Many histories of Ancient Greece center their stories on Athens, but what would that history look like if they didn’t? There is another way to tell this story, one that situates Greek history in terms of the relationships between smaller Greek cities and in contact with the wider Mediterranean. In this book, author Joshua P. Nudell offers a new history of the period from the Persian wars to wars that followed the death of Alexander the Great, from the perspective of Ionia. While recent scholarship has increasingly treated Greece through the lenses of regional, polis, and local interaction, there has not yet been a dedicated study of Classical Ionia. This book fills this clear gap in the literature while offering Ionia as a prism through which to better understand Classical Greece.

This book offers a clear and accessible narrative of the period between the Persian Wars and the wars of the early Hellenistic period, two nominal liberations of the region. The volume complements existing histories of Classical Greece. Close inspection reveals that the Ionians were active partners in the imperial endeavor, even as imperial competition constrained local decision-making and exacerbated local and regional tensions. At the same time, the book offers interventions on critical issues related to Ionia such as the Athenian conquest of Samos, rhetoric about the freedom of the Greeks, the relationship between Ionian temple construction and economic activity, the status of the Panionion, Ionian poleis and their relationship with local communities beyond the circle of the dodecapolis, and the importance of historical memory to our understanding of ancient Greece. The result is a picture of an Aegean world that is more complex and less beholden narratives that give primacy to the imperial actors at the expense of local developments.

The city has had a rich and tumultuous history, evolving from a powerful political entity in ancient times to its modern role as a local hub of tourism and commerce. Sovereign City examines the nature of the city's ever-changing status, as Geoffrey Parker investigates the city-state as a geopolitical form and explores its distinctive niche within different types of states. This probing work analyzes the various forms of city-states throughout world history, from the Greek polis, which Plato and Aristotle considered the perfect type of state, to the Roman imperial capital, to the political role of the city in early Islamic society. Parker also considers the revival of the European city-state in late medieval and Renaissance Italy and northern Europe, which culminated in the Hanseatic League, and how the rise of the nation-state contributed to the decline of the city-state.

Sovereign City is a wide-ranging and vigorous examination that seeks to understand the role of the city-state from the birth of Western civilization through its re-emergence at the dawn of the twenty-first century in the Far East and Islamic world.