Currency as an Imprint of the Nation-State: Monetary Conditions in the Ottoman Empire at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century and the Transition from Ottoman Currencies to the Phoenix of the Hellenic State (1828)

Abstract: The economic decline of the Ottoman Empire was fundamental in various ways to the outbreak and progress of the Greek Revolution. The first attempts to create a national currency during the Greek Revolution reflect efforts to craft a modern state, and the eventual introduction of the phoenix by the first governor of the Hellenic State, Ioannis Capodistrias, underscores the shift to a newborn nation-state. The contradictions of Capodistrias’s monetary policy, however, reflected social antagonisms within Greece.