Konstantina Zanou ends her monograph Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean 1800–1850: Stammering the Nation with the public fallout in 1855 between two friends, Niccolo Tommaseo, an influential advocate of the Italian Risorgimento and an exile on Corfu, and Andrea Mustoxidi, a prominent political figure on the island. The dispute took place in the context of Hellenization of the Ionian islands and the discrimination against Catholics during the agitation for union with the Greek state. For Zanou, this dispute is indicative of the closing of the fluid space of the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean.

Zanou's book, which has won several awards (The Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies, the Edmund Keely Book Prize of the Modern Greek Studies Association, the Mediterranean Seminar Best Book Prize), is a history of intellectuals and politicians from the Ionian islands off the western coast of Greece who found themselves at the center of the conflict between Napoleonic France, and the Russian, Habsburg, Ottoman, and British empires. Starting as Venetian possessions, these islands switched hands several times over the course of the Napoleonic wars, ending as a British protectorate until they were ceded to Greece in 1864. Their complex history allows Zanou to investigate novel concepts of the nation, patriotism, and liberalism. Zanou problematizes later readings in Greece and Italy, which saw some of her protagonists as nation builders and effectively breaks down the frequent juxtapositions seen in historiography of east vs. west, empire vs. the nation, religious conservatism vs. liberalism.

The book is framed around the lives of Ionian individuals that exhibit aspects of what Zanou calls transnational patriotism. Part I discusses three poets who later came to be seen as national poets for Italy (Ugo Foscolo) or Greece (Dionysios Solomos, Andreas Kalvos). Zanou shows the complex identities of these poets and how their ultimate representation ignored uncomfortable aspects of their lives. While scholars have recognized these complexities, Zanou does a masterful job of summarizing their convoluted literary and ideological paths as an introduction to her theme for those not versed in Greek and Italian historiography.

Part II brings Russia into the history of the region not only as a political force but also as a topos where people from the islands and the wider Orthodox world congregated, established networks, and developed alternative ideological constructs from those emanating from western Europe. Zanou argues against the still influential narrative of the “Neohellenic” Enlightenment. Her narrative centers on Ioannis Kapodistiras, the Ionian aristocrat who would serve the tsar as foreign minister and then become the first governor of Greece. Zanou effectively situates Kapodistrias within the post-Venetian world of the Napoleonic wars and the French and Russian occupations of the islands. These chapters also bring to focus marginalized figures like Spiridione Naranzi, Alexandre Stourdza, and Bishop Ignatius, highlighting their role in the formulation of early Greek nationalism. Zanou avoids the extremes of the historiographic representations of Kapodistiras, correctly situating him as a conservative liberal with all that entailed in post-Napoleonic Europe. She argues that Kapodistrias, Stourdza, and their associates experimented with diverse ideas of “imperial nationalism” and “transnational patriotism” framed by an Orthodox worldview until the Greek revolution alienated them from Russia's policies.

Part III examines the autobiographies of two lesser-known individuals from the Ionian diaspora, Mario Pieri and Andrea Papadopoulo Vretto. Here Zanou explores her concept of “in-between,” of individuals active “in the fringes of languages and cultures” (5). Zanou interestingly argues that Pieri, and many of the Greek diaspora, saw Greece through the lens of Italian philhellenism, much of it composed of exiles from earlier failed Italian and Spanish revolts, and that their national consciousness was thus forged through the notions of “absence, exile, and estrangement” (133).

The final section examines individuals that acted as “bridges,” especially Andrea Mustoxidi, whose trajectory went from Italian intellectual to Russian diplomat to Greek state minister, and finally to politician in the British held Ionian islands. Zanou also uses Mustoxidi to challenge the tendencies of Greek intellectual history to focus on those who wrote in Greek rather than those who felt Greek but wrote predominantly in other languages, in Mustoxidi's case Italian.

Zanou does not analyze every theme she touches upon in this book. For example, while Orthodoxy is discussed in relation to the intellectual developments of individuals like Kapodistrias, Zanou mentions but does not explore the conversion of Kalvos to Anglicanism, the disbanding of Orthodox churches in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and the discrimination of Catholics in the Ionian islands. Often the reader is unsure regarding the religious affiliation of some of the people discussed and whether their religious affiliation mattered, as in Kapodistrias's case.

Minor quibbles aside, the book is thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research in Greece, Italy, and France and is effective in what it sets out to do. Zanou convincingly argues that while nations and nation-states were being forged from a world of empires there were areas like the Ionian islands where complex hybrid forms of national affiliation could briefly exist, alerting us to the complex and fluid identities and trajectories of those seen as the architects of Greek and Italian nationalism. It is a masterful first monograph and opens interesting avenues for further research.