o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

Sakis Gekas ∗
COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY IN THE IONIAN ISLANDS
UNDER BRITISH RULE
“You English should either govern us or go away” 1 .
“According to his oracle in Printing-House Square, [The Times] grasps after colonies
only in order to educate them in the principles of public liberty; but, if we
adhere to facts, the Ionian Islands, like India and Ireland, prove only that to be
free at home, John Bull must enslave abroad. Thus, at this very moment, while
giving vent to his virtuous indignation against Bonaparte’s spy system at Paris, he
is himself introducing it at Dublin” 2 .
Introduction
T
he two extracts above provide two opposing but complementary views on
the governance of the Ionian Islands at the end of the period of British
rule. The first comment, voiced by a radical unionist politician of Kefalonia, reveals
the frustration with British lack of effective governance. The second, much
more famous commentator, locates whatever liberalism there was in Britain required
the colonial ‘enslavement’ of territories as disparate and different as the
Ionian Islands and India. This paper begins to assess the form, extent and impact
of British governance in the Ionian Islands. During the first decades of the nineteenth
century the Ionian Islands became an integral part of the British colonial
system and the Mediterranean imperial network of naval bases and commercial
stations. This reorientation of British imperial power followed victory in the Napoleonic
wars and laid the foundations of the Pax Britannica of the second half of
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The period until the Congress of
Berlin in 1878 was one of transition for the British Empire. A central tenet in this
transition was the shift to the Ottoman Empire, South Asia and China. Malta, the
Ionian Islands (until 1864), Cyprus and especially Egypt in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century were central in the establishment of British imperial political
and economic power in the Eastern Mediterranean and a key to eastward expan-
∗ agekas@yorku.ca. I would like to thank the editors of the volume and especially the
anonymous editor of the article for their very useful comments, corrections and suggestions.
1 Quoted in Viscount Kirkwall, Four Years in the Ionian Islands, Vol. 2. Their political and social
condition with a history of the British Protectorate, Kessinger Legacy Reprints [1864], p. 144.
2 Karl Marx in New York Daily Tribune, 6 January 1859.
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