The old rules of land use had changed to the benefit of some and the detriment of others. Less affluent Greek villagers were forced to assume a greater risk of subsistence failure so that wealthier Greeks might profit, and many people were compelled to resist such changes. Suddenly, in the early 1890s, foreign demand for Mediterranean agricultural products evaporated, and the gains of export agriculture in Greece were swiftly reversed. The ensuing economic crisis sent the Greek government into bankruptcy. Free-standing companies formed to undertake land reclamation projects were also bankrupted, and their backers in Paris, London, Athens, and elsewhere saw their investments disappear. Small farmers in the Peloponnese who had gone into debt to plant their plots with currant vineyards could no longer sell their produce, and they could not command the resources needed for their own families’ subsistence. Indebted, impoverished, and unable to find work, many of them abandoned their land, often emigrating in search of new opportunities. At the close of the nineteenth century, after much effort and at great expense, the landscape, agricultural system, and settlement patterns of rural Greece had been reformed to better satisfy foreign demand for Mediterranean agricultural commodities—a demand that no longer existed. The consequences of this period were felt in Greece for decades. This dissertation comprises two parts,stacking pots each built around a regional case study of foreign demand for Greek agricultural products creating homogenous zones of monocultural specialization out of diverse and fragmented landscapes. Part one focuses on the first case study region: the coastal, currant-growing areas of southern Greece.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, growing foreign demand for Greek currants made them into a global commodity. Because of this, in the parts of Greece that could grow currants, agricultural practice shifted from diversified agriculture and transhumant pastoralism to the much risker pattern of permanent lowland settlement and year-round currant monoculture. The currant-growing region expanded as currant vineyards extended from traditional zones of specialization to encompass the north and west coasts of the Peloponnese, the south coast of Aetolia-Acarnania, and the Ionian islands of Zakinthos, Kefalonia, and Ithaki, with the attendant alterations made to the Greek landscape in these places. Chapter three describes how and why Greek currants became such a highly demanded global commodity in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chapter four examines the consequent transformation in the Peloponnesian Greeks’ relationship with their environment as currant vineyards extended throughout the region and seasonal migration gave way to permanent lowland settlement. The physical landscape was also transformed as lowland wetlands were drained and hills were terraced to make the region better suited to intensive, specialized currant viticulture. The second part of this dissertation centers on the second case study region, Boeotia, in Central Greece. At the time that currants were taking off in the Peloponnese, different Greek products became profitable commodities in other parts of the country. In Boeotia, the most important crops were cotton and grains. Chapter five examines how demand for these Greek products created the imperative to drain a large lake in Boeotia and turn it into an irrigated estate for the intensive cultivation of cash crops. First, it describes the larger context within which these Greek goods became global commodities. Then, it describes the project to drain this lake to produce arable land for agriculture. Finally, chapter six describes how, after the physical landscape of Kopaïda had been transformed to suit these new imperatives, the region still had to be transformed socially and politically.

I conclude by examining the effects this period had on the long-term trajectory of development in Greece. The path of progress in rural Greece was neither straight nor smooth. As a result of landscape abandonment, rural depopulation, and the elimination of resources, the Greek rural economy remained impaired well into the twentieth century. Linear narratives of development in the Mediterranean have neglected the ways that the countryside of Greece was at its productive apex in the late nineteenth century, and they have also neglected the ways this early period of economic modernization stymied growth in the first half of the twentieth century. Before exploring these case study regions, the next chapter situates the present study within the historical literature on Modern Greece and the Mediterranean and elaborates on the methodological considerations underpinning this dissertation. Research in several disciplines has uncovered the effects of the incorporation of Mediterranean agricultural production into a global, capitalist system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The preponderance of research on this topic has come from an economic perspective. Economists and economic historians have demonstrated the ways development in Greece and the greater Mediterranean region during this time was tied to export agriculture, and they have also demonstrated the ways the globalization of Mediterranean agricultural production caused these countries to develop in a subordinate or “peripheral” position.1 Social and economic historical scholarship has also focused on the wide-ranging effects of the nineteenth century boom in Mediterranean commercial agriculture on the political organization of this region and the formation of classes and cultural identities.2 Despite compelling research on the long-term social and economic consequences of this period, the environmental transformations made in Mediterranean Europe in the nineteenth century to sustain intensive commercial agriculture are not well understood. The effects of global capitalism on the landscape and environment of the Mediterranean have been widely noted, but this area of inquiry has received less scholarly focus.

