WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2022 A NEW STATESMAN
AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 'Deserves to remain the standard
treatment of the subject in English for many decades to come' Roderick Beaton Times Literary
Supplement In the exhausted repressive years that followed Napoleon's defeat in 1815 there
was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States:
freedom for Greece. Mark Mazower's wonderful new book recreates one of the most compelling
unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of near impossible
odds the people of the villages valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud
II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces its Turkish cavalrymen Albanian
foot soldiers and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters they held on
until military intervention by Russia France and Britain finally secured the kingdom of
Greece. Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us
into the minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged towns the stories of
itinerant priests sailors and slaves ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children
struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging across the Eastern
Mediterranean and far beyond he explores the central place of the struggle in the making of
Romanticism and a new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across Europe to die
in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful
force than themselves - the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how people
decided to see their world differently and at an often terrible cost to themselves and their
families changed history. 'Exquisite impressive' The Times 'S uperbly subtle and
thorough' Daily Telegraph
