The significance of the 1821 Revolution for Greece and the world

The Greek Revolution of the 1820s was the first liberal-national movement to succeed in the Old World of Europe - after the United States, more or less at the same time as the similar liberation movements in South America (between 1811 and 1825), and before every one of the new nation-states that would soon become the norm throughout Europe. The ideological groundwork had been laid, mostly by thinkers writing in French and German, during the century before. Greeks didn't invent the nation-state. But it was in Greece and by Greeks that the experiment was first put into practice in Europe. 

The French Revolution, which began in 1789, would more famously transform the political life of the continent, perhaps of the world, in the long run. But after the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, and after the Congress of Vienna had established an international order for the whole...

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