Social History in Greece

East Central Europe/ECE, vols. 34–35, 2007–2008, part 1–2, pp 101–130.

Yannis Yannitsiotis

SOCIAL HISTORY IN GREECE:NEW PERSPECTIVES*

AND GENDER

Abstract: This article focuses on the evolution of Greek historiography since the 1970s, with an emphasis on issues of class and gender. It is argued that, in the last decades, Greek historiography has been liberated from traditional nationalis-tic narratives in favor of new intellectual perspectives dealing with social history and the history of “society.” During the 1970s and 1980s, the concept of class—a fundamental concern of social history in European historiography—did not find much room in Greek historiography. Debates about the socioeconomic and politi-cal system in modern Greece focused on the importance of immobile political and economic structures as main barriers to modernization and Europeanization. The 1990s were marked by the renewal of the study of the “social,” articulated around two main methodological and theoretical axes, signaling the shift from structures to agency. The first was the conceptualization of class as both a cultural and econom-ic phenomenon. The second was the introduction of gender. The recent period is characterized by the proliferation of studies that conceptualize the “social” through the notion of culture, evoking the historical construction of human experience and talking about the unstable, malleable, and ever changing content of human identi-ties.

* I am grateful to Efi Avdela and Haris Exertzoglou, and to the anonymous reviewers of the ECE for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to my friend Robert Harris for copy-editing my text in English. The following articles have proven to be of invaluable assistance for writing this essay: Antonis Liakos, “Modern Greek Historiography (1974–2000). The era of transition from dictatorship to democracy,” in Ulf Brunnbauer, ed., (Re)Writing History. Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism (Verlag: Munster, LIT, 2004), 351–378; Efi Avdela, “Η ιστορία των γυναικών και του φύλου στη σύγχρο-νη ελληνική ιστοριογραφία: Αποτιμήσεις και προοπτικές” [Women’s history and gender history in contemporary Greek historiography: Assessments and perspectives], in Pascalis Kitromilidis and T. Sklavenitis, eds., Ιστοριογραφία της νεότερης και σύγχρονης Ελλάδας 1833–2002 [Historiography of modern and contemporary Greece 1833–2002], vol. 2, Fourth International Convention of History (Athens: Kentro Neoellinikon Erevnon, 2004), 123–137; Dimitra Lambropoulou, Antonis Liakos, and Yannis Yannitsiotis, “Work and Gender in Greek Historiography during the Last Three Decades,” in Berteke Waaldijk, ed., Professions and Social Identity. New European Historical Research on Work, Gender and Society (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2006), 1–14.

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Yannis Yannitsiotis102

The questioning of the “social” has recently become a matter of central con-cern for a number of disciplines, and the writing of history is no exception. Social history underwent a decisive transformation related to the criticism of its conceptual foundations, which included: “experience,” “body,” “material,” “social,” and above all, its leading analytical category, “class.” The linguistic turn, gender, and postco-lonial studies, as well as the Foucauldian approach, highlighted the significance of discourses in the social and historical production of meaning. This had the effect of destabilizing the certainty of the existence of an external “social” as well as of any kind of dissociation between reality and representation. The uniformity of the notion of identity was also undermined, underlining its conflictual and unstable character. Thus, multiple identities in flux (class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality) that are composed through relations of systems of difference are today recognized. Finally, human subjectivity is understood as a historical creation and not as the organizing principle of multiple identities.

During the last decade a new theoretical proposition concerning social history has emerged that has persuasively called upon us to de-essentialize the “social” by proceeding to a historicization of its conceptual categories in order to revitalize the field of “old social history.”1 In the meantime, social history seems to be, more than ever before, a vast umbrella that covers a great number of different approaches con-cerning not only how history is done but also its political purposes. Thematic topics stemming from the “old social history” coexist with new approaches that have selec-tively or programmatically incorporated postmodern assertions so that outlining the contours of the social history field is an extremely difficult endeavor.

This would seem to be especially so in the case of Greece. Greek historiography was constituted as a contemporary discipline after the collapse of the dictatorship (1967–1974) that put an end to a long period of political turmoil stemming from the First World War. Within this new political and ideological environment, the theoreti-cal and methodological preoccupations of Greek historians were articulated around the rewriting of history and the renewal of the study of history. At the core of this endeavor was the effort to undermine traditional nationalistic historiography.

Within this new historiographical context, social history never reached the position of an autonomous field as in other academic systems. In Greece, we find neither the tradition of the British version inspired by Marxism, and later enriched by the culturalist notion of class formation, nor the French interpretation of the “social,” inaugurated by Ernest Labrousse, anchored, on the one hand, to the notion of structures and conjunctures and, on the other hand, to the immobile history of mentality. Nevertheless, during the 1990s, we could say that a Greek social history arose for the first time that was closer to the tradition of British Marxism (with an emphasis on the approach “from below,” labor history, and the place of culture in the formation of collective identities) and characterized by the incorporation of

1 See Patrick Joyce, “The End of Social History?,” Social History, 20 (January 1995) 1, 73–91; Patrick Joyce, The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, New York: Routledge, 2002).

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SOCIAL HISTORY IN GREECE 103

criticism from feminist studies and the linguistic turn. Yet, in using this criterion we face the danger of excluding many other historians that ascribe to themselves the title of “social historians” without belonging to the aforementioned trend properly speaking.

It is very telling that, at the end of the 1980s, on the occasion of the first review of historical studies published in a special issue of the journal Synchrona Themata (Contemporary Issues), there was no text dedicated to social history whilst other fields in the discipline such as historical demography, political history, constitutional history, and historiography of education were present.2 Amongst them, economic history was recognized as an already established and most promising field for the near future. Any reference to social history as an independent field sounded like heterodoxy. Despite the fact that social history was not recognized as one of the disciplinary fields, many of the participants in the review assigned an important po-sition to the study of the “social matter.” This “social matter” and Greek society’s relation to the West and East were considered as the two main goals to be pursued so that the formation of the modern “Greek identity” could be understood. Thus, in a decade when interest in economic history was flourishing, the “history of the society” was declared as the self-evident concern of anyone involved in a scientific examination of the past.

This assumption still maintains its validity with many historians so that a Greek version of social history, in contrast to other historiographical subfields, has never managed to gain a well-defined thematic structure. For many economic histo-rians, social history seems to be a secondary but indispensable part of their expertise, for others it is the first but not the foremost domain where their studies could be registered. Only a few historians recognize their roots or include their intellectual work within the field of social history. In the programs of various conferences, social history usually occupies a distinguished place, yet its content is revealed on many occasions as highly unstable. In some cases, for example, thematic topics such as charity, work, migration, gender, class, and family can easily be classified under its rubric, whilst in other cases historiographical topics that during the last two decades have been internationally considered as innovative fields of social history, such as women’s history, occupy a quite separate place from it.

This study examines the manner in which different narratives conceptualized the “social” over the last three decades in order to shed light on the nature and the transformation of Greek society from the 19th century onwards. I take into account the ways in which the master narratives elaborated in various European academic environments have contributed to the shaping of Greek historiography with regard to studying society. I also examine the interrelation between the political and ideo-logical environment of the country during the last three decades and the political ori-entations of Greek historians. Special attention is paid to the concepts of class and

2 See the special issue entitled Σύγχρονα ρεύματα στην ιστοριογραφία του Νέου Ελληνι-σμού [Contemporary Trends in the Historiography of New Hellenism], Synchrona Themata, (December 1988), 35–37.

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gender. It is generally accepted that both analytical categories within the framework of the international historiographical community are strictly linked to the shaping of social history, although both contributed to it in different ways. At least until the early 1980s, class functioned as the metonymy of social history. When society was perceived as exclusively a material entity, class antagonism and social classes were considered the real factors of any social transformation and the constituent element of power relations. Feminist studies and the appearance of gender, among other things, led to the destabilization of the above certainties and respectively to the con-sideration of class as only one of the possible identities.

With regard to the Greek case, for about two decades the theory of class struggle occupied quite a specific place in the explanatory schemes of Greek his-torians. By comparing economic and political structures of Greece with those existing in industrialized Western societies and by adopting the idea of “Greek society’s backwardness,” they persistently denied the analytical validity of such terms (the classes, class struggle theory) for the Greek society, at least as far as the nineteenth century was concerned. The “legitimization” of class as an analytical tool appeared during the 1990s in studies that referred to the formation of a Greek working class during the first decades of the twentieth century. Feminist studies that explored the interrelation between working class and gender issues, as well as studies dealing with the formation of the “bourgeois identity” were some of the first to deal with class in this way. All these laid the groundwork for the Greek historians’ receptivity to the findings of cultural history since the late 1990s until today, favoring in its turn new analytical and theoretical approaches to the ques-tion of the “social.”

