In this examination of the modern Greek state and contemporary Greek society, first published in 2013 and experiencing several reprints, as well as being translated into English, historian Kostas Kostis explores how a small province of the Ottoman Empire transformed into a modern European state.

The updated edition (2018) includes a new chapter covering the current period of crisis. In some respects, the problems that arose during the formation of the modern Greek state could be likened to the corresponding problems currently faced by the Western world in its attempts to impose its own political and cultural model on foreign, if not hostile, societies.

However, in such a comparison, there exists a difference that cannot be overlooked. The subject of the book is Greece and the Greeks, and this category—national and not religious—inevitably evokes what Western Europeans consider the foundations of their civilization.

From this perspective, it is easy to interpret the particular, at least to some extent, treatment that Western societies afforded to those populations that did not merely rise up against the Ottoman Empire in the name of Christianity, but invoked through their name a connection to a past in which Europe sees the roots of its own identity.

This is a perception that is often evoked by all those who wish to support or combat the often extravagant choices of the Greeks and which during the 19th century earned them the label of "the spoiled children of History" from Europeans.