In the northern Peloponnese, currants were grown in Patras, in Vostizza , and in the village of Sikionas, just West of Corinth. Currants also spread to the southern coast of Aetolia in towns along the gulf, including Lepanto , Anatolikon , and Messolonghi. From these locations, currants were shipped to the port of Patras, which became the bulking center for currants grown in Ottoman territory before their journey westward.Despite the continuing cultivation of currants in Ottoman Greece in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most currants were grown on the Venetian Ionian Islands during this time. The English traveler to the Ionian Islands Sir George Wheler wrote in the late seventeenth century that Zakynthos produced enough currants annually to fill five or six cargoes, and Kephalonia produced enough to fill three or four. At the same time, all the currant-growing regions around the Gulf of Corinth in Ottoman Greece—Anatolikon, Messolonghi, Patras, and Lepanto—together only produced enough to fill a single cargo.This continued throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, even as currant cultivation abated substantially on Zakynthos and Kephalonia and intensified somewhat in Ottoman Greece. In the eighteenth century, currants circulated through the early modern trade networks that connected the major trading hubs of the Mediterranean, including Venice, Trieste, Livorno, Smyrna, and Constantinople. The primary market was England, but they were also destined for consumption in Holland and elsewhere in Europe. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were six million Venetian liters of currants being exported from the Peloponnese, mainly from Patras.On the eve of the Greek Revolution, currant cultivation was growing, but currants remained the product of isolated zones of specialization around the Gulf of Corinth and on the Ionian Islands. The currant-growing places were not yet united into a region—they remained small islands surrounded by a sea of diverse cultivation. First, the demand for currants in Britain,livestock fodder system the main currant-importing country, increased due to changing consumption habits.

This was just the latest development in a longer process. In the eighteenth century in Britain, the growing middling and trading classes had adopted new consumption habits. Demand for luxury items was previously limited to the old elite, but with the expansion of British trade and growing prosperity, there was an increase in demand for luxury items and non-essential food commodities from faraway places such as tea and sugar and the porcelain and silver with which to consume them.The Industrial Revolution in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries expanded this consumer class even more and increased demand for these commodities. Rituals were created to consume these commodities. For example, breakfast and tea-drinking were both new rituals that were introduced in Britain in the eighteenth century. These customs coincided with the introduction of hot beverages such as coffee, chocolate, and tea and the ceramic, silver, and steel commodities used to consume them. By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was customary among middling and trading groups to consume a breakfast of bread and tea.One of the commodities that experienced a rise in demand was puddings, or sweet desserts made with sugar and dried fruit—particularly Greek currants. As described above, the market for currants in England to be consumed in puddings goes back to the fourteenth century or earlier, but because of new consumption patterns, around the middle of the nineteenth century, this market began to grow at a much faster rate. By the middle of the century, currants were the main export of the Peloponnese and of all of the Kingdom of Greece, and the UK was their principle market.The second half of the nineteenth century marks the period that Nikos Bakounakis calls the “age of pudding” in Victorian Britain.38 Pudding consumption rose in Britain among the lower and middling classes, and dried fruits were an essential ingredient in these puddings.The publication of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in 1843 popularized the holiday ritual of serving Christmas pudding made with dried fruit and adorned with a sprig of holly. Christmas pudding became a mainstay of the season, and other puddings became popular as year-round favorites.

The recipe for spotted dick, for example, which seems to date to an 1849 cookbook marketed to middle-class British housewives, calls for “Smyrna raisins” or sultanas to create the “spots.”Puddings became a sign of abundance and of the happiness of the bourgeois family— Greek currants became an essential ingredient in the aspirations of the upwardly mobile British population. Pudding consumption rose in Britain among the lower and middle classes, and Greek currants benefitted from this general trend. During the period from 1846 to 1876, the consumption of sugar and currants rose dramatically. Annual sugar consumption in England was 14 lbs. per person in 1846, but it grew to 60 lbs. in 1876. Currant consumption rose to a similar degree: total currant consumption in England was 14,000 tons in 1844, and it rose to 46,000 tons in 1874. Moreover, as the demand for dried fruit increased, currants also captured a greater relative share of this market. Currants displaced other types of raisins in London and Liverpool. In the years 1831 to 1840, 48% of the raisins consumed in these cities were currants. This number grew to 66% from 1860 to 1869.In the 1870s, 55% to 75% of Greek currants were being exported to Britain to meet this growing demand.As a French traveler to Greece wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century, “If Greece were to cease to produce these precious little black grains, there would be no more plum-puddings, nor plum-cakes, nor any of those dainties of which plums or currants are the foundation…. England would have been deprived of the purest of her pleasures, and Greece of the most certain of her revenues.”44 The demand from Britain was also promoted by greater access to the currant trade in the Peloponnese in the nineteenth century. During this time, Patras rose in importance to become the main port of the Peloponnese and one of the three main ports in the Kingdom of Greece alongside Piraeus and Hermoupolis. In the eighteenth century, Patras was an important regional port that served as a “bulking” or collecting center for the Gulf of Corinth and Elis. Smaller ports such as Vostizza and Lepanto sent their cargoes to Patras to be collected before being sent on to European ports to the West.

