The Scottish Greek: An Intellectual Biography of George Finlay (1799–1875)
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellowship Research
Dr Michail Sotiropoulos
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow, University of Edinburgh
Dr Michail Sotiropoulos is a historian of the modern Greek world and Lecturer in Modern Greek Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research places nineteenth-century Greece within wider European and Mediterranean histories of liberalism, political thought and state formation. His book Liberalism after the Revolution: The Intellectual Foundations of the Greek State, c. 1830–1880 (Cambridge University Press) was awarded the 2024 Edmund Keeley Prize, and he is also editor of the forthcoming volume Philhellenism and the Greek Revolution of 1821: Towards a Global History. His current research builds on longstanding work with the Finlay Papers and on his wider interest in philhellenism, liberalism and empire.
About the project
George Finlay is best known for the authoritative histories of post-classical Greece that he wrote while living in Greece between the 1840s and 1870s. Yet these works represent only one part of a much wider public, political and intellectual career. Finlay was closely involved in Greek high politics and institution-building, participated in diplomatic networks across the Eastern Mediterranean, wrote regularly for the British press, and maintained an extensive correspondence spanning Greece, Britain, the United States and beyond.
Drawing on the Finlay Papers at the British School at Athens, the project reconstructs these networks and Finlay's role within them. His correspondents included military officers and consular agents, historians and archaeologists such as William Leake, and political economists and thinkers including Nassau Senior and J. S. Mill. Taken together, they reveal Finlay as an important intermediary between Greece and Britain and as a central figure within an informal network through which political ideas and knowledge about Greece circulated.
This aspect of Finlay's career has never been systematically studied. Where earlier accounts have often understood figures such as Finlay primarily through the romantic traditions of philhellenism, the project asks how their activities also intersected with the expansion of British informal influence in the region.
By examining Finlay's writings, relationships and political activity, the research reassesses his contribution to nineteenth-century debates about state-building, national character, progress and “Europeanness”, empire and international society. More broadly, it explores how philhellenism could coexist with liberalism and imperial expansion, presenting Greece as a place where competing ideas of national emancipation, civilisation and empire were negotiated and transformed.