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COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY IN THE IONIAN ISLANDS
Novel economic institutions and forms of social and economic organization,
such as joint-stock companies, philanthropic and literary associations and societies,
formed part of the same liberal-inspired project as it unfolded in several colonies
and the British metropolis during the nineteenth century. This liberal project has
often been termed a feature of ‘colonial governmentality’ and India is commonly
the focus of a number of recent works 7 . Influenced by the ideas of Michel Foucault,
historians have studied, for example, the ways in which ideas about rationality
and science shaped Indian society and the Indian public sphere. For Foucault
governmentality signified a modern form of power that focused on ‘population’,
a new social and economic entity that emerged in Europe between the sixteenth
and the nineteenth centuries. The art of ruling transformed into a ‘scientific’
approach to government and aimed at the wealth and security of the ‘population’
which was ‘objectively’ quantifiable and therefore measurable through new
forms of knowledge such as political economy 8 ; to know was to control.
The British imperial project for the Ionian Islands is evident in the liberal spirit
that inspired ideas of social and economic organisation. These ideas were a product
of views imported from Britain and formulated by Ionian liberals and British colonial
officers. Infrastructure works, such as roads, bridges, lighthouses (the first built
in 1822 in Corfu) and administrative buildings were part of the developmental project
promoted by many colonial governors and have to be assessed when evaluating
the costs and benefits of the period of British rule. Indicators and variables can provide
some understanding of demographic and economic change; government documents,
newspapers and contemporary accounts provide narrative sources of historical
data. Whether strictly quantitative or flexibly qualitative, an evaluation of the living
standards of the Ionian population would have to take into account the fiscal
condition of the Ionian State. Just like with any government, it was the finances of
the Ionian government that determined its ability to carry out public works and
thus improve living conditions in the islands. Sources collected by the British authorities
entirely for colonial administration purposes, such as the Blue Books of
Statistics, as well as accounts of Ionians and British contemporaries, provide information
on the ability of the administration to carry out public works. The same
sources of colonial statistics serve as evidence of a colonial modernity that found
fertile ground among the educated and wealthy elite of the Ionian Islands. The collection
of statistics in the Ionian State and the dissemination of numerical informa-
7 On colonial governmentality, see Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination
of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1999; U. Kalpagam, ‘Colonial Governmentality
and the Public Sphere in India’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 15 (1) 2002, 35-
58; Peter Pels, ‘The Anthropology of Colonialism: Culture, History, and the Emergence of
Western Governmentality’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), 163-83; Patrick Joyce,
The rule of freedom: liberalism and the modern city, London: Verso, 2003; David Scott, ‘Colonial
Governmentality’, Social Text, 43 (1995), 191-220.
8 Simon Gunn, ‘From Hegemony to Governmentality: Changing Conceptions of Power in
Social History’, Journal of Social History 39, 3 (2006), 705-20.
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