Guards outside the Palace of St. Michael and St. George in Corfu City, Corfu, Greece, circa 1965. (Photo by Hy Simon/Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos/Getty Images)
When King Charles ascended the throne to the sonorous chants of a Greek Orthodox choir, the compelling fusion of British and Byzantine ceremony struck onlookers as a strange and mysterious novelty. But in one sense, it was the natural result of a now-disregarded byway of British imperial history. For half a century, British rule in the Ionian Islands off Greece’s western coast created an appealing hybrid society with all the romantic unlikeliness of a Crusader kingdom. On holy days, red-jacketed British soldiers would escort Corfu’s mummified patron saint through the streets in clouds of incense, with the garrison’s senior commanders bearing the ceremony’s giant candles. So impressed were locals by the spectacle that, even today, the island’s village marching bands play Holy Week’s funeral dirges in colourful uniforms and glittering helmets copied from the long-dead British garrison.
Even now, Corfu’s crumbling rotundas and bandstands, its British barracks, hospitals and palaces, are monuments to a vanished imperial culture, as lost and romantically stirring as that of Rome. Yet recent research born from this faded grandeur is more than just romantic marginalia: it offers a certain nuance currently absent from Britain’s own tiresomely propagandistic discourse on empire. As the Corfiot historian Maria Paschalidi notes, torn between strategic realpolitik and liberal idealism, “Britain suggested a variety of forms of government for the Ionians ranging from authoritarian… to representative… to responsible government.” Yet none worked, creating a “failed colonial experiment in Europe, highlighting the difficulties of governing white, Christian Europeans within a colonial framework”. But if things had worked out differently, Corfu might today be as British as Gibraltar. And the fact that it is not tells a micro-history of London’s always-ambivalent attitude to Empire.
Analysis of Britain’s lost Greek empire opens up new and productive pathways for interpreting the imperial past, keenly studied by a young generation of Greek historians even as it is ignored in the former colonial metropole. As the historian Evangelos Zarokostas observes, the half-century Ionian interlude took place at a formative time, “a period of transition between the collapse of old structures and the establishment of new ones”, in which “British officials were ambivalent about the place of the protectorate in the empire from its very beginning.” From the very start, Britain ruled the islands as a crown colony, but under the legal fiction they were an independent state under British protection. This ambiguous settlement would prove fatal to British rule, but it also provided a template for later British governance in Cyprus, Egypt, Mandate Palestine and Iraq. The islands were a laboratory for later imperial adventures, and would soon prove just as onerous a burden. In this sense, the bloody and still-unresolved conflicts of today’s Middle East were born on the verdant islands of the Ionian. Similarly, the failed Ionian experiment, abandoned just as Britain began to acquire hegemonic status, was to be Whitehall’s first experience of decolonisation — a first draft, in colourful mid-Victorian style, of Britain’s 20th-century decline.
In 1815, when Britain won the Ionian Islands from a vanquished Napoleon, the world looked very different. The island chain off Greece’s western coast commanded the entrance to the Adriatic, and seemed to offer mastery of the Mediterranean. In the 20 years preceding the raising of the Union flag over Corfu’s medieval fortress, the islands had rudely entered modernity after 400 years as a sleepy colony of Venice, passing from French to Russian hands and back to France again in a wearying succession of sieges and conquests. Desperately poor, they presented London with a complex society to govern: centuries of Venetian rule had left a Greek-speaking peasantry living in feudal squalor, lorded over by an absentee class of Italian-speaking nobles. In the regional capital, Corfu Town, all classes spoke Italian of one form or another, including the many Jews, confined to their ghetto by the vigorous antisemitism of their neighbours. As European Christians for the most part, the islanders were an anomaly in Britain’s expanding empire. How, then, were they to be governed?
