The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936– 1941:
Political Stakes in a Battle of Denominations
Alexis Rappas
European University Institute
Abstract
Taking as a starting point two strikes in colonial Cyprus in the 1930s––the miners’ strike in
1936 in which both Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots were involved and the
all-female spinners’ strike in 1938––this paper looks at how the labor movement deeply
transformed the political landscape of the island. In a society closely monitored by
British colonial authorities and well acquainted with the Greek-Cypriot claim for
Enosis, or the political union of Cyprus with Greece, the labor question became a
locus, or “interstice of power structure,” articulating competing and mutually exclusive
visions of Cyprus as a polity. More generally the paper investigates the modalities of
formation of a collective group allegiance in a context of constraint.
Introduction: Labor as a Dialogue of the Deaf
With the combined effects of the world economic crisis following the 1929 slump
and a three-year drought,1 in the early 1930s Cyprus’s mainly agricultural
economy entered a phase which would help to reshape the island’s social
outlook. Heralding this transformation, the local press gave increasing publicity
to a new socioeconomic actor: the labor force. Though the expression covered
varied social realities, its use was spurred by a string of increasingly frequent
strikes involving workers from different industries. A noteworthy characteristic
of the coverage of what was soon branded the labor question was the unanimous
sympathy, notwithstanding the varied ideological orientations of different newspapers, for what was presented by all as the labor class or the working world.
This sympathy was coupled with a general appeal to the island’s colonial government for the enactment of social legislation to protect the workers against the
vagaries of life and the arbitrariness of their employers.2 At the same time,
trade unions were applying for registration at a quickening pace throughout
the period while their claims, repeatedly submitted to the island’s authorities
in the form of written petitions, were gradually standardized.
Colonial authorities were aware of the economic difficulties plaguing the
island, and in March 1934 a Financial Commission was sent to Cyprus to
“advise [the local government] as to the development of [local] resources . . .”3
Yet the central piece of the financial commissioner’s report published in 1935
was entirely devoted to the problem of agricultural indebtedness; other industries were only briefly referred to, and no measures were proposed to palliate
their difficulties.4 Indeed, the press’s new concern for the labor question was
not shared by colonial authorities. As one could read in the administration’s
International Labor and Working-Class History
No. 76, Fall 2009, pp. 194 –216
# International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2009
doi:10.1017/S0147547909990172
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
195
official 1936 Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People
of Cyprus, “there [was] no ‘labouring class’ in the generally accepted sense of
the term . . . Factories are very few and any such institution as the so-called
‘factory system’ is unknown. In short, conditions are oriental rather than
occidental.”5
The denial of the existence of a labor question by the Cyprus government
may be symptomatic of the stand of a colonial administration in the face of a collective grassroots movement;6 but it was no doubt also deeply rooted in the
specific Cypriot context. A British colony since 1878, Cyprus became
the stage in October 1931 of a major uprising of Greek-Cypriots, captained by
the Greek-Orthodox clergy and aiming at the unification of the island to
Greece (Enosis).7 In its aftermath, all political life was severely restricted, and
assemblies of more than five persons without prior administrative approval
were forbidden. Although there existed a law allowing trade unions to exist,
public demonstrations––as might occur in strikes––were prohibited; colonial
authorities literally saw the ominous specter of 1931 behind any question of
societal importance, labor included.
A central argument of this paper deals with the political stakes of using,
or avoiding at all costs, all-encompassing terms related to the expanding
group of wage-earners in Cyprus in the 1930s. At stake was the formation
of an autonomous force or social actor, in this case, organized labor,
seeking to conquer and legitimize its own place in a political landscape
hitherto defined by the contest between the Cypriot nationalist elite and
the colonial government. After briefly presenting the social, economic, and
ethnic background of the island, the paper begins with an analysis of two
strikes: the strike of the miners at Mavrovouni (Nicosia district) in late
August 1936 led by both Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot workers and
the strike of the female spinners in Famagusta in June 1938. Building on
the insights provided by these two examples, I intend to show that the
reason colonial authorities adopted a passive approach toward the labor question was that they perceived it as a threat to their own sociopolitical project
for the preservation of a rural and agricultural society. But this passive
approach, translated by the absence of any legislation around labor, created
a niche, a public space, or, as Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler
termed it, an “interstice of power structure,”8 where politics could re-emerge
in post-1931 Cyprus. Indeed the labor movement became a labor question,
generating an intense rivalry in the Cypriot public sphere itself between
different understandings of the place of the working class within society.9
Hence, beyond the battle of denominations, labor became, in the 1930s, the
locus of confrontation between at least three competing and mutually exclusive visions of Cyprus as a polity: a Greek-Orthodox island, politically
reunited with mainland Greece and led locally by the Orthodox Church of
Cyprus and the island’s notability; an apolitical, agricultural, and colonial
British Cyprus; and an independent, interethnic and working-class polity
advocated by the trade unions.
