Events Calendar – British School at Athens

BIRI Ottoman Mobilities online lecture series

Dr. Georgios Giannakopoulos (City St. George’s, University of London)

Abstract: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars, writers and political advocates moved between Britain and the Ottoman world, carrying with them ideas about nationality, liberty, empire and political reform. Drawing principally on The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870–1930 (Manchester University Press, 2025) this lecture follows figures who travelled through, studied and wrote about places including Crete, Macedonia, Bosnia and Armenia.

Their journeys connected local conflicts to British universities, newspapers, political associations and centres of government, helping to turn struggles within the Ottoman world into international questions. Yet the knowledge they produced was never simply descriptive: it identified political communities, assigned responsibility and informed arguments for autonomy, supervision or intervention. The lecture concludes by placing these scholars alongside British consuls, whose mobile careers and local relationships produced another form of knowledge in motion.

Through reports and recommendations sent to London, consuls transformed local encounters into official knowledge. The two groups reveal how public interpretation and diplomatic reporting shaped British understandings of the Ottoman world.

Bio: Dr. Georgios Giannakopoulos is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Modern History and Associate Dean at the School of Policy and Global Affairs, City St. George’s University of London. He is the author of The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe 1870-1930 (Manchester University Press, 2025) and co-editor of The War for Anatolia: Greece, Turkey and the Remaking of International Order (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is currently leading the British Academy funded project The World Consuls Made: British Diplomacy in 19th century Greece.

Online lecture

To attend online via webinar, register here