The Treaty of Paris which granted them to Britain asserted that Whitehall’s rule was merely a benevolent guardianship of the first independent Greek state since the Middle Ages. The reality was rather different: fresh from negotiating Haiti’s handover to its new black rulers, the Ionian Islands’ first British Lord High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland, or “King Tom”, ruled with a rod of iron. A Scottish nobleman, described by his new Ionian charges as “dirty” and “frequently drunk”, Maitland began his decade as “conquistador” by erecting imposing monuments to himself, and ensured that, whatever the constitution said, absolute power rested with his own person. Feared by the locals as a volatile and abusive autocrat, whose secret police penetrated every level of Ionian society, Maitland’s absolute rule established the basis for later British governance. An enlightened despot, and a devotee of Adam Smith’s latest, fashionable theories, Maitland encouraged trade and imposed a sense of British order to Corfu’s teeming, overcrowded streets. Finding the locals disinclined to work, Maitland imported Maltese labourers to build his imposing regency palace of St Michael and St George, in the process reviving Corfu’s dwindling Catholic community. Correctly assessing the local nobility as easily swayed by glittering baubles, Maitland invented a chivalric order to dazzle them, still awarded today, in the absence of Greeks to bribe, to British diplomats — by themselves.
For a while, in the early decades of the 19th century, British rule was accepted by Corfiot society, if not by the more rebellious inhabitants of the southward islands. As Aggelis notes, there were even “popular demands from many Ionians to be ‘modernised’ by the British”. So, with all the lost confidence of Victorian Britain, Corfu was duly gifted the Foucauldian novelties of a Panopticon prison in Benthamite style, and a high-walled lunatic asylum, still occupied today. New Macadamed roads, also still in use, linked the villages to the capital, and a sturdy aqueduct brought water to its population. The expansion of new law courts, coupled with stiff sentences for carrying knives — at the time the British arrived, the Ionians had the second-highest murder rate in Europe — transformed a previously violent society into the most pacific, if now litigious, in the region. Handsome villas, their sober Regency neoclassicism softened by pastel-coloured limewash, sprung up around the town and its prosperous new suburb of Garitsa to house the garrison’s officers and their wives in British comfort. They are still lived in today by Corfu’s upper-middle class professionals — indeed, Prince Philip was born in one, Mon Repos. Banks and stock exchanges, hotels and sewers, street lamps and bandstands transformed the medieval walled city into a Balkan simulacrum of Cheltenham.
The eccentric Lord Guilford — whose erratically-spelled name is still commemorated by Corfu’s central square — founded modern Greece’s first university on the island, after being dissuaded from situating it on a goat-haunted mountain peak on Ithaca. A network of “Lancastrian schools” provided public education, including the first ever schooling for girls; British sentries guarded the ghetto during Holy Week, ending the local custom of stoning Jews who dared venture outside. And amid all this reforming zeal, garrison life drifted along with a sleepy, romantic charm, where red-coated officers and their crinolined companions hunted scented paper in lieu of foxes, and enjoyed champagne and oyster picnics on the island’s beauty spots, surrounded by peasants toiling in the olive groves. For Mrs Gaskell, imagining the life of an officer’s wife, enjoying “music and dancing” in her “house with its trellised balcony,” the daily round was one long summer holiday. For the ordinary squaddies, happily acquiring “local connections with women” and “local habits” and serving in the only British posting where wine was the ration drink, the only hazards were drunkenly falling from the ramparts or being snatched by sharks while swimming. A soldier’s life here was distinctly less onerous than in the Empire’s more spartan outposts.
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SubscribeLike others, I applaud the author’s efforts here – what a lively, succinct synthesis of complex issues, people, movements, stretching over several decades.
It strikes me that essays like this are absolute successes, yet seem to generate a lot less engagement in the comments section, than anything vaguely connected to immigration or trans activism. That’s understandble – obviously hot button political issues generate the greatest emotional response. But essays like this provide an awful lot of food for thought and deserve greater attention.
Yes, had exactly the same thought (and wasn’t going to comment myself!). It’s unfortunate that everything is so measured and engagement-optimised (no idea how things are run at Unherd, but I would be surprised if any modern media enterprise is an exception)– we might get more of this sort of writing otherwise.
