Giannakopoulos, Georgios. The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870-1930. Manchester: Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism Series), 2025.

 

Books often find us before we know we’re writing them.

The first element of my intellectual formation was theory—and conjuncture: learning to think through ideas as they collide with the urgencies of their historical moment. I was an undergraduate when the twin towers fell, an event as spectacular as it was terrifying. In the weeks that followed, I encountered the writings of Edward Said. His critique of the “clash of civilisations” narrative opened a door. From The Clash of Ignorance to Orientalism, I began tracing how categories like 'East' and 'West' are produced and reproduced. Said led me to Maria Todorova’s Balkanism and to questions about how Europe’s margins are imagined and narrated.

The second element was more local. In Athens in the late 1990s, I witnessed the moment of Greco-Turkish rapprochement. Workshops with Turkish historians introduced me to what I would now call critical Turkish studies. Short study trips to Turkey deepened my sense of our shared past; on one occasion, I even found myself—quite unintentionally—playing the part of an ambassador for Greek-Turkish friendship during a football match.

This intellectual osmosis made me wonder: why does one nation’s tragedy so often become another’s triumph? Could we think about our shared past comparatively, even collaboratively?

These two threads—civilisational critique and comparative curiosity about the shared heritage with our Aegean neighbours —merged in my master’s thesis on Arnold J. Toynbee. I still remember discovering The Western Question in Greece and Turkey in the Panteion University library and being struck by Toynbee’s ambition to transform a regional conflict into a theory of civilisation. And I was equally stunned by his falling out with the Greek donors that sustained his academic post in London on account of his 'Turcophile' stance. The Toynbee affair had everything that would later define my work—the decentring of the nation, the politics of knowledge, the tension between sympathy and imperial distance.

    

^{Georgios Giannakopoulos in front of a memorial to RW Seton-Watson in Ružomberok (Slovakia) and a German article from 1939 explaining the monument}

Years later, from London, watching Greece slide into the financial crisis (having miraculously secured a PhD scholarship from the Greek Scholarships Foundation), those early questions returned in a new guise. My focus shifted to Britain’s long engagement with Southeastern Europe—not just politically, but intellectually. The more I researched, the clearer it became that the 'national questions' of Crete, Macedonia, or Asia Minor could not be understood in isolation. They needed to be set alongside those of Bosnia, Hungary, or Armenia, within the broader frameworks of the British, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires. What struck me was the persistence of thinking in terms of questions—problems awaiting solutions. This vocabulary of crisis and resolution, so central to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century diplomacy, reveals much about the genealogy of international governance itself: a habit of imagining regions not as historical actors but as sites to be managed, pacified, or reformed.

That comparative turn led me to another discovery: Ireland. The Irish 'question' casts a long shadow over how British thinkers approached the Balkans and the Near East. It became clear that reflections on nationality abroad were shaped by anxieties about nationality at home.

The people I study—historians, archaeologists, journalists—were more than commentators. They represented the world of Southeastern Europe in anglophone audiences in both senses of the concept: speaking for 'oppressed' nationalities, small nations and in some cases small nations aspiring to national greatness. But they also presented aspects of Southeastern European folklore through their books and cultural commentary. Ultimately, their work was shaped by the inevitable distortions of translation and the selective empathy of empire. My aim became not to recover what was lost, but to read the silences and ask what these distortions served.

I came of age in a political world where 'internationalism' meant the political left. But this is part of the story. The main characters in my story shared a corpus of liberal internationalist sensibilities before the term hardened: they believed that liberty, nationality, and even empire could coexist within a moral order. Their writings inhabit a time when the boundaries between liberalism and socialism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, were still porous.

    

^{Bust of Arthur Evans at the entrance of Knossos (Crete) and Evans' interview on the 'Macedonian Question' for the Greek newspaper Αθήναι (c. 1907)}

The Interpreters is, in that sense, a book about continuities—about how the languages of freedom, civilisation, and reform forged in the age of empire continue to shape the ways Europe imagines and manages its peripheries.

At the same time, it is also a story about regional impact. The scholars I follow were not writing in a vacuum: their ideas travelled, entered local debates, and shaped how Southeastern Europe was seen—from diplomatic correspondence and scholarly treatises to the press and emerging universities. The discourses they helped craft seeped into regional vocabularies of progress and decline, civilisation and backwardness. I am also interested in how their memory was institutionalised—how figures such as R. W. Seton-Watson, Mary Edith Durham, Arthur J. Evans, and James Bryce came to embody distinct traditions of liberal engagement with the Balkans. Through archives, foundations, and commemorations, their intellectual legacies acquired a semi-official status, shaping how generations would come to understand the region and its place in Europe.

And yet, I still wonder whether this way of writing about Southeastern Europe has ever truly vanished. The old languages of sympathy and supervision, of fragility and promise, still surface—in policy papers, journalistic commentary, even academic prose. To trace their endurance is not simply to expose their persistence, but to ask what they continue to make possible—and what they prevent us from seeing.