Liberalism After Empire – Modern History Cluster event

A roundtable discussion of Michalis Sotiropoulos’ Liberalism after the Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, c. 1830-1880 (Cambridge, CUP, 2023)

Speakers:

Michalis Sotiropoulos (University of Edinburgh)
Margot Tudor (City St George’s, UoL)
Jeppe Mulich (City St George’s, UoL)
Charlotte Johann (QMUL)

Chair: Giuseppe Grieco (City St George’s, UoL)

Summary:

How is a new state built? To what ideas, concepts and practices do authorities turn to produce and legitimise its legal and political system? And what if the state emerged through revolution, and sought to obliterate the legacy of the empire which preceded it? This book addresses these questions by looking at nineteenth-century Greek liberalism and the ways in which it engaged in reforms in the Greek state after independence from the Ottomans (c. 1830-1880). Liberalism after the Revolution offers an original perspective on this dynamic period in European history, and challenges the assumptions of Western-centric histories of nineteenth-century liberalism, and its relationship with the state. Michalis Sotiropoulos shows that, in this European periphery, liberals did not just transform liberalism into a practical mode of statecraft, they preserved liberalism's radical edge at a time when it was losing its appeal elsewhere in Europe.