Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean (review)

This book is an extraordinary piece of historical and anthropological scholarship. Its signal contribution is a result of Gallant's extensive mining of such primary sources as police and court records, legal statutes, colonial dispatches, and memoirs, which enables him to reconstruct in minute detail many of the events presented as case studies.

Gallant's subject is the period of British colonial rule in the Ionian Islands, which lasted a mere half century from 1815 to 1864, and Greek resistance to it. Gallant meticulously elucidates how the Ionian Greeks and the British constructed reciprocal identities for each other that resulted in a series of misperceptions and miscalculations on all sides. An early chapter is devoted to the British characterization of the Ionian islanders as "Mediterranean Irish." Both societies presented a paradoxical dilemma for the British in that, unlike most of the other peoples colonized by the British, the Irish and Ionians were white, Christian, and socially complex. To justify their subjugation, the colonial rulers con- structed parallel identities for them: Both groups drank to excess, were prone to idleness and mendacity, and were quick to resolve differences through violent confrontation. Gallant amply demonstrates that the Ionian Greeks lived up to this stereotype.

Consistent with symbolic systems in other parts of the Mediterranean, where male sexual potency and control of women often serves as a metaphor for political potency (or, more often, impotence), much of the symbolism explored by Gallant is manifestly sexual. Peasants taunted members of the ruling classes (both indigenous and foreign) through nuanced implications and more direct means, expressing their dissatisfaction with colonial rule by accusations of cuckoldry and impotence.

Another thing that makes this work particularly valuable is that the larger picture is not neglected in favor of the sort of detail represented by the passage above. By making the analogy between Britain's treatment of the Ionian Greeks and the Irish, and by tying his discussion of hostility between the peasants and ruling classes to larger issues, Gallant manages to remain focused on the implications of everything that he discusses for colonialism in general and British colonialism in particular. Although each colonial situation is unique, certain elements of imperialism and resistance to it have general import. Hence, Gallant frequently cites other colonial experiences by way of comparison or contrast.

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. At the outset, Gallant states that "the central aim of this book is to undertake an engagement with debates on hegemony, power and identity in contemporary historical and anthropological literature" (x), and he delivers what he promises. Gallant does not merely pay lip service to anthropology; he seriously incorporates relevant perspectives from the discipline in his analyses of the data.