The other major ports on the Peloponnese—Navarino, Methoni, Coroni, and Nafplion—shared the rest of the peninsula’s trade. The French Revolution was a turning point for Patras, when the French lost their control over trade in the eastern Mediterranean. For the duration of the French Revolutionary period , Greek merchants dominated trade in the eastern Mediterranean more than any other group. As a result, the French ports such as Coroni declined. Moreover, with the implementation of the Continental System, the British turned to the Eastern Mediterranean for sources of commodities and for markets for their manufactured goods. Consequently, Patras enjoyed a greater relative share of the peninsula’s trade and increasing trade with Britain. During the French Revolutionary period,Patras handled 30% of all Peloponnesian exports to Western Europe, and the rest was divided among the peninsula’s other ports.46 After the Napoleonic Wars, the English displaced the French in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Italian ports declined, but Patras continued to grow through closer connection to British ports in the Ionian Islands and Malta. From 1815 to 1820, Patras’s relative share of the peninsula’s trade with the West suddenly doubled from 30% to 60%. Due to the disruptions caused by the French Revolution, Patras emerged as the dominant Peloponnesian port for trade with Western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.During the Greek War of Independence, Patras was completely destroyed, the population left, and the land was not cultivated. The war was a violent break with the past, but Patras and its vineyards were able to recover quickly. The destruction left Patras as a tabula rasa. Under the influence of British demand for currants,hydroponic nft gully the city was remade into a port-city with its orientation shifted to the sea. Before the war, the center of  Patras was perched on a hillside, and the city was oriented inward toward its hinterland. After the war was over, the old town on the hillside was rebuilt, but a new city was also built on the coast beside the old city on land that was previously occupied by vineyards .The engineer Stamati Voulgaris who planned the reconstruction of the city moved the demographic and economic center of the city from the hills to the sea and made plans for a new port. Patras after the Greek Revolution was therefore a new city with a “double” landscape: the sea and the plains on the one hand, and the hills on the other.The newly rebuilt Patras sent most of its exports to Britain and its territories in the eastern Mediterranean. Patras continued to ship to the Italian ports, but the percentage of total exports from Patras that were bound for London, the Ionian Islands, and Malta reached 73%.Patras also began receiving imports directly from European ports. Before the revolution, Patras received European commodities after they had stopped first in a larger Ottoman port such as Smyrna.

As a part of the newly independent Kingdom of Greece, Patras received cargoes of textiles sent from British ports in the Ionian Islands and Malta. Patras also imported other manufactured goods and food commodities such as sugar, coffee, and pepper.51 By the 1830s, therefore, the currant trade and Greek trade with Britain were both concentrated in the port of Patras. The technological innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution lowered the speed and costs of transit, promoting the continuing integration of Greek agricultural production with Western markets. Most significantly, improved steam ship transport in the second half of the nineteenth century meant that Patras no longer needed to trade with Britain through the ports in its Mediterranean colonies but could trade directly with British ports. By the middle of the century, merchants had opened steam ship lines to carry currants directly from Patras to London, Liverpool, Falmouth, Newcastle, and Southampton, and Patras also began importing directly from British ports. Patras continued to trade with Malta and the Ionian Islands, but now there was a direct connection as well.Steam ship transport also deepened the currant growing region’s connections to North America. The United States had begun importing Greek currants as early as 1835 due to the efforts of the Chian merchants Andreas and Pantellis Phakiris and their merchant house based in Patras.London had a near monopoly on shipping currants to the US and Canada at first, but by the end of the nineteenth century, steam ships were leaving Patras bound directly for North American ports.54 In fact, currants were the sole reason for trade between Greece and the US. Until the very end of the nineteenth century, currants made up 90– 100% of Greek exports to the US.A technical innovation in the practice of currant cultivation in the Peloponnese may have also played a role in the spread of currant cultivation further to the west and the south in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was a technique called “girdling” or “ring-cutting” . Ring-cutting involved removing a thin strip of bark in a ring around the base of the vine, about 2–3 cm. wide. Ring-cutting was done in mid-May at the appearance of the first growth on the currant vines. Ring-cutting was strenuous work performed by skilled laborers called harakotes. If done right, ring-cutting caused the fruit to grow larger, but there was plenty of room for error, and the stakes were high. If the faltseta, or pruning knife, cut too deep, the vine would die, but if it did not cut deep enough, the cut would be ineffective. The harakotis also had to determine the appropriate width of the cut based on the quality of the soil and the age and strength of the vine. Weaker vines and less fertile soil required a narrower cut, and hardier vines and more fertile soil required a wider cut. Moreover, the task had to be completed within ten days, “as otherwise the ripening of grapes would not be uniform and problems would arise at harvest-time.”Because it was physically taxing, time consuming, and required special skill, ring-cutting was highly paid work.Ring-cutting was introduced in the Peloponnese in 1848 when the technique was first applied by workers who came to the peninsula from Zakynthos.