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

civilisation. Hence they dualised and hierchialised “others” while also defining
themselves and Britishness. The travel writers used common techniques to categorise
and define what it meant to be Ionian. Ansted and Kirkwall portrayed Ionians as
“children”, a standard colonial trope distancing the colonised from the adult
British. 128 Maclellan and Kendrick did not present them as individuals like ordinary
Englishmen but focused on separate body parts, such as overlarge noses and heads. 129
Travellers also referred to their abhorrent smell and filthiness (also used to describe
the British rural poor and Irish). 130 Ionians of all classes were corrupt and immoral,
unfit to govern themselves.
Most travellers felt the solution to the Ionian problem was the maintenance and
exercise of authoritarian colonial power in the Septinsula. Ansted criticised High
Commissioners who granted liberties to Ionians. 131 He treated Ionian demands for
responsible government with irony and sarcasm, believing despotic rule was most
appropriate for them. 132 Kirkwall held similar views, writing “constitutions must be
fitted to those who are intended for, and are not, as some Englishmen appear to
imagine, like the ready made garments of certain Hebrews warranted to fit
anybody”. 133 He further asserted that “constitutional ideas as cherished by English
men are simply absurd when applied to modern Greeks in their present state of
incomplete civilisation… [the] best form of government for them, for at least fifty
128 For example see Ansted D.T., The Ionian Islands in the year 1863, p. 451.
129 Maclellan F., Sketches of Corfu, pp. 208, 451; Kendrick T.C., The Ionian Islands, p. 16.
130 Ansted D.T., The Ionian Islands in the year 1863, p. 208. Also see Mills S., Discourses of
Difference, p. 90.
131 Ansted D.T., The Ionian Islands in the year 1863, pp. 462-64.
132 Ibid., p. 451.
133 Kirkwall V., Four Years in the Ionian, p 259.
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