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

“missionaries, educators, and doctors could carry out experiments in social
engineering without confronting popular resistances and bourgeois rigidities”. 41
Others point to the “cultural domination, racial exclusivity and violence” and the
patterns of “domination and subordination which are always inscribed in the
relations between coloniser and colonized”. 42 Historians have also recognised the
“planned epistemic violence of the imperialist project was also backed up by the
planned institutional violence of armies and law courts, prisons and state
machinery”. 43 The above historiography, using the analytical approaches of post-
colonialist, post-structuralist, feminist and critical race theory, all focussed on
deconstructing, decentring and making connections, exploring the ambiguities and
complex relations of power among and between rulers and have been useful for
thinking about the ways the British constructed colonial relations with the Ionian
people. Neither the British nation nor the Ionian Islands were fixed entities. Rather
this work explores the shifting discourses of the colonisers on these categories.
Benedict Anderson’s work on the construction of nations, the ways in which
national belongings were forged as people imagined themselves into communities
through shared languages or forms of religious belonging, has also been critical to
considerations in this thesis. 44 In Britons: Forging the nation 1707-1837, Linda
Colley built on some of Anderson’s insight and explored the making of British
41 Ibid., pp. 5,15.
42 Ibid., pp. 16-17; Hall C., “Histories, Empires, and the Post-colonial moment” in Chambers and
Curti (eds.), The Post-Colonial Question; Common Skies, Divided Horizons, (London, 1996), p. 69.
43 McClintock A., Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (London,
1995), p. 16.
44 Anderson B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
(London, 1983).
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