In the following, I do not purport to have included an exhaustive list of all studies relating to the issue of social history in Greece. Moreover, my attempt is one narrative amongst other possible narratives, and the bibliography is only indicative.

THE MODERNIZATION DEBATE AND THE PREVALENCE OF THE “POLITICAL”

The first historical narrative includes studies that appeared after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. The consolidation of democracy put an end to a long period of political turmoil and was accompanied by widespread political radicalization, the legalization of the left-wing parties, and Greek society’s irreversible move towards “Europeanization.” The Greek Civil War (1946–1949) was stigmatized as a period of political turmoil and anarchy. The post-Civil War period was notable for its anti-communist and nationalistic official discourse which in turn led to serious restric-tions of civil rights culminating in the imposition of the dictatorship (1967–74). At a scientific level, the new political era was characterized by the opening of science to contemporary international trends and the gradual abandonment of the traditional nationalistic narrative, which was predominant in Greek universities for about a cen-tury.

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The political scientists, sociologists, and historians involved in this endeavor focused their attention on the exploration of the past in order to understand the evo-lution and crises of the Greek political system. Choosing as a starting point the birth of the Greek state in 1828, after the end of the War of Greek Independence against the Ottoman Empire, they were interested in the ways in which Greek society of the nineteenth century encountered modernity.

This historiographical discourse perceived the “social” solely through the no-tion of structures. Its analytical priority articulated around the unraveling of the rela-tions of causality between political institutions and economic and social inertia, as well as state mechanisms and social formation. The notion of clientelism became the basic analytical key.3 The class struggle theory was quickly rejected as non-applicable to a society characterized by the absence of any social antagonism and the vague character of social classes where clientelism managed to form a kind of social con-sensus. For that reason, it was asserted that political mechanisms functioned autono-mously from their social background.4

Through the notion of clientelism a persistent paradox could be perceived. As Nikiforos Diamantouros pointed out, even though Greek society had adopted very early on—ever since the naissance of the state—Western institutions such as a modern constitution, male universal suffrage, and a multiparty political system, it was anchored in a premodern political culture stemming from the Ottoman past that prevented it from modernization.5

Clientelist relations were also seen as a way of political integration of the masses. It was therefore argued that the premature introduction of Western political institutions coincided with the delay of industrialization. This resulted in a specific articulation of capitalistic and precapitalistic relations in which working people from the cities and the countryside were incorporated through vertical clientelist mechanisms. During the pe-riod of “oligarchic parliamentarism” (from the naissance of the Greek state until the end of the nineteenth century), a handful of leading families exercised control over an ex-tensive clientelist network whilst many parts of the population remained excluded from political power. From the end of the nineteenth century to the dawn of the twentieth century, the commercialization of agricultural production and interwar industrialization led to the emergence of new political leaders and dynamic social groups. As a result, the clientelist system evolved from “oligarchic parliamentarism” to mass democracy.6

3 John Anthony Petropulos, Politics and Statecraft in the Kingdom of Greece, 1833–1843 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

4 Giorgos B. Dertilis, Κοινωνικός μετασχηματισμός και στρατιωτική επέμβαση 1880-1909 [Social transformation and military intervention 1880–1909] (Athens: Exantas, 1977).

5 Nikiforos Diamantouros, Οι απαρχές της συγκρότησης σύγχρονου κράτους στην Ελλάδα 1821-1828 [The beginnings of the state formation in Greece 1821–1828] (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 2002).

6 Nicos P. Mouzelis, Modern Greece. Facets of Underdevelopment (London: MacMillan, 1977); Nicos P. Mouzelis, Politics in the Semi-Periphery: Early Parliamentarism and Late Industrialization in the Balkans and Latin America (London: MacMillan, 1986).

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Constantinos Tsoukalas found the root of the clientelist system in the role state mechanisms played in the collection and allocation of public revenues and in the formation of social hierarchies. Tsoukalas also asserted that the state prevented the formation of a class of landowners by maintaining control over the land and by prompting the traditional leading families—more or less deprived of their economic and political power as well as of their social status after the War of Independence—to deal with administration and policy. As a result, the new dominant class was a “state bourgeoisie.” Within this framework, the organization of political relations through clientelism was the fundamental means of participating in the mechanisms that distributed public revenues.7 He also pointed out the absence of any significant industrialization, due mainly to the speculative practices of the elites and their indifference towards long-term investments and the predominance of the agricultural and commercial sectors. Significantly, within this historical narrative, the Greek Diaspora was denied any significant contribution to the Greek economic and social transformation. It was argued that the wealthy members of Greek Diaspora had wrongly been considered a vital part of the Greek bourgeois class. On the contrary, they were full-fledged members of a “comprador bourgeoisie” who performed their roles as middlemen and creditors solely for purposes of speculation to the detriment of the state coffers.8 By historicizing the Diaspora’s attitude, this narrative also managed to dismantle the idealistic image associated with the nationalistic narrative, according to which members of the Greek Diaspora were considered major national benefactors. The appearance of these “colonizers of their own country,” as Tsoukalas put it, in Greek society and the gradual settlement of some of them in the capital since the second half of the nineteenth century onwards led to a systematic ostentation of their wealth through the building of private mansions and to a multifaceted benefaction that in many ways substituted for the financially inept state.9

Critically minded historians, such as Gunnar Hering, questioned, however, the explanatory scheme of clientelism. Hering pointed out to the existence and function-ing of a modern Greek multiparty political system that relativized the alleged “devia-tion” of the Greek political system from its (idealized) Western European counter-parts. He was also argued that clientelism—a notion that originated in anthropologi-cal and ethnographical research—described only interpersonal dependency relation-ships, and that these relations had weakened considerably after the establishment of universal suffrage. Hering asserted that class antagonism was one among many fields

7 Constantinos Tsoukalas, Κοινωνική ανάπτυξη και κράτος. Η συγκρότηση του δημόσι-ου χώρου στην Ελλάδα [Social development and state. The formation of the public space in Greece] (Athens: Themelio Publishers, 1981).

8 Constantinos Tsoukalas, Εξάρτηση και αναπαραγωγή. Ο κοινωνικός ρόλος των εκ-παιδευτικών μηχανισμών στην Ελλάδα (1830-1922) [Dependence and reproduction. The social role of the educational mechanisms in Greece (1830–1922)] (Athens: Themelio Publishers, 1977).

9 Tsoukalas, Εξάρτηση και αναπαραγωγή, 266.

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of social antagonism expressed through political parties, and that Greek political par-ties cut across all social classes, just as in other contemporary European societies. As horizontal associations of communication, political parties did not derive automati-cally from vertical clientelist relations.10

George T. Mavrogordatos contributed to the understanding of the sharp social and political confrontations that characterized Greek society during the first half of the twentieth century, such as the so-called “National Schism” (1916–1936), that were otherwise inexplicable through the notion of clientelism. He argued that clien-telism in interwar Greece emerged as a distinctly variable rather than as a uniformly distributed phenomenon and that its importance varied considerably along several interrelated dimensions, many of which derived from social position and ideology. Mavrogordatos also questioned the existance of a sharp confrontation between the Liberal Party, identified with the country’s modernization, and the People’s Party, supported by the royalists. Instead, he explained the masses’ electoral behavior ac-cording to voters’ socioeconomic position, occupation, region, and religion, etc. He also examined the different political and ideological visions of both parties concern-ing the economy, the functioning of the regime, the intervention of Greece in the First World War and Greek irredentism, the integration of refugees in 1922 and onwards, and the policy towards national and religious minorities and ethnic groups of the country.11

THE STUDY OF THE “SOCIAL” THROUGH THE LENS OF ECONOMIC HISTORY

The 1980s were marked by the emergence of a novel historiographical school that can generically be called the “New History.” This trend is a result of the combina-tion of two previous schools of historical thought: the study of “Greek Enlightenment” connected with Konstantinos Th. Dimaras, and the “Marxist view” expressed by Nikos Svoronos.12 The methodology of the “New History” prioritized the importance of doc-uments, the analytically-oriented “histoire-problème,” and the history of the average person and of the society as a whole through the extensive use of statistics. Its theoreti-cal inspirations came from a mixture of a Marxist version of the economic, on the one hand, and social history that was close to the French paradigm, on the other hand.

