This volume in the Edinburgh History of the Greeks series deals with the people of Greece and of the broader Greek world, including Cyprus and the diaspora. It covers the last 110 or so years, beginning in 1912, the eve of the First Balkan War, and ending with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. It focuses on state and society, and how each has negotiated more than a century of dramatic domestic, regional and global change. The book has less to say about party politics than it does about the Greek people. It includes Greece’s and Cyprus’ cultural minorities, and Greek minorities in other parts of the world. By reading the stories of Greeks within the context of global change and international relations, the book seeks to avoid the trap of ‘exceptionalism’, which tends to ascribe too much explanatory power to ‘the Greek character’ and to the Classical and Ottoman historical heritages. By taking a more transnational approach, the book aims for a better sense of what is and what is not distinctive about modern Greek history.

The book is a collaborative work of two historians who share an abiding interest in historiography, in global historical dynamics, historical (especially national) memory and above all, in history as a tool of social inquiry. We worked on and re-drafted every passage and every sentence, even though we never sat together during the writing process: one of us worked in his study in Athens or in his Andros retreat, and the other at his kitchen table in Sydney. The book has also been written with a more global readership in mind: it seeks to explain why Greece, a small country on Europe’s periphery, should have been so often in the forefront of global historical developments. After all, a case could be made that the Cold War started in Greece, while during the recent economic crisis pundits around the world were accusing Greece of threatening to bring down the entire world economy. In any case, it is commonly accepted nowadays that national histories ought to be considered from a transnational perspective.