Constructing Ionian identities: the Ionian Islands in British official ...

Having moved to the UK to pursue postgraduate studies, my MA in Women’s
and Gender History at the University of York gave me a broad understanding of
theoretical and methodological approaches associated with feminist, post-colonial
and post-structuralist approaches to historical research. My interests shifted towards
questions of ‘difference’ associated with ethnicity, culture and empire. I began to
think about Corfu in a colonial context and how the British articulated a particular
form of colonial subjectivity for the Ionian people. Who were the Ionians? How and
why did they emerge in British thinking as a distinctive people? How did British
discussions impact on the shaping of colonial rule in the Ionian Islands? What
significance, if any, did British discourses on the Ionian Islands have on British
foreign policy in Europe? What was “the rule of colonial difference,” the marking of
the distinction between coloniser and colonised? 5 These are the research questions
that have shaped my investigation in the Ionian Islands.
This thesis considers how Ionian people were imagined in British official
discourses. It describes and examines the language employed by British officials,
governors, parliamentarians, journalists and travellers, paying particular attention to
‘official’ definitions and representations of Ionian peoples. Using political sources,
my thesis explores the ways in which British officials constructed Ionian identity.
Their perspectives were never singular but rather multiple, sometimes contradictory,
sometimes complementary. Colonial power, however, was always central to the
definitions of difference.
5 Hall C., (ed.), Cultures of Empire: A Reader - Colonisers in Britain and the Empire of the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, (Manchester, 2000), p. 7.
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