The Muslim Bonaparte: diplomacy and orientalism in Ali Pasha's Greece

Abstract

This text focuses on the tension between the two experiences of Ali Pasha - the diplomatic and the cultural. It places the history of Greece in the context of European history, as well as that of Ottoman decline, and demonstrates the ways in which contemporary European visions of Greece, particularly those generated by Romanicist philhellenism, contributed to a form of orientalism in the south Balkans. Greece, a territory never formally colonized by Western Europe, was subject instead to a surrogate form of colonial control, one in which the country's history and culture, rather than its actual land, was annexed, invaded and colonized.