Guillaume de Vaudoncourt: Memoirs on the Ionian Islands, Considered in a Commercial, Political, and Military Point of View.London 1816 First edition, in 8vo,contemporary leather over boards,text clean and bright,light spotting on title page and very last pages only,complete 502p. and one folding map,overall in very good condition,a nice copy. Vaudoncourt was a French general who served under Napoleon,travelled in Greece widely and he was later an exile in London.The account has been composed for a British audience,as England had just taken possession of the Ionian islands. Vaudoncourt’s book served as an intelligence briefing for the British public and government on what exactly they had just inherited.It contains significant information on Ali Pasha of Tepeleni, the powerful and brutal Ottoman governor of Albania. Vaudoncourt analyzes the threat Ali Pasha posed to the islands and his complex relationship with the French and the British.He argues that the islands are not just military outposts but vital trade hubs for currants, oil, and wine, linking the Adriatic to the Levant. Strongly Philhellene, Vaudoncourt was one of the first to describe the modern Greeks of the islands as a people ready for national revival.