Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean - Tapa dura

"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 "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 "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"

Experiencing Dominion pushes contemporary literature on historical anthropology in a new direction by moving the discussion away from an emphasis on a simple polarity between hegemony and resistance, and instead focusing on the shared interactions between colonizers and colonized, rulers and ruled, foreigners and locals. In this important study, Gallant emphasizes contingency and historical agency, examines intentionality, and explores the processes of accommodation and, when warranted, resistance. In so doing, he reconstructs the world Britons and Greeks made together on the Ionian Islands during the nineteenth century through their shared experience of dominion.