The main axis around which this book revolves is the transformation of a small province of the Ottoman Empire into a modern European state. In some respects, the problems that arose during the formation of the modern Greek state could be equated with the corresponding problems currently encountered in the efforts of the Western world to impose its own political and cultural model on societies that are foreign, if not hostile, to it. The fact that the Greeks of the 19th and 20th centuries are Christians, while the societies that are currently the subject of Western experimentation are Muslim, has little significance to the extent that both were or are treated, explicitly or not, as fields of civilization and in no way as equal partners in the political project to which the term modernization is rather uncritically attributed. Moreover, the Christianity of the Greeks never ceased to represent the schism, that is, a peculiarity compared to Western European perceptions, not always sympathetic and even less understandable.
However, in such a comparison, there is a difference that cannot be ignored. The subject of the book is Greece and the Greeks, and this now national category inevitably refers to what Western Europeans consider the foundations of their civilization. From this perspective, the special, to some extent at least, treatment that those populations who did not simply revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the name of Christianity, but invoked through their name a connection with a past in which Europe sees the roots of its own identity, can easily be interpreted. This is a perception that is very often recalled by all those who want to support or fight the often sophisticated choices of the Greeks and which in the 19th century earned them from the Europeans the characterization of the "spoiled children of History".