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

dependencies were governed directly by the Crown. Bernard Porter’s description of
systems of colonial rule century reveals:
There was no single language covering the whole empire, no one
religion, no one code of laws. In their forms of government the
disparities between colonies were immense: between the Gold Coast
of Africa, for example ruled despotically by foreign officials and
Canada with self-government in everything except her foreign
policy…in between Nigeria was ruled by a commercial company, the
states of Australia by their own prime minister, Sierra Leone by a
governor, Sarawak by a hereditary English rajah…. Ascension Island
by a captain as if it were a ship…. there was no kind of overall
logic… 49
Catherine Hall notes, however, that
the variety of forms of rule was underpinned by a logic of rule -
colonial governmentality, what Partha Chatterjee calls ‘the rule of
colonial difference’. This distinguished the colonizers from the
colonized and was predicated on the power of the metropole over its
subject peoples. 50
This logic of colonial governmentality was complex and contradictory processes
were apparent in British rule, as occurred in the Ionian Islands. The confusion of
where the Ionian Islands fit within the British Empire never disappeared from British
official thinking between 1815-1864. While the Ionian Islands were officially a
British protectorate, they were treated as a British colony but without any of the
political and economic benefits official British colonies enjoyed.
Helen Manning’s British Colonial Government after the American Revolution,
1782-1820 describes the machinery of government in Britain and the colonies and
49 Porter B., The Lion’s Share, A Short History of British Imperialism 1850-1995, (London, 1996), pp.
1-2.
50 Hall C., (ed.), Cultures of Empire, p. 7.
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