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Greeks under European colonial rule: national allegiance and imperial loyalty1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Alexis Rappas
Alexis Rappas*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Abstract

How to narrate the experience of the Greeks who lived under European colonial rule? Greek nationalist historiography ignores the colonial dimension and links this experience to the grand narrative of the struggle of unredeemed Greeks against foreign domination. By contrast, revisionist accounts challenge the pervasiveness of ‘national sentiment’ among subjected Greeks and stress the coercive nature of nationalism. Based on micro-analyses of cases drawn from Cyprus under British rule and the Dodecanese under Italian rule in the 1930s, an assessment is made of the practical significance, in the daily lives of these colonial subjects, of the conflicting imperatives of national allegiance and imperial loyalty.

Type
Articles
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , 2010 , pp. 201 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2010

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Footnotes

1

Acknowledgments: I wrote this article as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Program of Hellenic Studies at Princeton University (2009–10). I would like to thank Ted and Elaine Athanassiades for providing my post-doctoral scholarship; Kostis Kornetis, Elsa Amanatidou and Evangelos Calotychos for inviting me to present earlier versions of this article at the Modern Greek Studies Program at Brown University and at the Program in Hellenic Studies at Columbia University. I am very grateful to Mathieu Grenet, Angelos Ntalachanis, Robert Tignor, Katerina Rozakou and Thanassis Nikolentzos who read and commented on earlier drafts of this article. I have also benefited from the reactions and comments of Dimitris Gondicas, Molly Greene, Effie Rentzou, Marinos Pourgouris and Ipek Celik. Finally, I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Peter Mackridge for helping me improve the final version of the article. Any remaining flaws and inaccuracies are entirely my own.

References

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39 GAK 639/1936 Celebrazione Matrimoni Misti, Servizio Stato Civile Carteggio General f.to Lago, 21 Settembre, 1936.

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64 YPEX 1931/A22α Δωδεκάνησος. D. I. Pappas, Greek Consul in Rhodes, confidential letter No. 782, 10 July 1931, to the Political Division of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

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70 Ibid., G. G. Argyropoulos, Greek consul-general in Rhodes, dispatch No. 760 Δ/7, 3 July 1935, to the political affairs division, European section, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

71 Ibid., B. Mostras, director of the political affairs division, Ministry of the Interior, dispatch to the Aliens and Passport Department, 18 July 1935.

72 Ibid., Colonel Xenophon Zezas, director of the division of special security in Athens, secret dispatch No. 50/187/2, 7 Sept. 1935, to the aliens and passports department, ministry of foreign affairs.

73 ‘H αντεθνική πολιτική του Μητροπολίτου Ρόδου Αποστόλου και της μαφίας του’.

74 I am freely adapting Hannah Arendt’s expression ‘conscience of the nation’, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 2004 [first edn 1951]) 178.

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