What If Britain had retained the Ionian Islands ?

One of those little oddities of history is or rather was the United States of the Ionian Islands which existed from 1815 to 1864.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_the_Ionian_Islands

The islands were ruled as a protectorate by the British having taken them off the French from 1810 until the liberation of Corfu in 1814.

The islands were ceded to Greece in 1864 as part of the campaign to bolster the prestige of George I, King of the Hellenes. So, the POD would seem to be that George I doesn't become the Greek King. One way would be to have Prince Albert live and he might have persuaded Victoria that Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, would be a good choice for becoming a Greek King. There was also the not inconsiderable fact that Prince Alfred was very popular with the Greeks having won 95% of the vote in a plebiscite to choose the next monarch.

Alfred therefore becomes King of Greece and the British, as part of the quid pro quo, retain the Ionian Islands as a British protectorate.

What then ? How does a British military and naval presence in the Adriatic affect developments regarding Albania, Italy and the two World Wars ? I've some ideas but over to you all..
 
Given the Greeks got rid of their monarch, the British absolutely should have kept direct control. I don't see them making a military base out of it... I think it would be like the Flaklands, administrative control and not military fortification.
 
Given the Greeks got rid of their monarch, the British absolutely should have kept direct control. I don't see them making a military base out of it... I think it would be like the Flaklands, administrative control and not military fortification.

Or more like Malta or especially Cyprus. And the Ionian Islands are in an especially good position to join Greece at some point.
 
Rather unlikely... The Ionian Islands were not like Cyprus: there was no Turkish minority, and some of them are literally a stone's throw from the Greek mainland. The only thing the British gain by keeping them is pissing off the Greeks and spending treasure to hold down an increasingly restive possession (IIRC, it was Gladstone's mission to the islands in 1859 that convinced the British of the depth of pro-Enosis sentiment among the islanders), which, furthermore, was not formally a colony but supposedly an "amical protectorate".

On the other hand, since Greece does not face competition for these islands from any other Balkan power, they can afford a more relaxed attitude., betting that eventually they will get the islands either way. Greek attitudes depend on how the British react to the local calls for union with Greece. If they clamp down hard, there will be a problem. Greece IOTL was usually a British quasi-protectorate right up to the Truman Doctrine, but there were always countervailing tendencies. ITTL this would certainly increase resentment towards Britain, which always flared up periodically, even more. It might be enough to tip Greece over to a pro-French or pro-Russian (or later pro-German) stance, given the opportunity.

Even if the islands are not ceded in 1863, however, I consider it inevitable that they will be ceded at some later point, whenever London wanted to induce Greece to stay on its side or as a sweetener for staying out of any conflict with the Ottomans (1878 springs to mind here). They were not really worth anything, and strategically they did not contribute anything that Malta, Cyprus, and Suez could not provide.
 
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... IIRC, it was Gladstone's mission to the islands in 1859 that convinced the British of the depth of pro-Enosis sentiment among the islanders.

You are correct. Jan Morris has a brilliant chapter in Heaven's Command on it: "Pan and Mr Gladstone". (With a sneaking sympathy for Tom Maitland's rackety tenure as LHC there, as I recall.)
 
Given the Greeks got rid of their monarch, the British absolutely should have kept direct control. I don't see them making a military base out of it... I think it would be like the Flaklands, administrative control and not military fortification.
They had a protectorate thing set up. I don't see why they would want to keep the islands, let alone that it would be a good idea because the Greeks would get rid of their King ninety reads later. If they kept it I imagine the British might have been tempted to use them to pay off Italy in WWI, assuming butterflies didn't get too major. As for the Falklands, it helps that basically only British people live there.
 
Thanks for the comments. This idea came after having enjoyed a holiday on Zakynthos.

The islands hadn't of course been part of Greece for centuries having been Venetian and French before the British took over.

