o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

COLONIAL GOVERNMENTALITY IN THE IONIAN ISLANDS
associations were public-private initiatives and partnerships. The Agricultural Society
and the Savings Banks, for example, were complementary projects aimed at economic
and moral improvement 79 . Such initiatives tell us more about the modernising
project that British and Ionian liberals promoted. These plans had little impact
on the rural population who most likely had very little if anything to gain from a
Savings bank, for example, when the problem of indebtedness of the growers to
merchants and landowners had not been solved.
Historians have explored the emergence of the press in the islands and the formation
of parties focusing on the issue of union and the campaign that several
journalists-politicians staged in their newspapers from the late 1840s onwards. This
campaign culminated in the 1850s and supposedly led to Great Britain’s decision
–successful for the unionists– to cede the islands to the Greek Kingdom. The press,
however, was more than a platform for unionist agitation, a liberal reformist’s
agenda and, in one newspaper, a forum for the support of British rule. In fact it
served the Ionian liberal colonial governmentality ever since it appeared as a government
newspaper and even more so when free press was allowed 80 . Merchants
and intellectuals through the new medium of the newspaper that proliferated in the
1840s and 1850s introduced another form of liberal governmentality in the Ionian
Islands; the expression of opinions on public policy but also the publication of
names of individuals that re-affirmed their place in Ionian society.
In the newspapers but also in petitions (individual and collective), in public as
well as private documents that addressed government officials, merchants argued
for the principle and policies of free trade and intellectuals requested initially a
more liberal form of British rule and later some of them advocated union with
Greece. The two groups gained unprecedented wealth, status and privileges among
other Ionians during the period. Their ascent is inseparable from the formation of
governmentality of Ionian society and its introduction by the Ionian liberals as well
as by British with a similar mindset. The Ionian government collected statistics on
the economy and population of the islands creating an ‘economy’ that made sense
to the British colonial mind with the classification of the working population into
the categories ‘agriculture’, ‘manufacture’ and ‘commerce’. Except from the first period
when sound finances allowed for a public works program however, most
Ionians saw little improvement during the Protectorate. On the other hand the intellectuals,
merchants and colonial officials, who promoted the liberal modernizing
project of the islands’ economy and society benefitted most during the period of
British rule. Their participation in the new forms of association and agency, from
Chambers of Commerce and Merchant Societies to the Ionian Assembly and political
clubs to the publishing of newspapers, created an Ionian civil society that became
the new social field where power relations were negotiated during the period.
79 IIGG, Νο. 267, 25 January/6 February 1836.
80 For examples in other colonial settings, see, David Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’, Social
Text, 43 (1995), 191-220; U. Kalpagam, ‘Colonial Governmentality and the Public Sphere
in India’. Journal of Historical Sociology, 15 (2002), 35-58.
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