While maintaining close relations with the proponents of the previous histo-riographical narrative and remaining loyal to its main findings, a new generation of

10 Gunnar Hering, Die politischen Parteien in Griechenland 1821–1936 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1992).

11 George T. Mavrogordatos, Stillborn Republic. Social Coalitions and Party Strategies in Greece, 1922–1936 (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1983).

12 For an extensive reference to the founding fathers of contemporary Greek historiography see Liakos, Modern Greek Historiography (1974–2000), 358–362.

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historians belonging to the “New History” focused their attention upon past eco-nomic aspects, inaugurating a decade in which economic history flourished. The political conjuncture strengthened their efforts to innovate the writing of history in Greece. The rise to power of the Socialist Party (PASOK) in 1981 was marked by the establishment of new research centers (financially supported by the National Bank of Greece and the Commercial Bank of Greece), new universities in the coun-try’s periphery, and the complete restructuring of the legislative framework concern-ing the function of universities. The new historiographical approach was inspired by the political vision of its proponents. Their purpose was the replacement of the dominant nationalistic narrative with a new one prioritizing the “material” and the “structural.”

The bulk of the studies written under the aegis of the “New History” explored the reasons behind Greece’s “economic backwardness.” As in the previous narra-tive, the methodological principle of highlighting the multiple causation of social and economic transformation was still pervasive, but the emphasis was placed on the long durée. The endeavor of the new generation of historians articulated around three main axes: 1) the credit system and the agricultural economy; 2) the history of the National Bank of Greece; and 3) the process of industrialization. To a second degree, the railway system and the tax system were also examined. The chronological scope was extended so as to include the interwar period, which was regarded as a period of modernization and the prevalence of political liberalism. The main char-acteristics of the interwar period were summarized as follows: it was a second phase of Greek industrialization, characterized by the emergence of class antagonism and social protest, the institutionalization of labor legislation, the intensification of ur-banization, and the arrival of over one million refugees after the Greek defeat in the Greek-Turkish War in 1922 (an event which caused serious upheaval in the indig-enous structures of employment and social stratification).

Questioning Greece’s encounter with modernity, economic historians argued that the history of modern Greece was a case apart, incomparable, according to a preeminent historian, to any other country. The “specificity” or singularity of the history of Greece was, however, regarded as representative for understanding the dif-ferences and the relationships between Eastern and Western Europe, and the ways in which traditional socioeconomic structures were transformed and finally integrated into Western capitalism.13

Economic historians paid particular attention to the alternative opportunities for capital investments that prevented industry from taking off and played simultane-ously a major role in the formation of the social upper strata. Arguably the most im-portant of them was the function of credit networks that stemmed from the period of the Ottoman rule and was reformulated within the framework of the national state.

13 Giorgos B. Dertilis, “Introduction: structuration sociale et spécificités historiques (XVIIIe-XXe siècles),” in Giorgos B. Dertilis, ed., Banquiers, usuriers et paysans. Réseaux de crédit et stratégies du capital en Grèce (1780–1930) (Paris: Fondation des Treilles and Éditions la Découverte, 1988), 12, 11–32.

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These networks operated at three hierarchical and distinct levels: 1) in the interior of the country by local merchants who controlled the commercialization of agricultural production mainly linked to foreign trade; 2) in the exterior of the country by big financial capitalists who provided capital to the country through bank credits and public loans; and 3) at an intermediary level, by Greek entrepreneurs of the Levant and Diaspora.14

The history of banking was the focus of extensive research within Greek eco-nomic history. Giorgos B. Dertilis pointed out that banking activities were the main means for the Diaspora’s wealthy members’ penetration in the indigenous economy and society. In a period when the demand for capital was extremely high because Greece was excluded from all European money markets as a result of its inability to pay the amortization of the loans provided to it during and just after the War of Independence, Diaspora members became the main creditors of the Greek state with very high profit margins.15

The National Bank of Greece—established in 1841 with foreign capital and investments from merchants of the Greek Diaspora and some indigenous entrepre-neurs—was seen by historians as a mechanism of modernity that in actual fact failed to replace the traditional systems of credit but was forced to cooperate with them.16 Moreover, the banking system was defined as part of a larger economic network that also included a monoculture, the commercialization of agricultural production, and the structure of land ownership. The banking system functioned in a negative way during the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of growth in agricultural production due to the monoculture of currant vineyards. Even though it bolstered decisively the commercialization of production, the economic surplus resulting from monoculture was not invested in the industrialization of agricultural production. On the contrary, these economic gains perpetuated the traditional landed relations by favoring the smallholding system.17

Greek economic historians also investigated the causes behind the slow pace of industrialization. Aside from alternative investments of capital owners, state and banking policies towards industry were also evaluated. On the one hand, the Greek state basically favored liberal trade and shipping whilst showing little interest in the formation of a protective legislative framework for indigenous production. On the

14 Ibid.15 Giorgos B. Dertilis, Το ζήτημα των τραπεζών 1871-1873 [The Banks’ Issue 1871–

1873] (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezas, 1980).16 Petros Pizanias, “Rapports de prêt et domination économique. La fondation de la

Banque Nationale de Grèce (1841–1847),” in Économies Méditerranéennes. Équilibres et in-tercommunications XIIIe-XIXe siècles, vol. 2, Actes du IΙe Colloque International d’Histoire (Athens: Centre de Recherches Néohelléniques and Fondation Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, 1986), 451–476.

17 Thanasis Kalafatis, Αγροτική πίστη και οικονομικός μετασχηματισμός στη Β. Πελο-πόννησο: Αιγιάλεια τέλη 19ου αιώνα [Agricultural credit and economic transformation in the Northern Peloponnese: Aigialeia at the end of the 19th century], 3 vols., (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 1990–1992).

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other hand, banking policy was directed mainly towards the system of commercial discounts and the provision of mortgages. The relationship between the composi-tion of capital structures and the employment structures, including the urbanization growth rates, arose as the central point in the debates referring to the industrializa-tion of the country. Quantitative resources such as official censuses on population, employment rates, horsepower, and factories, served as basic tools for the examina-tion of labor cost, the length of time that industries functioned, the structure and hierarchy of wage rates (according to sex, age, and industrial branches), the cost of living, the purchasing capacity, and the living standards of the working population. According to the results of the research, two main conclusions can be extracted.18

Firstly, throughout the period under examination capital owners’ strategic preference, apart from a few exemptions, was only occasionally in investments in industry. This entrepreneurial attitude accentuated the general structural weaknesses of Greek industry in terms of its low level of mechanization, the high costs of pro-duction, the lack of an internal market, labor shortages, and the fragmentation into small production units.

Secondly, from the nineteenth century onwards (and reinforced in 1923 by the state policy of reallotment of land), the rural population maintained seasonal relations with the industrial sector only in periods where labor was not required in their smallholdings in the countryside. As a result, a massive exodus of the peasantry to urban centers and a permanent settlement in urban areas was prevented and an industrial proletariat did not emerge. Moreover, after the Greek defeat in the Greek-Turkish War in 1922, the massive settlement of Asia Minor refugees did not result in spectacular changes because the creation of a cheap workforce was absorbed by family-sized enterprises.

The railway system constituted another element of modernity, together with banks and industry, which worked against the social and economic inertia of Greek society. Lefteris Papagiannakis pointed out that the introduction of the railway sys-tem in the country during the second half of the nineteenth century was not demand-ed by social forces pressing for the reduction of transportation costs of agricultural

18 Vasilis Panagiotopoulos, ed., Εκσυγχρονισμός και βιομηχανική επανάσταση στα Βαλκά-νια τον 19ο αιώνα [Modernisation and industrial revolution in the Balkans in the 19th century] (Athens: Themelio Publishers, 1980); Giorgos B. Dertilis, Ελληνική οικονομία και βιομηχανι-κή επανάσταση (1830-1910) [Greek economy and the industrial revolution] (Athens: Sakkou-las Publishers, 1984); Christina Agriantoni, Οι απαρχές της εκβιομηχάνισης στην Ελλάδα τον 19ο αιώνα [The beginnings of industrialization in Greece in the 19th century] (Athens: Idryma Erevnas kai Paideias tis Emporikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1987); Michalis Riginos, Παραγωγι-κές δομές και εργατικά ημερομίσθια στην Ελλάδα 1909-1936. Βιομηχανία-βιοτεχνία [Productive structures and workers’ wages in Greece, 1909–1936. Industry-manufacture] (Athens: Idryma Erevnas kai Paideias tis Emporikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1987); Margarita Dritsa, Βιομηχανία και τράπεζες στην Ελλάδα του Μεσοπολέμου [Industry and banks in interwar Greece] (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 1990); Christos Hadziiossif, Η γηραιά σελήνη. Η βιο-μηχανία στην ελληνική οικονομία, 1830-1940 [The old moon. Industry in the Greek economy, 1830 –1940] (Athens: Themelio Publishers, 1993).

