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

etween the governors and the Colonial Office, texts which have been central to the
thesis.
Imperial historiography of the 1970s, such as John Manning Ward’s Colonial
Self-Government, The British Experience 1759-1856, John Cell’s British Colonial
Administration, and Peter Burroughs “Imperial Institutions and the Government of
Empire” have been standard works in British colonial administration and were
extremely helpful for an overall understanding of the evolution and establishment of
white settler colonies’ constitutions, and the implications and justifications of
imperial rule in general. 56 More recently, Mark Francis’s Governors and Settlers:
Images of Authority in the British Colonies, 1820-60 examines the rationale and
ritual structures of colonial authorities, the role of governors and political elites, their
place within the colonial communities and the changing patterns of authority. 57 It
studies the political culture of British settler colonies and demonstrates how British
governors and officials, along with politically active settlers, managed to “turn their
new societies into intellectual laboratories in which every item of conventional
constitutional belief, party doctrine, and social custom was challenged and
modified”. 58 As this thesis questions British debates about appropriate forms of
colonial rule for the Ionian people, the case studies in Francis’s book were helpful in
offering more plausible accounts of governors’ intentions and behaviour, challenging
56 Ward J. M., Colonial Self-Government, The British Experience 1759-1856, (London, 1976);
Burroughs P., “Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire”, in The Oxford History of the
British Empire, the Nineteenth Century, Porter A. (ed.), (Oxford, 1999), pp. 170-197.
57 Francis M., Governors and Settlers.
58 Ibid., p. 1.
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