ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the activity and performance of the Ionian Bank, one of the first ‘multinational banks’ in the Eastern Mediterranean.2 We call this region the ‘British Mediterranean’ for two reasons: the first is that as far as the history of the Ionian Bank is concerned, the expansion in the respective areas of the Ionian Islands and Cyprus would not have taken place had the islands not been under some form of British rule. On the other hand, the Greek Kingdom and Egypt
in the early twentieth century were spheres of substantial British political and economic influence throughout the period. The Mediterranean, from the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginnings of deconstruction of the British Empire symbolized by the 1956 Suez crisis, was considered a vital space for Britain, where economic and strategic necessities concurred. It is in this context that the Ionian Bank, through its establishment in the Ionian Islands and its expansion further east in the Mediterranean in the following decades, allows historians to trace the interaction of British business practice in an environment of significant British influence.
