Sovereignty and empire the Eastern Mediterranean during the 19th century: The Greek world

This seminar examines the transformation of the Eastern Mediterranean in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when imperial wars and entanglements, population movements, revolts, and revolution reshaped the region’s political and legal landscape. For the Greek world, these processes resulted in the creation of two new states: the United States of the Ionian Islands in 1815 and the Greek Kingdom in 1830–32. Although nominally independent, both occupied an ambiguous position between formal independence and external control.

The seminar argues that this ambiguity was central to the emergence of a distinctive regional legal order, shaped by the coexistence of multiple legal regimes and territorial and jurisdictional arrangements, including empires, states, semi-sovereign entities, and protectorates. At the heart of this order was the framework of “protection.”

Focusing on a number of liberal commentators, Greek and non-Greek alike, the seminar explores how this framework was conceptualised, contested, and deployed in the decades that followed, as imperial powers—and Great Britain in particular—sought to consolidate their power in the region. In doing so, it addresses two broader questions: what was at stake in these debates over law, empire, and sovereignty, and how can the Mediterranean periphery help us rethink the making of international law and world politics? By foregrounding the legal and political struggles surrounding protection, the seminar treats the Greek and Ionian cases not as marginal exceptions, but as revealing sites for understanding both the internationalisation of law and the foundations of nineteenth-century international order.