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The Gradual Transformation of a Rural Economy
In the 1930s, “Cyprus [was] an agricultural country and agriculture [was] the
main occupation of its inhabitants.”10 The latter were mostly peasant proprietors
or tenants farming their own lands (averaging 1.77 acres in size per capita) or on
their own account.11 The main crops cultivated on these land holdings were
wheat, barley, oats, and, above all, carobs. Cyprus’s main market was the
United Kingdom, which easily absorbed between twenty-five and thirty
percent of the island’s exports of agricultural products, although countries of
the Eastern Mediterranean, such as Greece, Egypt (accounting for 14.9
percent of the total export trade), Palestine, and Syria as well as Germany
and Italy bought Cypriot products.
Beyond agriculture, the island’s economic activity relied on domestic
manufacturing production, including shoemaking, furniture-making, weaving,
and the production of linen, lace, and embroidery.12 The island’s economy
was characteristically rural since perhaps 80 percent of working Cypriots practiced their occupations in their villages. Thus the 1931 census reported that of
347,959 Cypriots, 134,279 of both sexes were practicing occupations (73.31
percent males, 26.69 females); of these, 115,211 were involved in one of the
following occupations: farmers, agricultural laborers, shepherds, shoemakers,
carpenters, masons, tailors, weavers, bakers, blacksmiths, domestic servants,
barbers, teachers, clergy, waiters, grocers, fruiterers, café proprietors, and
butchers.13
Although we do not have the precise figures for the 1930s, we can draw
some conclusions with regard to the professional outlook of the island’s main
communities on the basis of the 1946 census, keeping in mind that “religion”
in the official documents was synonymous with “ethnicity.” In 1931, Cyprus’s
two main communities were the Greek-Orthodox and the Turkish-Moslem;
according to official figures, out of a total population of 347,959, 79.5 percent
of Cypriots were “Greek-Orthodox,” and 18.5 percent “Moslem-Turkish.” In
1946 these proportions remained practically the same, and 40 percent of the
total working population of each community was still involved in agriculture.
Craft industry was more important within the Greek-Cypriot community
(19 percent of the community’s working population), than within the
Turkish-Cypriot community (16 percent), while Turkish-Cypriots showed a
marked predilection for public service (5 percent of the community’s working
population) compared with the Greek-Cypriots (2 percent).14
Since most of the crops produced on a large scale were destined to be
exports, the economy––already vulnerable because of rampant agricultural
indebtedness and a severe irrigation problem––was further undermined when
the world prices for agricultural commodities collapsed in the early 1930s.15
As the immediate product of the difficult economic situation of the 1930s,
there emerged a significant “class of landless ex-proprietors”16 who resorted
to offering their labor in the mines operated mainly by two large companies,
the Cyprus Mines Corporation and the Cyprus and General Asbestos
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
197
Company. Both companies employed an average daily labor force of two thousand Cypriots, though many of these worked seasonally at the mines and
spent the rest of their time as agricultural laborers. Some 150 smaller companies
also attracted dispossessed or impoverished peasants in the early thirties, while
the public works and railway departments of the colonial administration
employed 3,485 Cypriots.17
The emergence of a landless agricultural class––a freelance workforce
operating part-time as miners, agricultural laborers, and builders––unsettled
established social equilibriums and official certainties. Scott Atran, who noted
a similar phenomenon in Palestine wrote, in terms that could easily apply to
Cyprus, of a “residual peasantry [. . .] compelled to work in towns, yet [who] continue to live in villages because they could not afford to live in towns. Neither
wholly proletarian nor peasant, neither socially urban nor rural, the semiproletarianized Palestinian villager was well on the way to becoming a
‘Partner of the Wind’ (Shrik el-Hawa).”18 These outsiders and their attempts
at rebuilding an identity of their own are at the heart of this paper.
