This article explores questions surrounding the motivations of the diverse group of actors who took part in the Greek Revolution. Attention is directed especially towards conditions in the Peloponnese and the actions of local political and military elites. The insights gained from this analysis are further used to consider the extent to which the revolution may be compared, from a standpoint of precipitating causes, social forces and international contingencies, with the other great upheavals associated with the Age of Revolution.
The State of Nationalism (SoN) seeks to create a comprehensive guide to nationalism. This installment of SoN is dedicated to a review and annotated bibliography about 'Social Class'.
This paper examines the political 'system', behaviour and attitudes of Christian landed elites in the Ottoman Peloponnese in the decades preceding the Greek Revolution of 1821. Particular attention is given to the relationship between these important local power-holders and the Filiki Etairia (Society of Friends), the secret organization that set the revolution in motion. Questions raised by earlier scholars concerning the motivations which led the notables to join this venture are reconsidered here in light of the aims disclosed in previous separatist plots and a closer reading of the interactions between the notables and the Etairia leadership. These help to indicate what the proposed revolution meant to those involved from a standpoint of opportunities and risks, as well as the assumptions contained in contemporary elite notions of sovereignty.
ABSTRACT. Diaspora intellectuals have often played prominent roles in the formation of national revival and independence movements. This article explores the factors that may help to explain this phenomenon through a survey of the literary responses of intellectuals from Eastern Europe, colonial Africa and Asia to their experiences in the capital cities of Western Europe over the early modern and modern era. These reactions, expressed through the writings of influential figures such as Adamantios Koraes and Leopold Senghor, reveal, in their thematic convergence, aspects of such encounters that have remained consistent over time. Portrayed throughout are the emotional hardships of talented individuals who found their status suddenly conditioned by the ideas associated with their places of origin in the host society's imagination. Unwilling, for reasons explored below, to submit passively to these affronts, the individuals studied here threw their energies instead into ambitious projects of national re‐imagination and rehabilitation. The article makes use, finally, of the rather visceral quality of the literature surrounding the experience of diaspora intellectuals to account for the complex weave of modern and traditional elements often exhibited in the new idealisations of self and nation that appear throughout their works.
