The world at the beginning of the twentieth century was dominated overwhelmingly by empires, and about half of the Greek people were dispersed among them, particularly the Ottoman but also the British and Russian empires. The United States had also expanded into First Nations territories and was hence an ‘empire’ in all but name. However, the multiethnic societies of many of these empires were about to be violently unmixed, and Greek communities would count among the tragic victims of this historical process. A related development was the extension of state controls over resources within national spaces, so that executive authorities could control and mobilise people, finance and material assets with increasing efficiency. The historian Charles S. Maier describes this vector of modernity as ‘territoriality’ (Maier 2016), which also denotes a new tendency of states to discipline ‘national communities’ and engineer their cultural profile. States were keen to make peasants into nationals through soft power, coercive means or both (Hobsbawm 1992: ch. 2; Markwick and Doumanis 2016).

What was the impact of ‘territoriality’ on post-imperial societies? How did the state intervene to restabilise and modernise the social order after empire? This chapter considers the fate of Greek minorities that were seen as potentially inimical to the national interest. It examines the destruction of Ottoman Greek communities, the dispersal of the Pontian communities of the Soviet Union and the early portents of minority expulsions in Egypt. Cyprus stands out as an exceptional case, as it remained a British colony throughout the first half of the twentieth century, when the political preoccupations of its population, as with the world’s other colonised peoples, were focused on ending colonialism.

In the meantime, Greeks continued to migrate to other countries, principally the United States, northern Europe and Australia, where immigrant communities were free to run language schools and ethnic-language newspapers, form associations and build their own houses of worship. The Greek diaspora that expanded across the world’s more advanced industrial economies was more proletarian than commercial, yet in many ways it remained closely tied to the homeland. Hence the National Schism reverberated in North American and Australian communities, and, conversely, the diaspora began to influence life in the centre.