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or industrial goods, as had been the case in industrialized European countries. Even if the construction of the railway system was initially conceived as a prerequisite for industrial development, it served mainly as an efficient state tool for the implementa-tion of certain domestic and foreign policies and a means of transportation of people and agricultural products.19

Finally, historians explored the impact of the modern tax system on the shap-ing of social hierarchies in Greek society during the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries, and its interrelation with the democratization of the political system. As Giorgos Dertilis pointed out, with the establishment of universal male suffrage (1843–1864), peasants saw their taxes being reduced year by year, culminating in zero direct taxa-tion by the middle of the twentieth century, while the economic elite of the country continued to enjoy low taxation. In contrast, the middle and lower urban strata bore the main part of the tax burden. This peculiar alliance between peasants and the economic elite, to the detriment of the urban strata, was financially ineffective but politically effective as it displayed characteristics of the clientelist system.20

The 1980s were also marked by a growing interest in urban history. The turning point for the study of cities by historians, city planners, and architects was initiated by the organization of the first international conference dedicated to the transition from the Ottoman to the Greek city.21 The main debates over the specific character of the Greek urbanization were articulated around the economic functions of the cit-ies, the rural exodus, and its repercussions on the capitalist development of Greece. The town of Ermoupolis found itself at the core of historians’ interests.22 That is because the island of Syros and its capital Ermoupolis used to be the main “market store” of the East Mediterranean within the framework of the Ottoman economy. Its annexation to the Greek nation state effected seriously its economic role and under-mined its source of growth, condemning it to a gradual decay most evident during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Historians found in Ermoupolis a society that was without comparison among the rest of the country: its capitalist economy was articulated around transit trade and banking activities, a naval shipyard, tanning manufacture, and, at the end of the century, industry. The highly stratified local soci-ety was led by wealthy merchants and members of the Diaspora networks. For these reasons, the city was regarded as the only place where—following the naissance of the Greek state—the transition from the traditional economy to the modernized one

19 Lefteris Papagiannakis, Οι ελληνικοί σιδηρόδρομοι (1882-1910). Γεωπολιτικές, οικονο-μικές και κοινωνικές διαστάσεις [The Greek railways (1882-1910). Geopolitical, economic and social dimensions] (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 1990).

20 Giorgos Dertilis, Ατελέσφοροι ή τελεσφόροι; Φόροι και εξουσία στο νεοελληνικό κρά-τος [Taxes and power in the Neo-Hellenic state] (Athens: Alexandria Publishers, 1993).

21 Νεοελληνική πόλη. Οθωμανικές κληρονομιές και ελληνικό κράτος [Neo-Hellenic city. Ottoman inheritance and Greek state], Acts of the International Symposium of History, 2 vols. (Athens: Etaireia Meletis Neou Ellinismou, 1985)

22 Vasilis A. Kardasis, Σύρος, σταυροδρόμι της ανατολικής Μεσογείου (1832–1857) [Syros, a crossroad of the eastern Mediterranean (1832–1857)] (Athens: Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis, 1987).

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had been brought about successfully. At a secondary level the other two important city ports of the country during the 19th century, Piraeus and Patra, became subjects of investigation.23

WOMEN’S HISTORY: HETERODOXY WITHIN “NEW HISTORY”

The first studies regarding women’s history appeared in the mid and late 1980s. Their contribution has been articulated around two axes. Firstly, their research, based on the writings of the first female authors and schoolmistresses, focused mainly on the feminist awakening during the second half of the nineteenth century demanding the right to education for women. These historians pointed out that the last quarter of the century was marked by the formation of a new public discourse which, based on biological explanations of sexual difference, argued that educated women could have a pivotal impact on national edification given their “natural” qualities, such as their moralizing and civilizing aptitudes. They asserted that during the last decades of the nineteenth century, in Greek society similarly to other European counterparts, a male centered concept of women’s confinement in an idealized private space emerged and became predominant, solidifying the ideology of the separate spheres and the gendered inequality within the family and the work domains. They also explored the development of feminist discourse in the press, and the emergence of the first politi-cal actions during the interwar period concerned with full political, social, and civil equality. They highlighted the strong reactions against the emancipation of women in Greece, and the poor results achieved by the feminist struggle for equality on the eve of the imposition of the Metaxas dictatorship in 1936.24

23 Vasias Tsocopoulos, Πειραιάς 1835-1870. Εισαγωγή στην ιστορία του ελληνικού Μάντσεστερ [Piraeus 1835–1870. An introduction to the history of the Greek Manchester] (Athens: Kastaniotis Publishers, 1984); Nikos Bakounakis, Πάτρα, 1828-1860. Μια ελληνική πρωτεύουσα στον 19ο αιώνα [Patra, 1828–1860. A Greek capital in the 19th century] (Athens: Kastaniotis Publishers, 1988).

24 Efi Avdela and A. Psarra, eds., Ο φεμινισμός στην Ελλάδα του Μεσοπολέμου. Μια ανθολογία [Feminism in interwar Greece. An anthology] (Athens: Gnosi Publishers, 1985); Sidiroula Ziogou-Karastergiou, Η μέση εκπαίδευση των κοριτσιών στην Ελλάδα (1830-1893) [Girls’ secondary education in Greece (1830–1893)] (Athens: Istoriko Arxeio Ellinikis Neolaias, 1986); Eleni Fournaraki, Εκπαίδευση και αγωγή των κοριτσιών: ελληνικοί προβληματι-σμοί (1830-1910). Ένα ανθολόγιο [Education and training of girls: the Greek situation (1830–1910). An anthology] (Athens: Istoriko Arxeio Ellinikis Neolaias and Geniki Grammateia Neas Genias, 1987); A. Bakalaki and E. Elegmitou, Η εκπαίδευση «εις τα του οίκου» και τα γυναικεία καθήκοντα. Από την ίδρυση του ελληνικού κράτους έως την εκπαιδευτική μεταρρύθμιση του 1929 [Education in household and female duties. From the foundation of the Greek state to 1929] (Athens: Istoriko Arxeio Ellinikis Neolaias and Geniki Grammateia Neas Genias, 1987); Eleni Varikas, Η εξέγερση των Κυριών. Η γένεση μιας φεμινιστικής συνείδησης στην Ελλά-δα 1833-1907 [The ladies’ revolt. The birth of feminist consciousness in Greece, 1833–1907] (Athens: Idryma Erevnas kai Paideias tis Emporikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1987).

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The work of gender and feminist historians shed new light on the study of the “social” by tracing the relationship between the nascent bourgeoisie and the process of Europeanization and evolution of Greek nationalism. It is important to note that po-tent public institutions such as the Historical Archive of the National Bank of Greece, the Historical Archive of the Commercial Bank, and the Historical Archive of the New Generation of the Ministry of Culture began in the 1980s to allocate resources for the publication of studies of women’s history. Despite this evident progress, gender his-tory was received with indifference by the rest of the historical community, composed mostly of men. In Greece, as elsewhere, women’s history was linked with the feminist movement and was marked by the political ideology of the left. Male and female his-torians of the “New History” had, in other words, the same political background. As it will be argued below, research in women’s history conducted in the 1980s and new gender approaches advanced in the early 1990s helped undermine the prevailing histo-riographic emphasis on economic structures and its impact on social forces.

THE ISSUE OF CLASS FORMATION AND THE APPEARANCE OF GENDER

The early 1990s can be considered a turning point in the study of the “social” for two reasons. The first reason was the appearance of studies dealing with the history of labor and of social protest, and the exploration of the issue of working class formation. The discussion veered away from an examination of the economic structures and focused preeminently on the practices and the mentalities of working people. The shift from structures to agency culminated in studies on women’s and gender history that stressed the importance of the category of gender in the explora-tion of labor relations as well as social protest.