The Royal Navy had blockaded Greece in both 1850 and 1854 in order to stop Greece attacking the Ottomans during the Crimean War and I just wonder if we could envisage an earlier overthrow of Otto and his replacement by an anti-British nationalistic pan-Hellenic Republic in the late 1850s or early 1860s. Such a Government might seek to destabilise the situation in the Ionian Islands as well as threaten the Ottomans perhaps in alliance with Russia.

The Hellenic Republic joins the Pan-Slavic Alliance against the Ottomans in 1877 and this liberates other areas of Greek speakers from Ottoman control.
 
Why? They never had any real reason to keep it. Presumably avoiding any Greek independence at all would be the best POD that would ensure a permanently British Ionian Islands, though having an anti-British Greek government established in Greece and Britain promptly promoting the Italianized nature of the Ionian Islands is still a pretty good one.

until the liberation of Corfu in 1814.

I'm not sure "liberation" is the right word here, considering that the Ionian Islands were actually freer under France than under Venice.
 
The Royal Navy had blockaded Greece in both 1850 and 1854 in order to stop Greece attacking the Ottomans during the Crimean War and I just wonder if we could envisage an earlier overthrow of Otto and his replacement by an anti-British nationalistic pan-Hellenic Republic in the late 1850s or early 1860s. Such a Government might seek to destabilise the situation in the Ionian Islands as well as threaten the Ottomans perhaps in alliance with Russia.

The Hellenic Republic joins the Pan-Slavic Alliance against the Ottomans in 1877 and this liberates other areas of Greek speakers from Ottoman control.

A Hellenic Republic in the 19th century is next to impossible. For reasons too numerous to go into here, for any POD after 1830 Greece will remain a monarchy. Furthermore, the pro-Russian faction never really gained an ascendancy in Greek politics, and certainly not at this time; despite the anger at the blockade, Britain enjoyed enormous prestige in the country, and France was also a contender for influence in the country. Indeed, Otto's downfall was to a degree due to the definitive turn of the British against him. If Otto were deposed earlier, it would have been due to more successful British machinations (the British never really liked or supported him), hence he would be replaced by another British-backed candidate. Greece could never afford to be actively hostile to the leading world power, and especially the power that controlled the Mediterranean. Not when the guns of the British warships can shell your capital from the Piraeus. That was why I wrote above "given the opportunity". That opportunity would have to be a weakening or llong-term preoccupation of British power elsewhere.

Similarly impossible is Greece joining a "Pan-Slavic Alliance", at least not if it is framed in these terms. The Slavs were Greece's natural competitors for the Ottoman territories. Greece wanting to join in 1877/78 would have been as much to keep Macedonia from falling into Slavic hands than wanting to "liberate" these areas from the Ottomans. Furthermore, if such a "Pan-Slavic Alliance" came about, you can bet that Britain would bet on Greece to counterbalance Russian hegemony in the Balkans, since the Ottomans were clearly on the way out. This is something that some of the more far-sighted (and Anglophile) Greek politicians like Trikoupis actively pursued, and actually happened in OTL when Greece joined the Balkan League in 1912 with the blessings of London.

Presumably avoiding any Greek independence at all would be the best POD that would ensure a permanently British Ionian Islands, though having an anti-British Greek government established in Greece and Britain promptly promoting the Italianized nature of the Ionian Islands is still a pretty good one.
If you avoid Greek independence, then the Ionian islands would become even more a hotbed of Greek nationalism, as the only "free" Greek territory not under Ottoman control. As it was, even IOTL they provided a springboard for ideas, education, and, during the war of independence, provided money, supplies, and several hundred volunteers. Even the Greek national anthem was written in Zakynthos. The "Italianized" nature was largely limited to Corfu, and there it was already rapidly declining. The culture of the Ionian Islands had (and still has) many Italian elements, but they never lost their Greek character, and even the Venetian aristocracy assimilated there; once you became Orthodox, you were Greek, even if you were educated in Italian or held Italian titles.
 
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