In this book, Giannis Milios repositions the most critical issues of modern Greek history: the formation of the Greek nation and its boundaries, the construction of the Greek bourgeois state in its initial republican form and in its later "authoritarian" forms, the legacy of the Revolution, and its ideological uses up to today.

Since 1838, the Greek state has celebrated the beginning of the Greek Revolution on March 25th each year (along with the "Annunciation of the Theotokos" from the Orthodox Church). This date conceals a matter that is yet in front of our eyes: that the Greek Revolution was declared on February 24, 1821, in the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia by Alexander Ypsilantis, with the statement that "Morea, Epirus, Thessaly, Serbia, Bulgaria, the Islands of the Archipelago, in a word, all of Greece took up arms to throw off the heavy yoke of the Barbarians."

This belief, that all Christians of the Ottoman Empire are Greeks, begins with the revolutionary texts of Rigas Feraios and the Greek Nomarchy, and is maintained with slight modifications until the mid-19th century. It also constitutes the ideological ground of the Megali Idea, the expansionist policy of the Greek state during its first century of existence.

This study shows that Greek nationalism, Greek national consciousness, is a social process that begins after the late 18th century, half a century before the other Balkan nationalisms, and has a clear political content: a demand from the masses for a state, as long as it does not exist, and subsequently for political rights and national "purity" internally, and for the expansion of the state’s influence and "correction" of its borders, externally.

This national politicization of the masses expresses the historically new, "modern," form of their subjection to capital, as its permanent function is to integrate class conflicts into the general capitalist interest that manifests as "national unity," while simultaneously immersing the state's expansionist-imperialist strategies in popular support.