Commentary: Review of Richard Clogg, Anatolica: Studies in the Greek East in the 18th and 19th Centuries

A peculiar book review by Alexandros K. Kyrou was published in the October 1998 issue (volume 16, pp. 371–374) of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. The review was peculiar because in a piece purportedly devoted to an assessment of a recently published collection of essays by Richard Clogg, Kyrou chose instead to devote about one third of the review to criticisms of my short essay “Greek Exceptionalism and Contemporary Historiography: New Pitfalls and Old Debates,” published the year before in JMGS (15:209–216). The inappropriateness of launching such an attack in a book review should be self-evident and require no further comment.

Clogg’s book stands on its own merits; thus Kyrou did not need to caricature my essay so as to set it up as a straw man for his review of the book. Nonetheless, his comments are so off-base and so representative of a certain viewpoint regarding the development of our field that I feel that some response is needed.

In Kyrou’s view I am guilty of a number of sins. It appears to him that I am overly optimistic about the present and future, and too pessimistic about the past. Also, I do not pay due respect to past historians of modern Greece. Finally, it seems that I am being a slave to fashion by encouraging my colleagues to adopt more crosscultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of modern Greek history.

Since the latter two points are of lesser importance, I shall address them first. In my essay, which was based on a short note designed to elicit discussion at a workshop, I was able to offer only a very truncated review of the historical literature; hence numerous significant works were not mentioned. But there is an important point here that reinforces my view. As good and significant as these works are, most historians, including those who specialize in European history, have not discussed or integrated into their own work the books of Petropulos, Zahariadou, Vacalopoulos, or Vryonis. Look at any citation index. The absence of the works of these historians in the synthesis of European history is a loss to the field; nonetheless, largely ignored they have been. Moreover, historians, except for Greek or Balkan specialists, are largely unaware that Arnold Toynbee and William McNeill wrote about Greece. Both are known for their other works in world history. In fact, an assessment of how the writings of these first-rate historians have been received more broadly in the general field of history makes even more palpable my observation on their relative lack of visibility in modern Greek history.

Regarding interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, if Kyrou is unclear that these represent the major trends in historiography over the last twenty-five years, then this suggests a marked lacuna in his training. But it is not that he objects to them. Instead, he notes that “when rigorous interdisciplinary approaches have been employed, they have more often than not led to major contributions to the field” (372). I could not agree more. What Kyrou seems to take umbrage at are works that utilize newer theoretical paradigms such as the postmodernist or postcolonialist, or more broadly those related to the “linguistic turn” in history. His text is so opaque on this point that it is hard to tell exactly whom he is criticizing here. It is now commonplace knowledge that since the onset of the “new” histories of the 1960s, interdisciplinarity and comparativism have become the mainstays of contemporary historiography. What makes this particular moment in time so important is that now the other social disciplines—anthropology and sociology, for example—are looking to history. We are now witnessing the historic turn in the human sciences. Greek history has the potential to benefit greatly from this turn.

In my original note, I adopted a number of measures—articles published, conference panels and participation, visibility in edited volumes on Europe, to name a few—and found that works on Greece are becoming more visible and integrated into the historiogarphical mainstream than...