Excellent essay.
Yes, had exactly the same thought (and wasn’t going to comment myself!). It’s unfortunate that everything is so measured and engagement-optimised (no idea how things are run at Unherd, but I would be surprised if any modern media enterprise is an exception)– we might get more of this sort of writing otherwise.
Excellent essay.
Like others, I applaud the author’s efforts here – what a lively, succinct synthesis of complex issues, people, movements, stretching over several decades.
It strikes me that essays like this are absolute successes, yet seem to generate a lot less engagement in the comments section, than anything vaguely connected to immigration or trans activism. That’s understandble – obviously hot button political issues generate the greatest emotional response. But essays like this provide an awful lot of food for thought and deserve greater attention.
This is the type of essay where Aris Roussinos shines, imo. An impressively erudite essay on a subject most people probably haven’t considered.
He was also good in an early experiment by Unherd which I think they called “Edgelands”. He interviewed people who were arguably on the fringe of society. I recall he interviewed several members of Extinction Rebellion. They came across as real people, not monsters. But they did all seem to be slightly marginalized, perhaps a little lost and in search of a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Hopefully Unherd will commission him to do more of those types of interviews.
This is the type of essay where Aris Roussinos shines, imo. An impressively erudite essay on a subject most people probably haven’t considered.
He was also good in an early experiment by Unherd which I think they called “Edgelands”. He interviewed people who were arguably on the fringe of society. I recall he interviewed several members of Extinction Rebellion. They came across as real people, not monsters. But they did all seem to be slightly marginalized, perhaps a little lost and in search of a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Hopefully Unherd will commission him to do more of those types of interviews.
Wonderful essay! I knew nothing about this! Thank you thank you! I find the essay to be a really helpful “European” lens through which to view all of Britain’s colonial adventures. I had a peripatetic childhood with my father working for Shell, and living in Indonesia, Borneo and Nigeria. I am fascinated by our colonial past and also feel a great interest in and love for other places and other peoples (whilst absolutely loving England above all, since it is home, and a wonderful home at that.) I have always thought that British colonialism was a mixed bag, but overall did much more good than harm. It’s difficult to say that these days without being shouted down. And so many writers and activists seem to equate slavery (which really was HORRENDOUS) with British colonialism, which was not the same thing at all! This essay was FASCINATING, eye opening and also chimed with my own view of how the British approached their colonies. Thank you UnHerd! It would be fabulous if we could have more in depth UnHerd essays about British Colonialism and Empire generally, as there is not enough balanced, nuanced writing on this topic, and it would be a fascinating historical source to tap.
Do you know what cause the Biafran War ?
Nigerian Civil War – Wikipedia
1966 anti-Igbo pogrom – Wikipedia
Once Britain banned slavery, involvement in Africa was reducing slavery, reducing conflict between groups which developed into colonial administration.Reading Arthur Bryant reveals how many in Britain were against developing our influence overseas. The Liberals provided moral support for Livingstone to reduce slavery in East Africa and also develop the region economically. In Africa, expanding British influence was partly achieved through missionaries , especially those who were medics.
I would not say there is lack of nuanced or balanced writing, there is lack of writing by people who were actually there. Most anti Empire types are suburban academics who ahve neverrun a construction site, mine, oil rig, farm etc in former colonial countries and do not come from a family with such experience. I am talking about someone with J Master’s experience
John Masters – Wikipedia
The reality is that as we we ran down Empire , The Foreign Office deliberately ran down Colonial Support, especially after Suez in 1956 and became very pro EEC. Heath and Crispin Tickell were anti Empire and pro- EEC. A Ghanian in his 70s said to me a few days ago the British should have stayed another 15 years to train up more engineers, scientists and doctors. The reality as that in Africa and Pakistan the largest roup of trained middle class professionals were in the Army with very few outside of it, which was why there were so many coups. If Britain had stayed another 15 years and trained up a group of cvilian engineers, scientists, doctors, lawyers and business people, greater in number than Army officers, there would have been less coups.
