The introduction situates the book at the intersection of two flourishing historiographical fields. One explores the rise of the modern territorial state, and the other the emergence of novel political ideas and in particular of liberalism. As the book argues, the formation of modern statehood was not only the result of wars and the global restructuring of territory. It was also the result of critical thinking about political and social arrangements and institutions, and the imagining of new ones. By drawing on recent works by historians working on contexts other than the core European countries, the introduction incorporates the Greek case in the ongoing discussions on nineteenth-century liberalism. At the same time, it challenges the reluctance of some historians of liberalism to link political thought to political change and the intellectuals they are studying to institutional contexts, by assessing for example how they thought about and were influenced by institutions (in this case institutions such as the judiciary, the university, the cabinet or the legislature with which the jurists were associated). Along with some methodological points and the general structure of the book, it offers a brief survey of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century Greece.