After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, most Byzantine intellectuals, the bearers of Hellenic-Christian culture, emigrated to the West, mainly to Italy.
Others stayed and became high-ranking state administrators and translators for the new rulers; they formed a distinct social group, the Phanariots. Greece became a Christian province of the Ottoman Empire and was excluded during the next 400 years from the technological and scientific breakthroughs of the early modern period.
The Greek language was preserved through the reading and teaching of texts of the Eastern Christian Fathers of the Church dating from the third century ad. These texts called for a humble Christian life, a life of sharing surpluses in a closed community, of no luxury and of no taking-up of interest. Life generally ought to be non-materialistic, a stage of acquisition of properties by humans who qualified for paradise. This teaching was microeconomic as it applied to individual behaviour, but was also in tune with the macroeconomic maxims of Ottoman economic thought: provisionism, fiscalism and traditionalism (Psalidopoulos and Theocarakis, 2011).According to this approach, the functions of government were the uninterrupted supply of goods to the internal market, particularly the urban population, the maximisation of treasury income in order to finance the state bureaucracy and the military, and a tendency to preserve existing conditions in economy and society. By the late seventeenth century these ideas and policies were in crisis. Extensive accumulation through the addition of new territories was no longer possible, and the extraction of an agricultural surplus made taxation harsh and arbitrary and the whole political and economic administration tyrannical. A fiscal crisis and the rise of nationalism in occupied regions led to the gradual decline of the empire. Mercantilist theories concerning the value of money, a favourable balance of trade and policies aimed at the strengthening of the state were, curiously, not transmitted or not fully understood among state administrators and officials of the late Ottoman Empire; the main belief among the peoples in the Balkans was that the state was entitled to intervene in the economy and shape society.
Commerce thrived in the eighteenth century with the ‘Balkan Orthodox merchant' conquering new markets and obtaining profits, and balancing between state and church authority.
Shipping also flourished. It was out of these merchant classes and ship-owners that sympathy for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution grew, and with them ideas associated with economic freedom and individual rights. Private property and individual freedom were regarded by them as the only way to welfare and to higher stages of civilisation.On the eve of and immediately after the Greek Revolution encyclopaedias were published, and translations of books by Jean-Baptiste Say and Joseph Droz were widely read in Greece. The Greek Orthodox Church's hostility towards some of the Enlightenment teachings was a revisionist force that led to their retreat in the early 1830s (Henderson, 1970). However, the presence of Benthamites from Britain (Rosen, 1992), economistes from France (Vacalopoulos, 1977) and Bavarian administrators in Greece acted to disseminate in the country a liberal amalgam of thinking and policy-making that became dominant in the decades thereafter. The overthrow of the Ottomans and the creation of an independent Greece in 1830 did not bring about the immediate entry of the Greek state into modernity, as traditional, pre-modern patterns of government were abandoned only gradually, over several decades (Kostis, 2002).
In retrospect and by using as a criterion the institutionalisation of economics as a discipline, one can distinguish three distinct periods in the evolution of economic thought in Greece: a) from independence in 1830 to 1920; b) from 1920 to 1974; and c) from 1974 to today.