As far as old India (and therefore Pakistan) is concerned, there was a close connection between engineers and doctors, and the army. My grandfather was in the IP, and had 7 brothers, of whom 1 was in the Indian army in a regiment which still exists, 1 in the PWD, and 5 in the IMS.
The last all had military rank, because as well as tending to the army, civilian government employees, and public health (one became famous for mass surgery on cataracts), they also served the army.
The engineer was also associated with the military through mapmaking, and constructing railways, canals, roads and forts, as well as hospitals and other public buildings.
As far as old India (and therefore Pakistan) is concerned, there was a close connection between engineers and doctors, and the army. My grandfather was in the IP, and had 7 brothers, of whom 1 was in the Indian army in a regiment which still exists, 1 in the PWD, and 5 in the IMS.
The last all had military rank, because as well as tending to the army, civilian government employees, and public health (one became famous for mass surgery on cataracts), they also served the army.
The engineer was also associated with the military through mapmaking, and constructing railways, canals, roads and forts, as well as hospitals and other public buildings.
Do you know what cause the Biafran War ?
Nigerian Civil War – Wikipedia
1966 anti-Igbo pogrom – Wikipedia
Once Britain banned slavery, involvement in Africa was reducing slavery, reducing conflict between groups which developed into colonial administration.Reading Arthur Bryant reveals how many in Britain were against developing our influence overseas. The Liberals provided moral support for Livingstone to reduce slavery in East Africa and also develop the region economically. In Africa, expanding British influence was partly achieved through missionaries , especially those who were medics.
I would not say there is lack of nuanced or balanced writing, there is lack of writing by people who were actually there. Most anti Empire types are suburban academics who ahve neverrun a construction site, mine, oil rig, farm etc in former colonial countries and do not come from a family with such experience. I am talking about someone with J Master’s experience
John Masters – Wikipedia
The reality is that as we we ran down Empire , The Foreign Office deliberately ran down Colonial Support, especially after Suez in 1956 and became very pro EEC. Heath and Crispin Tickell were anti Empire and pro- EEC. A Ghanian in his 70s said to me a few days ago the British should have stayed another 15 years to train up more engineers, scientists and doctors. The reality as that in Africa and Pakistan the largest roup of trained middle class professionals were in the Army with very few outside of it, which was why there were so many coups. If Britain had stayed another 15 years and trained up a group of cvilian engineers, scientists, doctors, lawyers and business people, greater in number than Army officers, there would have been less coups.
Wonderful essay! I knew nothing about this! Thank you thank you! I find the essay to be a really helpful “European” lens through which to view all of Britain’s colonial adventures. I had a peripatetic childhood with my father working for Shell, and living in Indonesia, Borneo and Nigeria. I am fascinated by our colonial past and also feel a great interest in and love for other places and other peoples (whilst absolutely loving England above all, since it is home, and a wonderful home at that.) I have always thought that British colonialism was a mixed bag, but overall did much more good than harm. It’s difficult to say that these days without being shouted down. And so many writers and activists seem to equate slavery (which really was HORRENDOUS) with British colonialism, which was not the same thing at all! This essay was FASCINATING, eye opening and also chimed with my own view of how the British approached their colonies. Thank you UnHerd! It would be fabulous if we could have more in depth UnHerd essays about British Colonialism and Empire generally, as there is not enough balanced, nuanced writing on this topic, and it would be a fascinating historical source to tap.
AR gives the impression that the mistakes made in Corfu were to be later repeated by Britain in the Middle East much more seriously, as if Britain and then America are in some way mainly responsible for the more recent disasters in that region. But might it not be better to point to the centuries of Ottoman imperial rule as to being the main cause of the lack of coherent political communities who could deal with the modern world rather more peacefully and successfully. My gripe is the West gets blamed for the whole mess of the Middle East rather just some of it.
