The main focus of this book is the transformation of a small province of the Ottoman Empire into a modern European state. From certain perspectives, the problems that arose during the formation of modern Greek state could be compared to the similar problems currently encountered in the efforts of the Western world to impose its own political and cultural model on foreign, if not hostile, societies. 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, is of little significance in the sense that both have been or are being treated, explicitly or not, as fields of civilization and in no case as equal partners in the political endeavor to which the term modernization is attributed, rather uncritically. Moreover, the Christianity of the Greeks never ceased to represent the schism, that is, a peculiarity in comparison 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 is inherently associated, in a suggestive manner, with what Western Europeans consider the foundations of their civilization. From this perspective, the particular treatment that those populations received from the West, who did not simply rebel 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 be easily interpreted. This is a perception that is often invoked by all those who want to support or fight against the often desperate choices of the Greeks and which in the 19th century will give them the characterization of "spoiled children of History" by the Europeans.