University of Notre Dame Press Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean

This volume contributes to contemporary debates on hegemony, power and identity in contemporary historical and anthropological literature through an examination of the imperial encounter between the British and the Greeks of the Ionian Islands during the 19th century. Each chapter focused on a different aspect of the imperial encounter, with topics including identity construction, the contestation over civil society, gender and the manipulation of public space, hegemony and accommodation, the role of law and of the institutions of criminal justice, and religion and imperial domination. It argues that a great deal can be learned about colonializm in general through an analysis of the Ionian Islands, precisely because the colonial encounter was so atypical. For example, it demonstrates that because the Ionian Greeks were racially white, Christian and descendents of Europe's classical forebears, the process of colonial identity formation was more ambiguous and complex than elsewhere in the Empire where physical and cultural distinctions were more obvious. Colonial officers finally decided the Ionian Greeks were ""Mediterranean Irish"" who should be treated like European savages. Review "This book is an extraordinary piece of historical and anthropological scholarship. This kind of social history, based on primary sources that reveal significant truths about the activities of the peasantry and other working-class people, informed by historical and anthropological perspectives, and focusing on the colonial context, is typical of the current trend in hybrid scholarship. Experiencing Dominion represents one of the finest examples of this innovative approach to historical subject matter." -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History-- "Journal of Interdisciplinary History" From the Back Cover " Experiencing Dominion is an impressive piece of work, well grounded in both anthropological and historical data and theory, and an original contribution, not only to our knowledge of Greek social history, but also to a mature consideration of resistance theory and related subjects." --Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University "Gallant is sensitive to the multiple and multifaceted meanings exhibited by peoples confronting exogenous political and intellectual power. He has mined a treasure trove of material in the provincial Greek archives. It is the merit of Experiencing Dominion to exploit this material through new perspectives, thus contributing an original work to the historical study of cultural relations between two different European societies." --Gerasimos Augustinos, University of South Carolina "This is a significant contribution to a broad range of fields, among them, social history, critical anthropology, identity politics, legal history, gender studies, religion, and power theory. Above all, it constitutes a crucial intervention in postcolonial debates as it examines the interplay of authority, sovereignty, and resistance that shaped the colonial encounter not in the heart of darkness but in that most overlooked area, the heart of Europe." --Vassilis Lambropoulos, University of Michigan About the Author Thomas W. Gallant is professor of Greek history at the University of Florida.