The second reason is connected to the revitalization of the study of 1940s, i.e., the period of Nazi Occupation, and of the Civil War. The main emphasis was placed on the importance of economic, social, and cultural factors in the understanding of the political landscape of the period. New approaches to the period replaced obso-lete views based solely on the principles of political history “from above,” predomi-nant from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.

Three main axes or positions around which the new interest in the field of labor relations was articulated, can be discerned. The first axis involved an examina-tion of the ways in which collective subjects involved in the process of industriali-zation and modernization—mainly working people and, to a lesser degree, capital owners—reacted to economic and social changes.25 Petros Pizanias, for example,

25 Petros Pizanias, Οι φτωχοί των πόλεων. Η τεχνογνωσία της επιβίωσης στην Ελλάδα το Μεσοπόλεμο [The urban poor. The know-how of survival in interwar Greece] (Athens: Themelio Publishers, 1993). For the capital owners, Aliki Vaxevanoglou, Οι Έλληνες κεφαλαι-ούχοι 1900-1940. Κοινωνική και οικονομική προσέγγιση [The Greek capital owners 1900–1940. A social and economic approach] (Athens: Themelio Publishers, 1994).

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argued that the working population in urban environments activated a certain kind of cultural capital stemming from their rural or semi-urban background. In other words, they developed a technology for the organization of social relations around the fam-ily, in order to secure their living and social reproduction and to avoid becoming proletarians.

The second axis drew attention to the fact that work is a social and cultural construct and not simply an economic one. This innovative proposition was formu-lated around (1) the emergence of social policy and the construction of the social sector of the state in close relation to the international environment, and (2) the impact of state policy and urbanization, including specific features of the industrial sectors and of labor unions, on the formation of the Greek working class. It was argued that the different political and cultural approaches to the matter of labor relations, expressed by all parts involved—namely the state, the International Labor Office, the unions, and the political parties—led to a new perception of the “social” during the interwar period.26

The formation of the Greek working class proved to be a contested point between the two aforementioned positions. Proponents of the former position claimed that it would be wrong to assert the existence of a working class, given the lack of investment in the industrial sector, the seasonal employment, and the occupational mobility of working people towards the primary and tertiary domains either as employees or smallholders. The absence of the cohesion that could be fostered by the permanent presence of workers in the same job rendered any kind of collective consciousness elusive. At the core of the opposing assumption was the adoption of the Thompsonian notion of “making,” the examination of social class formation as a process in which active agents (the workers, the state, the employers, and the union members) took part. Working people’s mobility between different economic sectors, it was argued, was not a proof of their ability to avoid subordination to the industrial domain, but a proof of their permanent insecurity, both in the countryside and in cities. In addition, the importance of social antagonism was stressed, an issue totally neglected by the other historiographical positions. Frictions between workers and the industrialists or the state, were far from rare. On the contrary, from the dawn of the twentieth century, working-class strikes increased in intensity, turnout, and political character.27

This vivid and very productive debate paid no attention to the issue of gender. The ongoing inequality between male and female wages and the identification of

26 Antonis Liakos, Εργασία και πολιτική στην Ελλάδα του Μεσοπολέμου. Το διεθνές Γρα-φείο Εργασίας και η ανάδυση των κοινωνικών θεσμών [Labour and politics in interwar Greece. International Labour Office and the emergence of social policy institutions] (Athens: Idryma Erevnas kai Paideias tis Emporikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1993).

27 Liakos, Εργασία και πολιτική στην Ελλάδα του Μεσοπολέμου; Serafim Seferiadis, “Για τη συγκρότηση της εργατικής τάξης στην Ελλάδα (1870-1936): Μερικοί προβληματισμοί πάνω σε ένα παλιό θέμα” [On the making of the working class in Greece (1870–1936): Some thoughts on an old theme], Elliniki Epitheorisi Politikis Epistimis, (Nov. 1995) 6, 9–78.

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female labor with unskilled positions were never touched upon. Recognizing the con-cept of class as the main organizational principle of social action, historians studied workplace confrontations only through the number of strikes conducted by trade unions exclusively formed by men. They did not approach the cultural practices and informal options for the organization of communities and collective resistance of daily life and family relations.

Parallel to the renewed interest in the field of labor relations, a third axis of research emerged. Based on an analytical shift to the concept of agency, this new direction of research was comprised of studies on women’s and gender history that investigate issues regarding the relation between women’s work and their social, le-gal, and domestic subordination. The importance of gender in the understanding of social and working relations has been emphasized by the study of: the division of labor between public employees; the protection of women’s industrial employment; the gross inequality of the system of women’s paid work; the dynamic character of the feminist movement during the interwar period (demanding the right to vote and legislative reforms); the interconnectedness of class, gender, and ethnicity in the workers’ struggles; and the hierarchical organization of gender relations within the family.28

Moreover, a new approach to family history and its interrelation to gender studies overturned the prevailing assumption about the implications of smallholder predominance in the formation of labor relations. It was argued that, apart from state policy, this phenomenon could be explained mostly as a cultural one. It was connected to family strategies and gender relations within the family-based rural or urban productive units, which were related to a cultural model of household au-tonomy. The conveyor of this model was the conjugal or nuclear family household that had been established in different social categories and regions, and exerted a formative influence upon gender identities. Based on the hierarchical organization of domestic kinship and on the sexual division of labor between its members, the model of organization led to the development of the small-productive or semi-productive unit. Household autonomy consisted, on the one hand, of securing for the male head of the family a livelihood independent from both waged work and state regulation and, on the other hand, of equating womanhood with domesticity and motherhood. This model influenced family strategies that organized the resettlement from country

28 Efi Avdela, Δημόσιοι υπάλληλοι γένους θηλυκού. Καταμερισμός της εργασίας κατά φύλα στον δημόσιο τομέα στην Ελλάδα (1908-1952) [Female civil servants. The sexual division of labor in the public sector, 1908–1955] (Athens: Idryma Erevnas kai Paideias tis Emporikis Trapezas tis Ellados, 1990); Efi Avdela, “To the Most Weak and Needy: Women’s Protective Labor Legislation in Greece,” in U. Wikander, A. Kessler-Harris, and J. Lewis, eds., Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1890–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 290–317; Efi Avdela, “Contested Meanings: Protection and Resistance in Labor Inspectors’ Reports in 20th c. Greece,” Gender & History, 9 (1997) 2, 310–332; Efi Avdela, “Class, Ethnicity and Gender in Post-Ottoman Thessaloniki,” in Billie Melman, ed., Borderlines: Genders and Identities in Peace and War (1880–1930) (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 421–438.

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to city under the pressure of economic and social changes, along with small prop-erty and high mobility in the search for supplementary incomes, and a fragmented, occasional labor market. The labor segregation of sexes in the agrarian economy was transformed into a new kind of segregation in cities, as well. Education and the level of literacy were determining factors in the construction of family strategies in different social arenas and affected women’s options for paid and unpaid work. The educated male members of the family tended to become public employees through clientelism, while their wives were confined to the private domain. The illiterate men strove to avoid any involvement in the industrial system, focusing their efforts on self-employment, while young women worked as part-time wageworkers during periods of economic difficulty to eke out a family living.29

Since the 1960s, anthropologists have offered us a wide variety of studies on the structures of the household, the transmission of property within the family, and the construction of power relations and gender identities in the Greek countryside.30 Historians have been rather reluctant to adopt these anthropological insights and to employ such concepts as “household,” “marriage,” and “kinship” as heuristic catego-ries. Yet, such concepts are important for understanding the impact of cultural val-ues on the organization of agricultural society in the past, the economic and cultural forms of settlement of the peasant population in urban centers, and the impact of kinship in new urban environments. The few historiographical studies dealing with the matter of households pointed out to the small size of the typical Greek rural and urban household during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Historians used strictly quantitative methods to analyze the role of the household as an economic unity. The theoretical and methodological insights of the new genre of “family his-tory” that developed from the 1970s onwards in international historiography have remained unexploited. Even now, we know little about the agricultural family in Greece. Even though the scarcity of documents concerning the matter might seem to be an insurmountable problem, oral history and anthropology could provide many reliable sources of information. As has been noted, the household can provide a most appropriate perspective to rewrite the history of work, through the incorpora-tion of gender.31

The second approach that has renovated the “social” includes studies that fo-cus on the history of the 1940s, as we mentioned above. Until the early 1990s, the Nazi occupation, the anti-Nazi resistance, and the Civil War were issues approached

29 Efi Avdela, “Genere, famiglia e strategie del lavoro in Grecia,” Passato e Presente, 15 (1997) 41, 145–163.

30 P. Loizos and E. Papataxiarchis, eds., Contested Identities. Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); E. Papataxiarchis and Th. Paradellis, eds., Ταυτότητες και φύλο στη σύγχρονη Ελλάδα [Identities and Gender in Contemporary Greece] (Athens: Alexandria Publishers, 1992).

