Creating a ‘Suspect Community’: Monitoring and Controlling the Cypriot Community in Inter-War London

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a critical assessment of British policing and government monitoring and controlling of a ‘suspect community’ in inter-war London, which was also the subject of emigration control, the only colonial group to be thus treated prior to the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962. The case is that of the Cypriots, who began to emigrate to the imperial metropolis in significant numbers in the late 1920s and largely settled in and around Soho. Their concentrated geographical location made them easy to police, monitor and control once their criminality and deviant communist politics made them a ‘suspect community’. They were also subjected to immigration control at their homeland by the Cypriot Colonial Government. There was significant co-operation between the Home and Colonial Offices to achieve the controls in both London and Cyprus. The immigration controls served as a prototype for the subsequent restrictions on other groups after the Second World War (namely those from India and Pakistan) and formed the basis of the Commonwealth Immigration Act.