This book examines the period of the Greek War of Independence from 1821 through 1829. It uses a multidimensional approach to collectively examine the transition from the Ottoman world defined by localism, exceptionalism, and deep entanglement within imperial governance to one increasingly articulated through universalist and national claims. Ottoman Transits and the Greek Revolution reveals that these emergent principles were legitimized within the intellectual frameworks of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, wherein historical and cultural continuity was imagined to reside within the Greek laos.

In much of the modern historiography, interpretations of the Greek Revolution have been shaped by the revolutionaries themselves, their admirers abroad, and subsequently by Greek national(ist) historians. Here, Katerina Lagos brings together the latest research on the Ottoman context-on the eve of and during the 1820s-into conversation with the internal dynamics of the revolution and the decisive role of Great Power politics in shaping its trajectory.

Ottoman Transits and the Greek Revolution is the first book to systematically integrate the Ottoman background into a broader analysis of the Revolution. It situates the conflict within a wider set of vectors: from the quasi-autonomous domain of Ali Pasha in Epirus, to the early processes of Romanian nation-state formation, to the evolving norms of warfare that would go on to shape conflicts well beyond the Ottoman world in the 19th and 20th centuries. In doing so, it challenges prevailing narratives and offers a historically grounded and analytically expansive account of the Greek War of Independence.