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

qualities of women and instilling these principles in children were important traits of
English national character in the first half of the nineteenth century and, along with
climate and geography, made participation in political institutions and self-
government possible. 73 Mandler, unlike historians influenced by postcolonial theory,
does not accept racial and biological theorising was central to the intellectual life of
the period, arguing race had less influence on British people’s behaviour towards
others than Enlightenment approaches to laws, institutions, religion. 74 Mandler noted
many “used ‘race’ to distinguish between people of colour and white European but
not between Europeans”. 75 However, this was not the case in the Ionian Islands,
where race and nationality played vital roles in the hierarchical relationship between
Britons and Ionians. Race, as many historians have argued, “was not a ‘fixed’,
‘stable’ and objective category and essential natural category” but had meanings
which “changed historically … during the heyday of the British Empire and its
aftermath, race in its many guises, ‘naturalises difference’ and re-inscribes the
always unstable distinction between coloniser and colonised”. 76 In the Ionian Islands
the British encountered a complex, sophisticated, white, Christian indigenous
culture. Therefore, the process of identity formation and cultural categorisation
differed from other parts of the Empire where skin colour provided an obvious
marker of difference and inferiority.
73 Ibid., p. 55-64.
74 Ibid., pp. 72-86.
75 Ibid., p. 85.
76 Hall C., and Rose S., (eds.), At Home with Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World,
(Cambridge, 2006) p. 7.
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