"Imagined Communities" in the Aegean: What Nationalism Theory Says About 1821

The Greek War of Independence occupies a peculiar place in the study of nationalism. It is at once the romantic founding episode of European nation-making — the first new nation-state of Europe — and, for that very reason, a privileged test case for the theory of how nations come to exist at all. If the founding theory of nationalism studies is right about what a nation is, then it should be right about Greece; and if we read the Greek evidence through that theory, the familiar story of an ancient ethnic nation reawakening in 1821 dissolves into something more interesting and better documented: the assembly of a nation out of culture, religion, and commerce, retrofitted afterwards with an ethnic pedigree.

Gellner’s definition, and what it omits

Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism remains the canonical statement of what nationhood consists of. His definition is worth quoting in full, because what matters most is what it does not contain:

“Two men are of the same nation if and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating.”

— Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, pp. 6–7

Culture, plus mutual recognition — and nothing else. There is no ethnic component in the definition at all: no descent, no blood, no ancient pedigree. Nationhood, for the discipline’s founding theorist, is a matter of shared systems of meaning and of people recognizing one another as belonging together. Gellner presses the point to its conclusion: “nations are the artefacts of men’s convictions” (Nations and Nationalism, p. 7). And he warns against the illusion that makes this hard to see:

“Having a nation is not an inherent attribute of humanity, but it has now come to appear as such.”

— Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 6

That last clause is the crucial one. The theory does not merely say that nations are made rather than found; it predicts that once made, they will appear natural, inherent, eternal. A successful nationalism is precisely one whose artificiality has become invisible.

The Greek case as the general law

Apply the definition to the Aegean world of the decades before 1821 and the fit is exact. What existed there was a community in Gellner’s sense — a shared system of ideas, signs, associations, and ways of behaving — but its binding agents were not ethnic. The deepest of them was religion: the Ottoman millet system had organized the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans, whatever language they spoke, into a single confessional community whose identity, as Gregory Jusdanis puts it, “was not national but religious” (Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, p. 31). Layered over the religious community was a commercial one. From the eighteenth century, Orthodox merchants had become indispensable to European trade with the Ottoman Empire — in Peter Mackridge’s summary, “Greeks became the necessary middlemen in the commerce of all the European states with the empire” (Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976, pp. 35–36) — and this trading network, with its diaspora colonies, its schools, and its printing presses, supplied exactly the shared culture of signs and communication that Gellner’s definition requires.

What the pre-revolutionary Aegean did not possess was the thing the later national narrative placed at its centre: a self-conscious ethnic descent-group tracing itself to antiquity. The community that would rise in 1821 was bounded by Orthodoxy and threaded together by commerce; its members called themselves Christians and Romans, and joined “Greekness” the way one joins a culture — by entering its religion, its trade, and its language of business. Theory says this is what a nation is. The Greek sources say this is what the Greek nation was. The ethnic genealogy — the unbroken bloodline from Pericles to the present — was added afterwards, as the nation’s account of itself rather than its cause.

The machinery of appearing eternal

How does an assembled nation come to feel like an inherent attribute of humanity? Gellner’s answer is that conviction must be manufactured and maintained, and in the Greek case we can watch the machinery at work. Stathis Kalyvas, surveying modern Greek identity, identifies its core as

“a powerful belief in the seamless continuity of Greek civilization from antiquity to the present”

— Stathis N. Kalyvas, Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know®, pp. 7–8

— a belief, he notes, propagated by public education. That phrasing deserves attention. The seamless continuity is described not as a fact transmitted by the past but as a belief transmitted by schools. The nineteenth-century Greek state built a national history, a purified language, and a mass educational system whose joint task was to teach the population that its nationhood was ancient — that is, to produce in each generation exactly the appearance Gellner diagnosed, of a nation as an inherent attribute rather than an artefact of conviction.

None of this makes the Greek nation less real. On Gellner’s account, artefacts of conviction are the only kind of nation there is; the French, German, and Italian nations were assembled by analogous means from analogous materials. What the theory removes is not Greece’s nationhood but its exceptionalism — the claim that, uniquely among nations, this one was not made but merely woke up. The Greek case does not embarrass the theory of nationalism; it exemplifies it with unusual clarity, because the assembly happened late, fast, and in full view of the documentary record.

The lesson of 1821, read through the discipline it helped to found, is therefore double. It confirms that nations are built from the materials actually at hand — here, a religious community and a commercial network — and it confirms that the final act of the building is always the same: the construction of a story in which no building ever took place. The historian’s task is not to debunk the nation but to recover the labour, the institutions, and the convictions that made it, and to resist the retrospective ethnic pedigree that the finished nation drew up for itself. In the Aegean as everywhere, the community was imagined first and ancestral only afterwards.