31 Efi Avdela, “Quand classe et genre s’opposent: le cas de l’historiographie grecque contemporaine,” in A. M. Sohn and F. Thelamon, eds., L’Histoire sans les femmes est-elle pos-sible? (Rouen: Perrin, 1998), 29, 25–32.

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exclusively by historians of the political life. The role of the occupation forces was examined only to the extent that Nazis interfered in the internal political conflicts. Thus the political confrontation between Right and Left was explored only to the extent it touched upon the English and American intervention in internal politics and the diplomatic aspects of the confrontation between East and West coalitions. In contrast with this approach, from the early 1990s onwards we are witnessing the attempt to understand political issues through new analytical categories belonging to the field of social history. The notion of everyday experience takes a prominent position amongst them. Thus, the collective resistance against German occupation is seen as the result of the dismantling of prewar social hierarchies due to the break up of the state.32 It was also linked to Nazi violence as well as to the harsh wartime economic conditions.33 Focusing on the case study of a mountain village, Tasoula Vervenioti argued that women and young people’s participation in the Resistance organizations led to the emergence of new collective subjects.34 Combining anthro-pology with oral history methodology, Riki van Bouschoten shed light on the com-plex ways in which the inhabitants of the countryside experienced the occupation, the movement for resistance, and the Civil War. She argued that it is important to understand the connection between the impact that the period of political confronta-tion had on social and family relations, the overturning of power relations, and the dismantling of cultural codes that had shaped the life of the community during the prewar period.35

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE AND THE “SOCIAL”

Let us now focus our attention on the evolution of Greek historiography in the last two decades, from the late 1990s to the present. This period is characterized by the gradual reconfiguration of the “social” through culture, the analytical tool of identity(ies), and the notion of construction. This interest was to a certain extent stimulated by the social and political conjuncture of the 1990s, i.e., the emergence of a strong Greek nationalist movement triggered by the Macedonian issue and the ten-sion in Greek-Turkish relations coinciding with a massive influx of migrants mainly from neighboring countries. The majority of Greek intellectuals and historians open-

32 Giorgos Margaritis, Από την ήττα στην εξέγερση. Ελλάδα: άνοιξη 1941-φθινόπωρο 1942 [From the defeat to uprising. Greece: Spring 1941–Autumn 1942] (Athens: Politis Publishers, 1993).

33 Mark Mazower, Inside Hitler’s Greece. The Experience of the Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

34 Tasoula Vervenioti, Η γυναίκα της Αντίστασης. Η είσοδος των γυναικών στην πολι-τική [The woman of Resistance. The women’s entrance into politics] (Athens: Odysseas Publishers, 1994).

35 Riki van Bouschoten, Ανάποδα χρόνια. Συλλογική μνήμη και ιστορία στο Ζιάκα Γρεβε-νών (1900-1950) [Turbulent years. Collective memory and history in Ziakas Grevenon 1900–1950] (Athens: Plethon, 1997).

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ly reacted against the widespread nationalistic fervor. They reflected on the ways in which nationalist ideologies are constructed. Following the path opened by studies on Greek nationalism that had appeared in the previous decade, young historians questioned previously taboo issues relating to minorities living in Greece.36 Like-wise, the emigrant issue led to the reconsideration, from a historiographical point of view, of the economic, political, and cultural aspects of Greek emigration in the near past.

I can summarize the main characteristics of the present day historiographi-cal trend concerning the issue of social relations and the conceptualization of the “social” as follows:

1. Greek historians, and particularly the new generation, no longer ask the misleading question of why Greek society does not resemble its European counterparts. Their theoretical paradigms have become multifaceted. The preoccupation with total causation and explanations is fading away and the attempt for a “histoire globale” is being abandoned.

2. Many historians recognize that gender can no longer be left off the agenda of social relations. On the contrary, we are witnessing a gradual reformula-tion of the field of the “social,” characterized by the abandonment of the concept of class as the key notion for understanding social relations, and the ascendance of gender and to a secondary level of race and ethnicity. All these analytical categories, and especially class and gender, are treated not as coherent and consolidated systems of reference, but as processes in the making, within which layers of internal inconsistencies exist and multiple meanings are produced.

3. Some historians have attempted to investigate the cultural construction of the human experience and the interrelation between structures and agency, as well as discourses and practices. In these cases, the influence that has been exercised by feminist and gender studies, oral history, social theory, literary and cultural studies, the “linguistic turn,” and the Foucauldian ap-proach, is quite relevant.

From this point of view, six main groups of studies can be identified. The first il-lustrates the shift that has taken place on the issue of the perception of social hierarchy

36 Οι Εβραίοι στον ελληνικό χώρο: ζητήματα ιστορίας στη μακρά διάρκεια [Jews in Greece: Questions of history in the longue durée], Acts of the First Symposium in History (Athens: Gavriilidis, 1995); Ο ελληνικός εβραϊσμός [Greek Jewry] Scientific Symposium (Athens: Scholi Moraiti, Etaireia Spoudon Neoellinikou Politismou kai Genikis Paideias,, 1999); Frangiski Ampatzopoulou, Το Ολοκαύτωμα στις μαρτυρίες των Ελλήνων Εβραίων [Holocaust in the testimonies of Greek Jews] (Thessalonica: Paratiritis Publishers, 1993); Rena Molho, Οι Εβραίοι της Θεσσαλονίκης, 1856-1919: μια ιδιαίτερη κοινότητα [The Jews of Thessalonica 1856–1919: A particular community] (Athens: Themelio Publishers, 2001); V. Gounaris, I. Michailidis, and G. Aggelopoulos, eds., Ταυτότητες στη Μακεδονία [Identities in Macedonia] (Athens: Papazisis Publishers, 1997).

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from the “modernization narrative” onwards, and specifically the middle class groups of the nineteenth century. According to this older historiographical narrative, the coun-try’s economic backwardness and social fluidity generated by clientelism undermined the formation of the middle class. Today, greater attention is paid to discourses and practices that shaped social difference and constituted social hierarchy in various envi-ronments. In other words, the economic and political burdens blamed for the ambiva-lent nature of the bourgeois identity in Greece have been replaced by the exploration of the cultural facets that reflect or construct social inequality. This approach underlines the interrelation between bourgeois identity and local community and collective iden-tity. For example, historians of the city of Ermoupolis studied legal documents such as wills in order to explore the attitude of the upper social strata of Ermoupolis urban society toward family and kinship relations, religious devotion, and charity. They also research the ways in which the inhabitants of Ermoupolis constructed their public com-memorations.37 The diffusion of sports and the development of sports associations in Greek society are related to the urbanization process and to a bourgeoisie on the ascent, which adopts a new style of living, propagating new values based on physical culture and associational life.38 Finally, the emergence of the middle class of Piraeus during the last quarter of the nineteenth century has also been examined. This endeavor focuses on the interconnectedness of family and business and the place of gender as an organi-zational principle in their formation and everyday functioning, and on the discourses that shaped a bourgeois public sphere based on social distinction with gendered con-notations.39 Encompassing studies that started to appear from the late 1980s onwards, the new historiographical approach concentrates on the exploration of the bourgeois identity as it was expressed through charity associations and the moralizing of the poor, and the formation of a new set of ideas concerning childhood and youth.40

37 Christos Loukos, Πεθαίνοντας στη Σύρο τον 19ο αιώνα [Dying in Syros in the 19th century] (Irakleio: Panepistimiakes Ekdoseis Kritis, 2000).

38 Christina Koulouri, Sport et société bourgeoise. Les associations sportives en Grèce 1870–1922 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000).

39 Yannis Yannitsiotis, Η κοινωνική ιστορία του Πειραιά. Η συγκρότηση της αστικής τάξης 1860-1910 [A social history of Piraeus. The making of the middle class, 1860–1910] (Athens: Nefeli Publishers, 2006).