When Baghdad was sacked in 1258 by the Mongols. Ibn Taymiyyah said ijtihad- reasoning was dead. Most of the arabic knowledge was stored in the House of Wisdom was destroyed. The sack of Damascus by Timur the Lame in 1400 and then rule by the Ottoman Empire resulted in the decay of Arabic/Muslim knowledge. The arabic /Muslim World was more technically advanced in 950 AD than 1850 AD.
The Ottomans were superb at running an empire , they were ruthless and understood divide and rule. The modern arabic world was based on splitting the Ottoman Empire into components which could be run competently by those living within the boundaries. Boundaries are a problem where people are nomadic.
Ottomans themselves suffered at the hands of the Mongols for many centuries – much like their ancestors the Seljuk Turks before them. This is likely one of reasons for the so-called brutality of their ways.
Ottomans themselves suffered at the hands of the Mongols for many centuries – much like their ancestors the Seljuk Turks before them. This is likely one of reasons for the so-called brutality of their ways.
The grievance of former Ottoman territories (such as the Balkans and Arabia) is the original victimhood story by the way. Long before Wokeism was a thing, people such as the Greek, Serbians and Arab nationalists have been tying everything bad in their country to the Ottoman occupation.
Nowadays white people like to complain that they’re the only ones getting the blame for their past imperial misadventures, but it’s only a continuation of what’s been happening for quite a while.
When Baghdad was sacked in 1258 by the Mongols. Ibn Taymiyyah said ijtihad- reasoning was dead. Most of the arabic knowledge was stored in the House of Wisdom was destroyed. The sack of Damascus by Timur the Lame in 1400 and then rule by the Ottoman Empire resulted in the decay of Arabic/Muslim knowledge. The arabic /Muslim World was more technically advanced in 950 AD than 1850 AD.
The Ottomans were superb at running an empire , they were ruthless and understood divide and rule. The modern arabic world was based on splitting the Ottoman Empire into components which could be run competently by those living within the boundaries. Boundaries are a problem where people are nomadic.
The grievance of former Ottoman territories (such as the Balkans and Arabia) is the original victimhood story by the way. Long before Wokeism was a thing, people such as the Greek, Serbians and Arab nationalists have been tying everything bad in their country to the Ottoman occupation.
Nowadays white people like to complain that they’re the only ones getting the blame for their past imperial misadventures, but it’s only a continuation of what’s been happening for quite a while.
AR gives the impression that the mistakes made in Corfu were to be later repeated by Britain in the Middle East much more seriously, as if Britain and then America are in some way mainly responsible for the more recent disasters in that region. But might it not be better to point to the centuries of Ottoman imperial rule as to being the main cause of the lack of coherent political communities who could deal with the modern world rather more peacefully and successfully. My gripe is the West gets blamed for the whole mess of the Middle East rather just some of it.
An interesting essay.
‘We’ should have learnt our lesson but didn’t.
In 1878 we grabbed Cyprus, yet another pestilential nest of Greek nationalism, that would turn very nasty with EOKA*, Grivas & Co.
Perhaps Mr Roussinos could give us the gory details?
(*1956-1960.)
I think one of the main takeaways of this essay is that there is no clear lesson to learn. There is no course in human affairs, including foreign affairs, which is not rife with difficulty – none of the options pursued by the British over the course of the decades was ‘right,’ all of them had major problems. The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, back and forth, for all of us.
The renowned Spanish philosopher George Santayana* thought the British, and in particular the English, were the greatest and most benign rulers since Ancient Rome.
I tend to agree with him.
(*1863-1952.)
Now replaced by Darren, Kevin , LeRoy and their equally vulgar, bovine, drunken doped- up violent and tattooed distaff free copulists Sharon, Kourtenay, and Tracy Dyan
Now replaced by Darren, Kevin , LeRoy and their equally vulgar, bovine, drunken doped- up violent and tattooed distaff free copulists Sharon, Kourtenay, and Tracy Dyan
The renowned Spanish philosopher George Santayana* thought the British, and in particular the English, were the greatest and most benign rulers since Ancient Rome.
