The leading British historian reconstructs here one of the most dense and significant decades in modern Greek and European history: the time when the people of the villages, mountains, and plains in the Greek regions of the Ottoman Empire rose up in 1821 against the mighty forces of the Sultan. Against all odds, and despite the terrifying reprisals they suffered, as well as the relentless civil conflicts, they kept the revolution alive until the moment when the military intervention of the Great Powers finally allowed the establishment of a new national state.

The book offers a fascinating panorama of this history, putting us in the minds, hearts, and actions of the protagonists, as well as in the revealing experiences of the many. We thus see with new eyes the revolutionary plans of the conspirators of the Filiki Eteria, the cunning guerrilla warfare of the chieftains and the feats of the fire-ship captains, the contributions, dilemmas, and hesitations of the armatoloi and klephts, notables and shipowners, the constitutional visions and diplomatic maneuvers of the new political order, the practical support of philhellenes and volunteers, the agony of besieged cities, the tragedy of defenseless women and children.

It thus becomes clear how catalytic the revolution of 1821 was in modern Greek history, determining the political formation of modern Greece; how central it was in shaping international trends such as romanticism, nationalism, or republicanism; and how much it contributed to the emergence of a new kind of political confrontation between the iron dictates of the Holy Alliance, the unprecedented dynamism of international solidarity, and the faith, dreams, and actions of a people struggling, often at terrible cost, to "make the Greek state."