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Abstract

This article reconstructs the British blockade of Greece in 1850 as an experiment in intervention short of war. Commonly remembered through the prism of the Pacifico Affair and Palmerstonian gunboat diplomacy, the blockade has been treated as an episodic display of British power rather than as a practice of international governance. Drawing on British, Greek, and French sources the article shifts attention from justification to implementation, tracing how naval coercion was organised, contested, and experienced across ports, ministries, and public arenas. It shows that the blockade operated as a disciplinary instrument directed at a formally sovereign European state, testing the limits of protection regimes, treaty obligations, and the law of nations. Far from suspending Greek agency, the crisis provoked intense domestic debate over sovereignty, dignity, and European belonging, while also exposing fractures among the Great Powers charged with guaranteeing Greek independence. The Greek case reveals how nineteenth-century international order was produced through everyday practices of coercion that blurred the boundaries between war and peace.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	Intervention, gunboat diplomacy, blockade, law of nations, Greece
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain D History General and Old World > DE The Mediterranean Region. The Greco-Roman World K Law > KZ Law of Nations
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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