40 Antonis Liakos, Νεανικές οργανώσεις [Youth organisations] (Athens: Lotos, 1988); Vaso Theodorou, “Φιλανθρωπία και πόλη. Ορφανοί και άστεγοι παίδες στον Πειραιά γύρω στο 1875” [Charity and city. Orphans and homeless children in Piraeus in 1875], Mnimon, 14 (1992), 71–90; Rica Benveniste, Η ποινική καταστολή της νεανικής εγκληματικότητας τον 19ο αιώνα (1833-1911) [The penal repression of juvenile criminality in the 19th century] (Athens and Komotini: Sakkoulas Publishers, 1994); Vaso Theodorou, “Πειθαρχικά συστήματα και εργασία στα ορφανοτροφεία το β΄μισό του 19ου αιώνα” [Disciplinary systems and work in orphanages during the second half of the 19th century], Mnimon, 21 (1999), 55–84; Maria Korasidou, Οι άθλιοι των Αθηνών και οι θεραπευτές τους. Φτώχεια και φιλανθρωπία στην ελληνι-κή πρωτεύουσα τον 19ο αιώνα [The wretched of Athens and their healers. Poverty and charity in the Greek capital in the 19th century] (Athens: Istoriko Archeio Ellinikis Neolaias and Geniki Grammateia Neas Genias, 1995).

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The second group includes studies that deal with the issues of the industrial working class and working relations within the family during the interwar period. These studies reveal the importance of the social and cultural meanings of work, veering away from a labor market perception. In addition, they underline the impact of gender in working relations. They exemplify the main ideas of labor history inau-gurated in the early 1990s by examining specific industrial branches and occupations in specific cities. The main research fields of the second group include: the impact of culture on the formation of class identity, using as a case study the tobacco work-ers in Thessalonica;41 the intertwining of technical and gender labor division in the textile industries of Piraeus and the importance of gender in the construction of professional identities;42 and the hierarchical relations among middle-class women and their domestic servants in Athens, in other words, class politics in the sphere of the home through which subjects were constituted as subordinates.43

The third group covers studies that deal with class, nationalism, and the gen-dered aspects of nationalism and of national discourses. We can discern two sub-groups of studies. The first one belongs to a broad trend that has arisen over the last decade within the field of Greek historiography that highlights the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the heterogeneity of Orthodox populations within the Ottoman Empire. This trend is in direct contrast to the main tenants of traditional historiography, according to which the presence of Orthodox communities for cen-turies is the main proof of the Greek national character. This heterogeneity had profoundly influenced the formation of Greek national identity, its content, and the perception of the notion of nation by the Greeks. We can mention studies that focus on the construction of national identity among the Greek-Orthodox community in Constantinople in relation to the cultural aspects of middle-class public activities through voluntary associations.

These historians invite us to see the public action of those associations as a result not of the economic and social position of their members in the Ottoman Empire but of a normative discursive field articulated around key terms such as “na-tional conviction,” “national language,” “nation,” and “national duty.” This field is activated through the establishment of a school network using Greek as the language of instruction in order to educate Greek-Orthodox believers by infusing in them bour-geois values such as personal hygiene, proper behavior, diligence, discipline, and

41 Kostas Fountanopoulos, Εργασία και εργατικό κίνημα στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Ηθική οι-κονομία και συλλογική δράση στο Μεσοπόλεμο 1908–1936 [Work and labor movement in Thessalonica. Moral economy and collective action during the interwar period 1908–1936] (Athens: Nefeli Publishers, 2005).

42 Lida Papastefanaki, “Άνδρες, γυναίκες, παίδες και παιδίσκαι…” Εργασία και τεχνολογία στην ελληνική κλωστοϋφαντουργία. Η βιομηχανία Ρετσίνα στον Πειραιά (1872–1940) [“Men, women, boys and girls…” Work and technology in the Greek textile industry. The Retsinas’ industry in Piraeus 1872–1940] (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Crete, Rethymno, 2002).

43 Pothiti Hantzaroula, The Making of Subordination: Domestic Servants in Greece 1920–1945 (Ph.D. Dissertation, European University Institute, Florence, 2002).

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the ideal of progress.44 Other studies explore the formation of a new discursive field relating to the conception of poverty and the philanthropic practices of the Ortho-dox community in Constantinople during the late Ottoman period. This discursive field was based on the attempt of the Ottoman state to homogenize the social body through the central category of “respectable life” and was realized by the leaders of every religious/ethnic group of the Empire, namely the Patriarch and the wealthy Orthodox merchants and bankers. The new conceptualization of poverty had strong class and gendered connotations and led to the emergence of an imagined Greek national community.45

The second subgroup includes studies that regard gender, class, and nation as constitutors of fields of hierarchical relations and seeks to explore the historically changing meanings produced by their articulation. It is shown that during the 1897 Greek-Turkish War and after the Greek defeat, upper- and middle-class women ap-propriated traditional definitions of national identity in order to legitimize their mod-ernist demands for emancipation, and as a result reconstructed the national narrative and affected the meaning of the politics of that time.46 Another study explores the ways of consumption in normative discourses with respect to three areas of identity shaping: the emergence of a self-sufficient and self-restrained middle-class (male) individual; the reconceptualization of domesticity; and the negotiation of national identity.47

The fourth group consists of studies relating to the migration phenomenon. Migration studies focused their attention on the permeability of national borders and on the complex, many-faceted and continuously transforming process that char-acterizes the construction of cultural identities. On the one hand, they seek to dif-ferentiate themselves from the sociological, demographic, and economic studies of Greek migration based on the analytical scheme of “push and pull” factors, which considered Greek migration as one of the structural elements of capitalism and of uneven relations between the center and the periphery. On the other hand, they seek to differentiate themselves from the studies produced by the migrant communities themselves, in which the migrant characteristics as well as those of Greek society are perceived through the lens of a “unified” and unchangeable identity in spite of

44 Haris Exertzoglou, Εθνική ταυτότητα στην Κωνσταντινούπολη τον 19ο αιώνα. Ο Ελληνι-κός Φιλολογικός Σύλλογος Κωνσταντινουπόλεως 1861–1912 [National identity in Constantinople in 19th century. The Greek Literary Association of Constantinople 1861–1912] (Athens: Nefeli Publishers, 1996).

45 Efi Kanner, Φτώχεια και φιλανθρωπία στην Ορθόδοξη κοινότητα της Κωνσταντινού-πολης 1753–1912 [Poverty and philanthropy in the Orthodox community of Constantinople, 1753–1912] (Athens: Katarti Publishers, 2004).

46 Efi Avdela and A. Psarra, “Engendering ‘Greekness’: Women’s Emancipation and Irredentist Politics in 19th century Greece,” Historia. Journal of the Historical Society of Israel, 5 (2000), 109–121.

47 Haris Exertzoglou, “The Cultural Uses of Consumption. Negotiating Class, Gender and Nation in the Urban Ottoman Centers during the 19th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 35 (February 2003) 1, 77–101.

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every effort of assimilation and alteration. Lina Ventoura examined the various ways ethnic identities are constructed under the influence of many factors, including: the policies of the Greek state and of the receiving societies related to the migration phe-nomenon; the hierarchy of the labor market in the latter according to nationalities; the relationships of Greek migrants with other foreign groups, and their perception of the prevalent cultural systems of classification; and the reshaping of previous so-cial inequalities within the foreign environment.48

Another study, authored by Ioanna Laliotou, is articulated around two analyti-cal terms—“transatlantic migration” and “migrant subjectivity.” The first one helps to overcome the separation between emigration and immigration by stressing the importance of approaching the movement of populations across borders as multi-directional flows, phenomena with local attributes but with translocal dynamics. The second one shows that a process of subjectivization is taking place through the encounters of the migrant experience, self-conceptualizations, and hegemonic discourses where race, ethnicity, class, and gender differences have a critical impact on its construction, although cultural institutions and cultural practices play an im-portant role in its formation.49

The fifth group comprises studies focusing on the Civil War period by factoring in the experiences of left-wing political prisoners and the construction of their subjectivity, while taking into account the different and contested discourses, practices, and positions that constituted the prisoner as a political subject.50 Other studies, taking as a point of reference regional and village histories, seek to understand how the war affected the family, the law, and the state. Amongst the subjects touched upon we can discern the following: (1) the postwar governments legitimacy crisis; (2) the ideological foundations of anticommunist and state practices of punishing people for their ideas; (3) women’s experiences from war to peace; (4) the dismantling of the sense of community in the Greek countryside; (5) the experience of the highly debated “paidomazoma” (gathering of the children), which was the practice of sending children en masse into exile behind the Iron Curtain; (6) the confrontations between the Communist Party’s mechanisms and members’ hopes and wishes; (7) the unprecedented exertion of violence by both leftist and right-wing military forces; (8) the ethnic dimension of the Civil War years in Northern Greece and the nation building process in the postwar period through narratives in which the experience of Jews, Slavs, and others found no

48 Lina Ventoura, Έλληνες μετανάστες στο Βέλγιο [Greek Migrants in Belgium] (Athens: Nefeli Publishers, 1999).

49 Ioanna Laliotou, Transatlantic Subjects. Acts of Migration and Cultures of Transnationalism between Greece and America (Chicago and London: The University of Chi-cago Press, 2004).

