The great depression of the inter-war years was the most profound shock ever to strike the world economy, and is widely held to have led directly to the collapse of parliamentary democracy in many countries. This study of Greece in the inter-war period, however, demonstrates that there was no simple correlation between economic and political crisis. Drawing on detailed statistical research, Mazower explores how an underdeveloped country like Greece was able to recover so quickly from the economic crisis. He examines the complex processes involved, showing how recovery, like crisis, threatened...

This volume makes available some of the most exciting research currently underway into Greek society after Liberation. Together, its essays map a new social history of Greece in the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which the country grappled--bloodily--with foreign occupation and intense civil conflict.

Extending innovative historical approaches to Greece, the contributors explore how war and civil war affected the family, the law, and the state. They examine how people led their lives, as communities and individuals, at a time of political polarization in a country on the front...

Throughout history, the Balkans have been a crossroads, a zone of endless military, cultural, and economic mixing and clashing between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. In this highly acclaimed short history, Mark Mazower sheds light on what has been called the tinderbox of Europe, whose troubles have ignited wider wars for hundreds of years. Focusing on events from the emergence of the nation-state onward, "The Balkans" reveals with piercing clarity the historical roots of current conflicts and gives a landmark reassessment of the region s history, from the...

This is an ambitious history of 20th-century Europe. It expands the frontiers of Europe outwards to include not only Portugal and Ireland but also, and significantly, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It also overturns the conventional myth of Europe as the cradle and safe haven of democracy and liberal values and shows how fragile they are.

Draw ing on an unprecedented range and variety of original research, Hitler's Empire sheds new light on how the Nazis designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion?and offers a chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain. Yet the Nazis? lack of political sophistication left them unequal to the task of ruling what their armies had conquered, despite a shocking level of...