Thread by @arisroussinos

Contemporary British account of the end of British rule in Corfu, 2nd June 1864, (quoted in Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815-1864, by Sakis Gekas)

Sir Thomas Maitland, or "King Tom," who ruled the Ionian Islands as an enlightened despot, building infrastructure and hanging rebels.

Taken from this PhD thesis:research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles…

Contemporary British takes on the inhabitants of Corfu Town.

Under British rule, the Ionian Islands had the second highest murder rate of any rural area of Europe, after Corsica. The British referred to the Ionians as "Mediterranean Irish" in an attempt to understand their character (via Gallant, 2000: doi.org/10.2307/1571456)

Gladstone, as Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands, comparing their accelerating Greek nationalism to that of Wales

Sir Charles Napier, later the hero of Sindh, then the governor of Kefalonia, compares the island's inhabitants to the Irish, without the drunkenness (quoted in Bowen's anonymously-penned The Ionian Islands Under British Protection, 1851)

Bowen again (born in Donegal, Sir George Ferguson Bowen was appointed rector of the Ionian University in Corfu & initiated the idea of formally annexing the island; he married an Ionian noblewoman, the Contessa Diamantina di Roma, & later governed Hong Kong & Queensland).

Maitland (the picture shows the statue of himself in a toga he erected in front of the Lord High Commissioner's palace, which he built) started out as a Whig, before crushing the Luddites and becoming a military authoritarian and the island's enlightened despot

Napier noting, with some acid, that the Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands was paid the same wage as the President of the United States of America

The British state at a period when it enjoyed building infrastructure

From Gallant: academia.edu/1535999/gallan…

Under Maitland's 1817 constitution, Greek was reintroduced as the administrative language of the islands for the first time since falling out of Byzantine control in 1257

A nationalist Ionian Greek noble, Georgios Drakatos Papanikolas, stung by Bowen's description of him as "the brother of a shopkeeper," criticises Bowen's excessive pay, his poor Greek, and his Irish accent (1851):

The traveller John Dunn-Gardner on Ionian demands for enosis with Greece, 1859:

The Anti-Papal League accuses Gladstone, then Lord High Commissioner, of attending an Orthodox service in Corfu, and of being a crypto-Catholic (1871)

Mrs Gaskell imagines Corfu garrison life for an officer's wife, in North and South (1854)

From Leslie Rogne Schumacher, Greek expectations:
Britain and the Ionian Islands, 1815–64 (2015) manchesterhive.com/view/978178499…

Private John Connors VC, 3rd (The East Kent) Regiment of Foot (The Buffs), of Co. Kerry, buried on Corfu after falling off the fortifications in 1857 (National Army Museum)

Left, the Sir Howard Douglas obelisk, Right, the Maitland Rotunda, Corfu Town, 1861– part of the effort to turn Corfu into Cheltenham. One mid-19th c British commentator compared the architecture of the town’s fashionable new suburb to “Hackney, or Holloway.”

Bowen (who wanted Britain to annex Corfu but give the other Ionian islands to Greece) contrasts the Corfiots with the other Ionians

On the national character of the Greeks, an unsympathetic portrayal by John Dunn-Gardner, who wanted Britain to formally annex the Islands, and use them as a base to boost trade with the Ottoman empire

From The Illustrated Magazine of Art, 1854 (painting by Edward Lear)