Recent scholarship on the Anthropocene and the so-called Capitalocene has brought these questions to the forefront. The spread of global capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had significant and often permanent environmental effects in developing countries worldwide, including air and water pollution, deforestation, resource depletion, severe erosion, and an overall decline in biodiversity due to the destruction of ecosystems. With respect to the Mediterranean in general and Greece in particular, many questions remain about the environmental changes brought by global capitalism, including the regional variations exhibited, the mechanisms of landscape transformation, and the long-term social and economy consequences. Despite this gap, there is a great potential for such an environmental history of Modern Greece building on more well-developed fields. In this chapter, I situate the present study within the existing scholarship on the social and economic history of the Eastern Mediterranean in the nineteenth century, agriculture and historical ecology in the Mediterranean, and the global environmental history of capitalism. First, I review the literature on the incorporation of the Mediterranean into the emerging global, capitalist economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries— this was the catalyst for the social and environmental transformations examined in the chapters that follow. In the second section, I argue that the scholarship on the historical ecology of the Mediterranean and “traditional” Mediterranean agriculture can help to contextualize the environmental changes seen in Greece in the nineteenth century. Finally, I situate this study within European, Mediterranean, and global environmental history. Here, I place the historical, anthropological,strawberry gutter system andarchaeological studies that have been done on Greece into a broader context and put them into conversation with the environmental historical literature on Italy, Egypt, Germany, and other places where the sub-field has enjoyed greater success. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, labor and commodity markets in Southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean were more thoroughly integrated into a global economic system. The terminology commonly used to describe this process comes from World Systems Analysis. Immanuel Wallerstein developed the World Systems model to explain how capitalism functions on a global scale and how, because of market integration, some regions became rich and powerful while others seemed stuck in a trap of relative under-development. In Wallerstein’s model, the modern world-system—i.e. the capitalist world-economy—emerged in Northwestern Europe in the fifteenth century and slowly expanded by incorporating new labor and commodity markets. The expansion of the world economy divided the globe into three distinct zones that Wallerstein, borrowing from Dependency Theory and Andre Gunder Frank, termed the core, the periphery, and the semi-periphery. These categories reflect the distribution of wealth and functions within the system. The core regions imported raw materials from the periphery, manufactured them into finished products if necessary, and exported the surplus back to the peripheral territories for purchase and consumption. The core, therefore, possessed capital and the means of production, and the periphery supplied cheap, labor-intensive commodities.3Before this system emerged, the predominant world-system was the world empire. Unlike the modern world-system, which was singular, many world empires could coexist at once. Each world empire unified a single division of labor under a single state structure. Their economic integration was limited to the exchange of luxury goods. Strong world empires were capable of controlling production within their own domains, channeling revenue from production toward the center through taxation and controlling the distribution of wealth to keep the ruling class dominant. Weak world empires, meanwhile, were dismantled and incorporated into rival world empires. In contrast, the modern world-system unified a single division of labor within multiple state structures, and economic integration of states in this world-system went well beyond the exchange of luxury goods. The division of labor was no longer directed toward the maintenance of elite power within the state structure, as in a world empire. Instead, it followed a capitalist rationality and was directed toward the endless accumulation of capital in the world center.

World Systems Analysis has been one of the dominant paradigms for studying market integration in Southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean in the modern era. Inspired by this model, scholars since the 1970s have studied the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans into the European economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using Wallerstein’s vocabulary, they initially termed this process “peripheralization.” Trade took place in a few major Eastern Mediterranean port-cities—Salonika, Smyrna, Patras, Beirut, and others—and these cities’ Jewish, Greek, Maronite, and Armenian populations acted as intermediaries between Ottoman commodity-producers and European merchants.5 These minority merchants began shipping Ottoman agricultural products, including staples, to Europe. Through this process of commodification, the Porte lost its power to control agricultural production within the empire, and as a result, agricultural production shifted to meet European market demands. In the Balkans, large estates called çiftliks were amalgamated to produce agricultural products to be exchanged with Europe.6 As the Ottomans ceased to be able to control the agricultural production within their own realms, the empire ceased to be a self-contained world-empire, and the agricultural production within the empire ceased to be an engine of the reproduction of imperial authority. Through tax farming and the rise of contraband trade with Europe, Ottoman agriculture became commercial, and the Ottoman labor market was integrated into the world labor market.7 In addition to studying the process by which regions were incorporated into the European economy as a periphery, scholars have also been interested in the social and political consequences of peripheralization, particularly through the formation of national and class identities. For example, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire into nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is understood as an effect of market integration. The economic and intellectual ties ethnic minority merchants in the Ottoman Empire developed with the West facilitated the political transformation of the region. The creation of a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and their conversations with the West helped to unravel the Ottoman Empire and reorganize the region politically into nation-states.As such, these cities are also considered sites of class formation. European economic penetration created commercial bourgeoisies that benefited from European capital as well as working class populations that resisted it, forming their class identities through labor organization and strikes.The world-systems model has been criticized for its adoption of a Eurocentric narrative that maintains that there was a single, modern European world-system into which the rest of the world was incorporated, overlooking the systems and networks that existed in these places before the moment of their incorporation.When applied to the Mediterranean, the model’s focus on “high commerce” may be said to “minimalize” the pre-modern economy—by neglecting the regional connectivity that existed well before the eighteenth century, the model does not take into account the dense trade in staples as well as luxury goods that occurred through the movement of small cargoes and was present since antiquity.Others have argued that World Systems Theory exaggerates the role of international influences as an explanation for Balkan economic under-development, and that Balkan “dependency” on Europe is too steep a claim.