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

Conclusion
During their years as a protectorate, there was a constant uncertainty about the
status of the Islands and how they fitted into the Empire. Under the terms of the
Treaty of 1815, the Islands were to be a free and independent state under British
protection. But they were a Protectorate, established as a consequence of the
complex military and diplomatic situation in post-Napoleonic Europe to help
stabilise the continent. For the British, the Islands were important for the Empire as
part of a comprehensive colonial Mediterranean policy with Malta and Gibraltar and
because they ensured a safe passage to India. Despite British attempts to impose a
form of colonial rule, they were never a colony nor were they granted the economic
and commercial privileges other colonies enjoyed. This ambiguity of the place of the
Islands within the Empire provided the key to the many failed attempts to rule.
This ambiguity connected with the history of the Islands, which were real links
to an imagined and literary classical past. Some governors came to the Islands with
their Homeric texts and romanticised views of the people and geography. Yet the
Islands had also been, for over four hundred years, a colony of another European
power, Venice, and later the French, Russian-Turkish allies, and British, all of whom
introduced aspects of their own laws, forms of government, language and culture to
the Islands. The Islands’ themselves had strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties
to Greece, yet many inhabitants were not Greeks. As a result, the Islands were indeed
hybrid: a mixture of numerous influences and contradictions.
355