History’s Spoiled Children: The Story of Modern Greece

History’s Spoiled Children is the story of a small Ottoman province and its transformation into a modern European state. In some respects, the challenges to the formation of the Greek state could be likened to those encountered by the Western world in its efforts to impose its politico-cultural model on societies foreign to it. Though the Greeks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were Christians whereas the societies subject to Western experimentation today are Muslim, the political venture known as modernization has treated both as civilizing projects and in no way as equal partners. However, there is one distinction that cannot be ignored. Western Europeans regard Greece and Greeks as foundational in their own history. With this in mind, one may better understand the West’s (more or less) particular treatment of these populations, which not only rebelled against the Ottoman Empire in the name of Christianity but also invoked connections to an ancient past in which Europe sees the roots of its own identity. Kostas Kostis explores this perception and traces the formation of this favored modern nation, dubbed in nineteenth-century Europe the ’’spoiled children of history’.

Kostas Kostis is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Athens. From 2006 to 2009 he occupied the Chair of Modern and Contemporary Greek Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His most recent publication is State and business in Greece: AHistory of the Aluminium of Greece, (2013).