Abstact This article aims to provide a brief overview of the institutional emergence and development of environmental history in Greece, starting from its humble beginnings during the latter part of the 2000s to the rapid flourishing of the field in the late 2010s. After a brief discussion of the emergence of environmental history internationally, it highlights how environmental history evolved from an extracurricular research interest of a few scholars into a discipline that is being fostered by many institutions and has already appeared in several university curricula. Additionally, the article provides a coherent list of works by Greek scholars that have contributed to the development of environmental history in Greece. The last part of the article acts as a prologue to this special section, summarising the main idea behind each article and the elements that make them fit together, underlining the reason why it focuses on the concept of conflict and its environmental repercussions. Open access: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historicalReview/article/view/35051

Abstract This article examines the conflict over forest use in modern Greece. While the main protagonists were foresters, who prioritised the importance of forests in providing timber, and those involved in animal husbandry, who needed the forests as grazing grounds, a number of other societal and political actors also engaged in this century-long struggle, which culminated in the 1937 decision to remove goats from Greek forests. It shows how the Greek foresters succeeded in framing the goat and goat rearing as the symbol of the country’s deforestation but also underdevelopment, both in economic and in cultural terms. Also, from the 1920s onwards, the large goat herds stood in the way of the development of the Greek agricultural sector: the extensive and free-roaming animal husbandry was viewed as an opponent of the state-sponsored and -endorsed settled farmer, who would help Greece in securing the desperately sought σιτάρκεια (grain sufficiency). Once Ioannis Metaxas seized power and established his authoritarian 4 August regime, which placed special emphasis on the agricultural development of the country, the fate of the goat was sealed: the “horned Satan” had to die, not just for the sake of the forests but, according to Metaxas himself, for the very survival of the Greek people. Open access: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historicalReview/article/view/35055

Abstract When Konstantinos Ktenas and Georgios Georgalas, the two most prominent interwar Greek geologists, began their respective careers around 1910, they were already enmeshed in a tense occupational and scientific conflict. The following decade, fraught with war and political upheaval, acted as a powerful “context of motivation” for their research and occupational strategies. The result was a host of scientific and institutional endeavours such as the founding of a Greek Geological Survey, the first attempts to assess the Greek lignite deposits, and involvement in consecutive oil exploration attempts that took place in Epirus between 1920 and 1937. As it turns out, the confrontational relation between the two geologists was actually productive. It signalled the emergence of a Greek geological community. It institutionalised the relations between this geological community and the Greek state. Most importantly, it produced a fusion of geological knowledge, tacit political calculation and obscure rhetoric that still remains in use to define the “reality” of the “Greek oil deposits”. Open access: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historicalReview/article/view/35056

Abstract This article forms a part of a research project on agricultural wealth and farming income in the southern Peloponnese, as attested by a series of land surveys undertaken at the end of the Greek Revolution in territories controlled by the administration of Greek Governor Ioannis Kapodistrias in 1830. The article argues that the 1830 land survey forms an important primary source, unparalleled for nineteenth-century Greece, that so far has not been exploited by historians. Drawing evidence from a sample consisting of a number of rural communities in the provinces of Agios Petros (modern North Kynouria) and Arkadiá (modern Trifyllia), the article discusses wealth and income inequality in early nineteenth-century rural Greece, challenging the prevailing view of an egalitarian society with little discernible social differences. Open access: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historicalReview/article/view/40069/29706