Yanni Kotsonis
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Professor of History, Russian, and Slavic Studies, New York University

Gerhard Casper Fellow - Class of Fall 2021

Yanni Kotsonis is the founding director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University. He received his BA from Concordia University, MA from the University of London, and PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861-1914 (Macmillan, 1999) and States of Obligation: Citizenship and Taxation in Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Toronto, 2014), which won the Wallace K. Ferguson Book Prize from the Canadian Historical Association, Ed Hewett Book Prize in Political Economy from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and Davis Book Prize in Social Science. Kotsonis has also edited several volumes, including a forthcoming issue on the Greek Revolution in the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. His work has been supported by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research and ACLS-SSRC Joint Committee on the Soviet Union and Its Successor States, among others.

Project Description

Five Empires and a Nation: The Story of the Greek Revolution, 1797-1830

His Academy project contextualizes the Greek Revolution globally and is comprised of three theses: First, the Greek War of 1821-1830 was a moment when Europe defined its geographic boundaries and produced a demographic revolution: a nation-state of Christians, which meant the destruction and removal of Islam—a process that continued through several Balkan wars and into the 1990s. Second, it tells the story of the nation as the product of the encounter of the local with the global. Until 1821, almost all Greeks had been Ottoman subjects and operated under Ottoman practices, including religious identity, security, and warfare. After 1797, Kotsonis argues, “the encounter with European empires introduced the possibility that the Christians were Europeans, that Muslims were alien, and that the land belonged to one people alone: the new Greeks.” Third, his project places what became Greece in the imperial crossroads of the southern Balkans, when Ottoman instability was challenged by the powerful empires of France, Russia, and Britain. These empires occupied the Ionian Islands in rapid succession, imposed new forms of government, and projected their power onto the Ottoman mainland. Thousands of Christians were enlisted to serve in the Caribbean as well as in Spain, North Africa, Russia, and Italy. They learned new warfare and statecraft, about mass mobilization and centralized hierarchical authority. Demobilized in 1815, these Greek Christians began to consider European polities better alternatives to the insecurity of the Ottoman Empire. And this, Kotsonis argues, was the Greeks’ principal complaint entering into 1821.

Academy Activities

05 Oct 21
The Imperial Roots of Modern Greece History

ONLINE: Gerhard Casper Lecture

The Imperial Roots of Modern Greece

When did the Greeks become Greek?

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01 Oct 21

Fellow Spotlight: Yanni Kotsonis

Yanni Kotsonis is Professor of History, Russian, and Slavic Studies at New York University. In his Academy project, he contextualizes the Greek Revolution globally. ...

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08 Oct 21

The Imperial Roots of Modern Greece

When did the Greeks become Greek? In this talk, Yanni Kotsonis argues that it happened when French, Russian, and British imperial armies arrived off the Balkan coasts in the late 1700s and early 1800s, interacted with the Ottoman mainland, and told the Greeks, in effect, who they were. In the ensuin ...

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