Modern Greece has long been at the crossroads of global transformations, serving as both a subject and an object of international order-making. From the 19th-century struggles over sovereignty and Great Power diplomacy to the upheavals of forced migration and economic oversight in the 20th century, Greece has been a testing ground for evolving forms of imperialism, intervention, and state-building. This book offers a fresh international history of Greece as a site where the shifting dynamics of European imperialism, nationalism, and global governance played out—tracing these processes from the mid-19th century to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Far from being a peripheral story, Greece’s modern history illuminates the ways in which international order was constructed, contested, and reshaped. As the first independent nation-state to emerge in post-Napoleonic Europe, Greece stood at the forefront of 19th-century liberal nationalism, while its territorial struggles and external dependencies highlighted the fragility of the nation-state model in the 20th century. The book examines how Great Power politics, economic crises, population movements, and humanitarian interventions in Greece reveal broader patterns of global governance and interventionism.

Drawing on archival research in English, French, German, and Greek sources, the book reconstructs a series of critical episodes—financial control, military occupations, international commissions, and forced displacement—to uncover the often-overlooked history of interventions in a state perpetually in flux. By placing Greece at the center of the narrative, the book makes the case that the country’s history is not just a regional story but a crucial lens through which to understand the global history of international order itself.