Modernity, Money, Morality and Malthus: International Settlement and the 1923 Greek Refugee Crisis

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus witnessed an international revival culminating in cosmopolitan efforts to coordinate experts from around the world to investigate the problems of and solutions to overpopulation. In this thesis, I point to the 1923 Greco-Turkish population exchange and subsequent settlement as one solution to dealing with a sudden growth in population, brought on by a fast influx of refugees into Greece following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922. This moment and the compulsory exchange of populations has been traditionally cited by scholars as a moment marking the breakdown of minority protections and the advent of the 20th century ethnonationalist nation-state. I examine the exchange for the first time through a Malthusian lens, walking through the negotiations for exchange, the procurement and distribution of a loan and the scientific means of settlement which proceeded. In doing so, I demonstrate that concerns of planners and actors considering land, population, food, agriculture, productivity, profit, and morality formed a sort of Malthusian nexus which reflected the Malthusian moment of the interwar period in which the exchange and settlement occurred.