I tend to agree with him.
(*1863-1952.)
Nothing that wouldn’t have been solved with a well-prosecuted policy of decimation, old boy. What far-flung part of the Empire would you have enjoyed lording it over?
Weihaiwei.
A splendid choice — and a far simpler task than lording it over the other British colony further down the coast, I would imagine.
A splendid choice — and a far simpler task than lording it over the other British colony further down the coast, I would imagine.
Weihaiwei.
I think one of the main takeaways of this essay is that there is no clear lesson to learn. There is no course in human affairs, including foreign affairs, which is not rife with difficulty – none of the options pursued by the British over the course of the decades was ‘right,’ all of them had major problems. The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth, back and forth, for all of us.
Nothing that wouldn’t have been solved with a well-prosecuted policy of decimation, old boy. What far-flung part of the Empire would you have enjoyed lording it over?
An interesting essay.
‘We’ should have learnt our lesson but didn’t.
In 1878 we grabbed Cyprus, yet another pestilential nest of Greek nationalism, that would turn very nasty with EOKA*, Grivas & Co.
Perhaps Mr Roussinos could give us the gory details?
(*1956-1960.)
This is a bit of history I literally had not heard about until reading Jules Verne’s “Islands on Fire.” Where he notes the British mania for erecting statues to the governors of Corfu.
This is a bit of history I literally had not heard about until reading Jules Verne’s “Islands on Fire.” Where he notes the British mania for erecting statues to the governors of Corfu.
Cracking essay. Up there with Mr Roussinos’ best.
Cracking essay. Up there with Mr Roussinos’ best.
Lovely piece.
Lovely piece.
Great essay. I believe they still play cricket on the island, with a pitch in the middle of the town. This is a slight variation on the considerations of Denis Healy, when as Defence Minister in the 60s implementing the East of Suez withdrawal of British troops, and the British High Commissioner in Aden as they watched an impromptu game of football of squaddies on the dockside as the navy prepared to move them out.
They agreed on two things as the lasting legacy of the British Empire; the game of association football, and the general understanding throughout the world of the expression ‘f**k off’.
Great essay. I believe they still play cricket on the island, with a pitch in the middle of the town. This is a slight variation on the considerations of Denis Healy, when as Defence Minister in the 60s implementing the East of Suez withdrawal of British troops, and the British High Commissioner in Aden as they watched an impromptu game of football of squaddies on the dockside as the navy prepared to move them out.
They agreed on two things as the lasting legacy of the British Empire; the game of association football, and the general understanding throughout the world of the expression ‘f**k off’.
After reading this only conclusion is that Corfu got the best possible option after 1815 compared to the alternatives!!
After reading this only conclusion is that Corfu got the best possible option after 1815 compared to the alternatives!!
Reminds me of that Fawlty Towers episode where the Germans gasp how did they ever win the war. I read this and wonder how the British ever had an empire.
Reminds me of that Fawlty Towers episode where the Germans gasp how did they ever win the war. I read this and wonder how the British ever had an empire.
Any chance of providing your contributors with a thesaurus ir employing a sub-editor to take out the constant repetition?
Any chance of providing your contributors with a thesaurus ir employing a sub-editor to take out the constant repetition?
I am not sure what the author meant by saying “British rule in the Ionians ended in the empire’s first bitter taste of decolonisation.” A century earlier, the American colonies “decolonised” themselves. And there are even earlier examples of decolonisation, such as Darien.
I am not sure what the author meant by saying “British rule in the Ionians ended in the empire’s first bitter taste of decolonisation.” A century earlier, the American colonies “decolonised” themselves. And there are even earlier examples of decolonisation, such as Darien.
And now full of drunken tattooed British sub pond life….
And now full of drunken tattooed British sub pond life….
Loved this. Guildford Street in Corfu Town & Garitsa have indeed a ‘crinoline’ charm. The Frenchies left their mark with the distinctively Gallic numbers on the houses.