Page:East European Quarterly, vol15, no1.pdf/149

East European Quarterly, Vol. VI, No. 1

A Short History of Modern Greece. By Richard Clogg. Cambridge University Press, 1979. x. 3 242 pp.

Richard Clogg’s monograph constitutes another major addition to the list of single-volume histories of modem Greece. It bears obvious comparison with two other recent volumes, Modern Greece (1968), by John Campbell and Philip Sherrard, and The Story of Modern Greece (1968), by C.M. Woodhouse. Clogg, who holds the lectureship in modern Greek history at King’s College, London, is unusually well prepared to deal with the full range of modern Greek history. He has written numerous articles on Greek political and intellectual history from the Ottoman period down to very recent events when Greece was under the “colonels’ dictatorship.”

The chronological scope of Clogg’s history differs significantly from that of Woodhouse’s, while approximating that found in the Campbell/Sherrard volume. Clogg begines in 1204 with the sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade-the 1204 date marking for Clogg a significant transition in the ultimate downfall of Byzantium. Woodhouse, on the other hand, begins the story of “modern” Greece with the reign of the fourth-century Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. Campbell/Sherrard are less concerned with political chronology than Clogg, but begin their account with the development of Greek national consciousness, which they find in late Byzantium.

The subsequent line of chronological division in Clogg’s Short History bear out his primary political interest. His treatment of Ottoman rule and the “struggle for emancipation” is followed by a single chapter surveying political and diplomatic developments from King Othon’s arrival in 1833 to the assassination of King George in 1913. Remaining chapters are divided by the ascendancy of Gen. John Metaxas (1935/36), the close of the Greek civil war (1949), and the fall of the military dictatorship (1974). This attention to political analysis underlines what is a central organizing principle of the work-the evolution of the modern Greek state.

Fit into this central focus on the developing Greek nation-state are subtle secondary themes. Clogg notes the difficulty encountered in the nineteenth century in “trying to graft the forms of constitutional government onto a society whose values and historical experience were alien to