CEREES Book Discussion

From the Russian Empire to the Greek Coast:

**A Discussion of Yanni Kotsonis, The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism (Princeton, 2025)**

Where: Queen Mary University of London

When: Monday 5 October • 6 PM – 8 PM

Register here!

Overview

Join us in person to discuss Yanni Kotsonis’ latest bookThe Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism (Princeton University Press), which highlights how major empires—including the Russian Empire—shaped the conflict and how the conflict helped shape the region.

In 1821, a diverse territory in the southern Balkans on the fringe of the Ottoman Empire was thrust into a decade of astounding mass violence. The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism traces how something new emerged from an imperial mosaic of myriad languages, religions, cultures, and localisms—the world’s first ethnic nation-state, one that was born from the destruction and the creation of whole peoples, and which set the stage for the modern age of nationalism that was to come.

Yanni Kotsonis exposes the everyday chaos and brutality in the Balkan peninsula as the Ottoman regime unraveled. He follows the future Greeks on the seaways to Odesa, Alexandria, Livorno, and the Caribbean, and recovers the stories of peasants, merchants, warriors, aristocrats, and intellectuals who navigated the great empires that crisscrossed the region. Kotsonis recounts the experiences of the villagers and sailors who joined the armed battalions of the Napoleonic Wars and learned a new kind of warfare and a new practice of mass mobilization, lessons that served them well during the revolutionary decade. He describes how, as the bloody 1820s came to a close, the region’s Muslims were no more and Greece was an Orthodox Christian nation united by a shared language and a claim to an ancient past.

This panoramic book shows how the Greek Revolution was a demographic upheaval more consequential than the overthrow of a ruler. Drawing on Ottoman sources together with archival evidence from Greece, Britain, France, Russia, and Switzerland, the book reframes the birth of modern Greece within the imperial history of the global nineteenth century.

Confirmed discussion panel:

Yanni Kotsonis (NYU)
Maurizio Isabella (QMUL)
Stephen Lovell (KCL)
Ceyda Karamursel (SOAS)

Yanni Kotsonis Raised in Athens and educated in Montreal, Copenhagen, London, New York, and Moscow, he teaches on Russia, the global political economy, and dystopianism. His books and articles concern Russian political economy, taxation, and modern Greece. He is best known for his work in political economy, the history of statecraft, and macro-historical connections spanning Russia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. He is the founding director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and father to three children.

Maurizio Isabella s a Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). He is a highly regarded specialist in the intellectual, political, and cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, with a particular focus on Italy, Southern Europe, and the Mediterranean in a global context. His latest book, Southern Europe in the Age of Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 2023), challenges Eurocentric, French-focused historical timelines by reframing the constitutional and popular revolutionary waves of the 1820s across Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece as highly synchronized, globally connected events.

Stephen Lovell is a Professor of Modern History at King’s College London (KCL). He is a leading historian of Russia, specializing in the social and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with research interests spanning media, print culture, urbanization, and oral history. His publications include a wide range of works on Russian social and cultural history, including How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860-1930 (2020) and Russia in the Microphone Age: A History of Soviet Radio, 1919-1970 (2015). His other notable works include Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 (2003) and The Russian Reading Revolution (2000).

Ceyda Karamursel is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is a specialist in modern Middle Eastern history, with research and teaching interests focusing on the economic, political, social, and legal history of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic. Her publications include several recent book chapters and major journal articles, such as her study “Relics of an Unwanted Past: Slavery, Polygamy, and the Harem at the End of the Ottoman Empire” (2025) published in Gender and History. She has authored the chapters “The Life and Times of Semsinur: Slavery, Freedom and Gender in the Age of Revolutions” (2025), “Nergister with Wisteria: Fragments of an Enslaved Life in Istanbul Old and New” (2025), and contributed the foreword to the book “The Adventures of a Slave Girl: An Ottoman Novel” (2026). Her broader research projects include a book manuscript titled “The Sack and the Bowstring: A Global History of Ottoman Slavery and Freedom.”