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

Ionian Islands, particularly Maitland and Seaton, and how their experiences in other
areas of the empire shaped their attitudes to colonial governance.
Hall’s Civilising Subjects has also been a guide through this work. The book
brings colony and periphery into a single analytical frame. It links Jamaica and
England in the first half of the nineteenth century and analyses the construction of
Englishness as a product of racialised imaginings, setting civilisation against
barbarism, whiteness against blackness. Civilising Subjects shows identities were not
fixed but constantly constructed and deconstructed. It explores the ways black
Jamaicans, in the period after emancipation, were increasingly defined as in need of
civilisation before they could become full subjects of the British Empire and hope
for political rights. The book helped frame the considerations concerning British
views of Ionian people’s fitness for responsible government discussed in this work. 60
Constructions of character and race: Britons and Ionians
The wider aim in this thesis has been to explore British representations of the
Ionians and what forms of rule were fit for them. But first there must be an
examination of how the British viewed and used the idea of character in order to
justify colonisation and rule over other lands and peoples. Stefan Collini has argued
key considerations in British character formation were linked to Enlightenment ideas
of moral virtue, reason, independence, and hard work. These factors provided the
main explanatory framework of civilisation at home and abroad. 61 Political theorists
60 Hall C., Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, (Chicago, 2002).
61 Collini S., Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850-1930, (Oxford,
2000).
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