50 Dimitra Lambropoulou, Γράφοντας από τη φυλακή. Όψεις της υποκειμενικότητας των πολιτικών κρατουμένων 1947-1960 [Writing from the prison. Facets of the political detainees’ subjectivity 1947–1960] (Athens: Nefeli Publishers, 1999); Polymeris Voglis, Becoming a Subject. Political Prisoners During the Greek Civil War (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).

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place; (9) the subject of the deliberate silence that enveloped discussion of wartime collaboration during the 1950s and 1960s; and (10) the gulf of memory between teenagers today and elder generations relating to wartime Bulgarian occupation in northeastern Greece.51

The sixth trend is best exemplified in a recent study by Efi Avdela, titled, “Due to reasons of honor,” which examines the interpersonal violence committed “in the name of honor” in post-Civil War Greece. Within the framework of a quickly urban-ized society, the author sees the gradual replacement of the code of honor perceived as a family and collective value, by the honor construed as an individual value under social control. Viewing honor as a fundamental family and collective value in Greek society during this period, the crimes “in the name of honor” are examined in their multiple historical and social contexts. This study is worthy of reference for at least three reasons. Firstly, it enables us to understand economic transformations, social matters, and the encounter with modernity through people’s everyday experience, instead of through political events and confrontations. Secondly, it launches a pro-grammatic dialogue with social and cultural anthropology—the elusive character-istic of Greek historiography as mentioned above—as well as with sociology and political science. Thirdly, it takes into consideration the compatibility of symbolic representations and social practices as well as the cultural and the discursive nature of emotions.52

The recent turning point in historiography is also characterized by the reorien-tation of some economic historians’ research interests towards the main protagonists in business and economic activities. New studies focus on the cultural aspects of Greek entrepreneurship during the nineteenth century53 and point out the various facets of the female presence in business activities, which directly or indirectly played a decisive role in the enterprises of the Greek Diaspora and in those of the country (a topic largely neglected until recently by Greek historiography).54 Other studies deal with the formation and the collective action of occupational groups such as the Athe-nian traders during the first decades of the twentieth century.55 Finally, there are studies that stress the importance of noneconomic factors and institutions upon the

51 Mark Mazower, ed., After the War Was Over. Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943–1960 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).

52 Efi Avdela, “Δια λόγους τιμής”. Βία, συναισθήματα και αξίες στη Μετεμφυλιακή Ελλάδα [“Due to reasons of honor.” Violence, emotions and values in the post-Civil War Greece] (Athens: Nefeli Publishers, 2002).

53 Maria Christina Chatziioannou, “The Emergence of a Business Culture in the Mo-dern Greek State,” in A. M. Kuijlaars, K. Prudon, and J. Visser, eds., Business and Society. Entrepreneurs, Politics and Networks in a Historical Perspective (Rotterdam: 2000), 469–476.

54 Ioanna Pepelasis-Minoglou, “Greek Women in the World of Mercantile Business, c. 1780–1940,” (forthcoming)

55 Maria Christina Chatziioannou, ed., Εμπορικός Σύλλογος Αθηνών 1902-2002. Ιστορι-κή αναδρομή στη συλλογική συνείδηση των εμπόρων [The Commercial Association of Athens, 1902–2002. A historical retrospect of the collective consciousness of merchants] (Athens: Kerkyra Publishers, 2002).

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development of the long-distance maritime Greek trade from the nineteenth century onwards. Therefore, these studies share the new preoccupations of an innovative sec-tion of international economic and business historiography, which undermines the traditional assumption that international trade and capital movements in the nine-teenth century were associated with the rise of the impersonal market. They ques-tion the so-called homogeneity of the Greek Diaspora, a concept that has frequently been promoted for political reasons in the Greek national historiography. Through the ethnic network approach, they reveal the multiple versions of the Diaspora mer-chants and ship-owner networks. They also analyze the close relationship between the ethnic group and entrepreneurship from the eighteenth century onwards. In this respect, historians take into consideration four interrelated factors: 1) the structure of the market; 2) the cultural formation of social networks based on family, kinship, trustworthiness, mutual assistance, and solidarity; 3) the strategy of the group (the relation between opportunities and ethnic characteristics); and finally, 4) the birth of the Greek state along with the evolution of international transport and trade and the imperialistic expansion during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which led some old merchant networks to vanish and others to modify their organization and strategy.56

Finally, we should mention the composite synthesis on the history of Greece during the 20th century published in six collective volumes, incorporating several new trends relating to the study of the social.57 This ambitious project consists of studies on various aspects of the economic, social and cultural life, shedding new light on the social transformations that occurred in Greek society during the 20th century.

CONCLUSIONS

From the early 1970s onward the evolution of Greek historiography was marked by its liberation from the traditional nationalistic narrative and by the pursuit of new approaches to the economic, social, and cultural transformation of society. Within this new intellectual framework, the history of “social issues” and of “soci-ety” was one of the historians’ highest priorities. Yet, class, which was traditionally considered one of the fundamental constituents of social history in European histo-riography, did not find much room in Greek historiography during the 1970s and

56 Gelina Harlaftis, “Mapping the Greek Maritime Diaspora from the Early Eight-eenth to the Late Twentieth Centuries;” Ioanna Pepelasis-Minoglou, “Toward a Typology of Greek-Diaspora Entrepreneurship;” and Maria Christina Chatziioannou, “Greek Merchant Networks in the Age of Empires (1770–1870),” all in I. Baghdiantz McCabe, G. Harlaftis, and I. Pepelasis-Minoglou, eds., Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks. Four Centuries of History (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2005), 147–171, 173–189, and 371–382, respectively.

57 Christos Hadziiossif, ed., Ιστορία της Ελλάδας του 20ού αιώνα [History of Greece in the Twentieth Century] vols. A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 (Athens: Vivliorama, 1999, 2003, 2007).

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1980s. The debates on the nature of the Greek political system and the structure of the Greek economy stressed the importance of immobile political and economic structures as the main barriers in the efforts of modernization and “Europeaniza-tion.” In the first historical narrative it was clientelism and the establishment of a social consensus, the absence of social struggle, and social fluidity that prevented the formation of social classes. In the second, it was mainly the economic inertia of Greek society that led to the “incomplete” formation of the working class and to the emergence of a leading class distant from the values and ideology of the middle-class. Moreover, the “take off” of the Greek economy was delayed by the state’s attitude towards the modernization of the economy. In order to explain the reasons why the Greek society of the nineteenth century did not resemble Western European socie-ties, the Greek scholars adopted a methodological scheme of multiple causation, seeing social relations solely as a reflection of economic and political structures.

The 1990s were marked by the renewal of the study of the “social,” articulated around two main methodological and theoretical choices that signaled the shift from structures to agency. The first was the conceptualization of class as both a cultural and economic phenomenon. The second was the introduction of gender, which ena-bled historians to explore the historically different ways women and men experience and construe their life, be it their work or the household. In terms of preferred topics of research, during the 1990s we also witnessed the profound renewal of the history of the Nazi Occupation, the Resistance, and the Civil War, as historians veered away from the political approaches “from above” and turned to the exploration of every-day human experience.

Finally, the current period is characterized by the proliferation of studies that conceptualize the “social” through the notion of culture, focusing on the historical construction of human experience and exploring the unstable, malleable, and ever changing content of human identities. It is from this point of view that the attempt to examine the interrelation between class and gender, and to a secondary level, ethnic-ity and race, is made.

It would be amiss to consider the shift to culture as the main trend relating to the study of the “social” within contemporary Greek historiography. The socioeco-nomic approach is still highly valued. Even though disagreements between the de-fenders of the “socioeconomic vision” and those of the “sociocultural” still exist, the coexistence and the plurality of various theoretical and methodological paradigms in comparison to the previous periods have decisively enriched the field of social history in Greece.

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