Cyprus Under British Colonial Rule: Culture, Politics, and the Movement toward Union with Greece, 1878–1954 by Christos P. Ioannides, and: The Cyprus Frenzy of 1878 and the British Press by Marinos Pourgouris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cyprus Under British Colonial Rule: Culture, Politics, and the Movement toward Union with Greece, 1878–1954 by Christos P. Ioannides, and: The Cyprus Frenzy of 1878 and the British Press by Marinos Pourgouris Loizos Kapsalis (bio) Christos P. Ioannides, Cyprus Under British Colonial Rule: Culture, Politics, and the Movement toward Union with Greece, 1878–1954. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2019. Pp. xvii + 321. Cloth $115.00. Paper $42.00. eBook $40.50. Marinos Pourgouris, The Cyprus Frenzy of 1878 and the British Press. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2019. Pp. xii + 219. 13 illustrations. Cloth $95.00. eBook $90.00. The island of Cyprus passed from Ottoman to British control with the signing of the Anglo-Turkish Convention in the summer of 1878. At that time, the British had only a vague knowledge of the island and its people. And yet, in Britain, the acquisition of the small and largely neglected Ottoman province was followed with curiosity and enthusiasm vastly disproportionate to its size. As Marinos Pourgouris notes, the occupation caused “an unparalleled frenzy” that was “more akin to fetish” (7). In The Cyprus Frenzy of 1878 and the British Press, Pourgouris dissects this tremendous explosion of public interest in Cyprus through an examination of representations of the island in the writings of the first British journalists who traveled there to cover the occupation. The British press, he argues, played a most significant role in sustaining the sensation that dominated public discourse by “reporting, constructing, propagating and eventually solidifying colonial perceptions of the island” (2). Previous work in Cypriot historiography—most notably by George Georgallides (1979) and Andrekos Varnava (2009)—has shown that British enthusiasm was misguided and ultimately short-lived. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the island was seen as “an inconsequential possession” rather than an imperial asset (Varnava 2009, 3). Pourgouris eschews the longue durée approach of earlier analyses, adopting instead what he calls a “microscopic gaze” (1) at a single historical moment: the first year of the British occupation. Perhaps more importantly, he views the British colonial apparatus not as a vast and impersonal bureaucratic machine, but rather as a small network of [End Page 230] politicians, military officers, and special correspondents linked to each other by close interpersonal relationships. Pourgouris draws parallels between these men and the “creole pioneers,” described by Benedict Anderson in his seminal Imagined Communities (1983), who possessed a “consciousness of connectedness” (Pourgouris, 2019, 21) even as they travelled around the world to take up positions as colonial administrators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Chapters 3 through 8, Pourgouris follows six special correspondents commissioned by major British newspapers to report on the arrival and settlement of the British administration and army on Cyprus in 1878. In these chapters, the author painstakingly pieces together the body of work pertaining to Cyprus of each of these six individuals (a daunting task, since the majority of their writing, he notes, was published anonymously). A close reading of their writings brings to light how their sympathies and antipathies, their friendships and affiliations with colonial administrators, military men, and other British travelers, refracted their experiences on the island and their opinions of the colonial project. These interpersonal relations, Pourgouris shows, exerted a remarkable influence on their views of topics as varied as the island’s climate, the nature of its inhabitants, the issue of slavery, and matters of law. A central node in the network of relationships, and a figure to which the narrative frequently returns, is Sir Garnet Wolseley, the first high commissioner of Cyprus (1878–1879). Sir Garnet, a highly decorated army man, is presented as a staunch pragmatist and cunning colonial administrator who demanded unwavering loyalty and discipline from his staff. In Cyprus, the backbone of the first British administration was formed by a select group of officers personally selected by the high commissioner. Pourgouris shows in Chapter 3 that, during his extensive military career, Sir Garnet developed a real distaste for journalists (he wrote a book about it), but also a keen awareness of the press as “ ‘a medium’ to achieve military objectives” (52). Throughout his short tenure as high commissioner, he took advantage of the affinity...