Social Justice vs. Public Order
Mavrovouni was, since the early 1920s, one of the main cupriferous sites operated by the Cyprus Mines Corporation (henceforth CMC), founded in 1916
and run by the Mudd family in Los Angeles. The ties of its American management with local British colonial authorities far exceeded the sphere of formality19 and, in the aftermath of the First World War, the CMC’s president,
Harvey Seeley Mudd, was reportedly in a position to discuss the official status
of Cyprus with the British Undersecretary for the Colonies and to advise him
against ceding the island––“the only part of the British Empire that contained
large deposits of pyrites”––to Greece.20 This privileged position the management
of the CMC owed to its local socioeconomic power. Within a few years, the
company became the island’s most important employer, after the Cyprus government, with a daily average labor force of more than three thousand miners
organized in three eight-hour shifts and producing in 1933 211,494 tons of ore.21
Until 1933, at thirty-one copper piastres [cp.] (£0.17) per diem,22 wages
were not disgraceful. However, the beginning of the 1930s signalled a change
of tide: Wages dropped to 29 cp. per diem (£0.161 for underground miners,
£0.13 for male and £0.05 for female surface workers) by 1936. During the
same period (1933– 1936) the price of bread had risen from £0.0874 to £0.11 a
kilo, when it was estimated that a “family of five” consumed 22.22 kg of
bread weekly.23 Already vulnerable to cyclical recessions, the miners’ status
became even more precarious, a situation illustrated by the Mavrovouni strike
in the summer of 1936.
Late on Sunday, August 30, 1936, a group of disgruntled miners appointed
a seven-member committee comprising both Greek-Cypriots and
Turkish-Cypriots, to carry their claims to the CMC’s management. On
Monday, August 31 the committee read a memorandum listing sixteen core
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demands in front of some five hundred of their colleagues on the morning shift.
These demands ranged from the standard salary increase to the establishment of
a system of workers’ compensation insurance to the relaxation of the system of
surveillance by foremen.24 After agreeing to the proposed memorandum, the
miners dispersed quietly. The next day, when the management of the CMC
refused to grant the miners’ requests and instead invited the displeased
amongst them to “look for a job elsewhere or to return to their villages,”
some 1,500 workers went on one of the “hardest” strikes of the 1930s.25
On the very first day of the strike, many miners were arrested, while the
police were actively searching for “ringleaders.” After spending eight days in
custody, all seven members of the committee, plus two of their colleagues,
were brought to trial at the district court in Nicosia. Six of the defendants
were Greek-Cypriot, the remaining three, Turkish-Cypriots. They were
charged with four counts of violating Law 54 of 1932, by having “organized
and participated in a public meeting and a public procession” without the
prior written authorization of the district commissioner of Nicosia. The court
sentenced the miners to a ten-pound guarantee to be paid within a year.26
There is no evidence that the convicted miners were sacked; but according to
Lavender, the CMC’s historian, the company could have easily replaced
them, as the management was tailed by “[h]ungry crowds” of dispossessed
farmers in dire need of a job.27
Two years after Mavrovouni, in June 1938, spinners at the local cotton factory
went on strike in the city of Famagusta. If the CMC can be said to embody, by
Cyprus’s standards, the “capitalistic firm” par excellence, the Famagusta cotton
factory, on the other hand, fitted much more into the “paternalistic type,”
owned and run by self-made man Panayiotis Ioannou, a wealthy Greek-Cypriot
merchant and landowner and member (before the uprising of 1931) of the municipal council and a benefactor of the city’s Greek-Cypriot schools.28 In contrast to
the management of the CMC, Ioannou’s relation to the colonial authorities was
less congenial since he was a committed enosist (namely a proponent of Enosis,
the political union of Cyprus with Greece). He was personally known to his spinners, all of whom were Greek-Cypriot women. The exact number of his female
workforce is unknown, but it must not have exceeded thirty.29
On May 30, 1938, a deputation of these spinners called at the district commissioner’s office, stated that they had gone on strike, and deposited a memorandum
listing their demands, which ranged from a salary increase to one week’s notice
prior to dismissal, free medical care and more polite behavior on the part of management. The district commissioner then met with Ioannou, who said that the only
concession he was ready to make was to reduce the workday to eleven hours in the
summer and to eight and a half in the winter (from sunrise to sunset). On June 6,
the district commissioner received a document entitled “Joint Communiqué of
the Labor Trade Unions of Masons, Barbers, Tailor Employees, Carpenters,
Shoe-maker employees, Shop Tenants and Blacksmiths,” claming to represent
“almost the whole labor class of Varosha [Famagusta]” and stating that their committee “adopted the claims [of the female laborers]” and were “determined to
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199
strengthen their struggle.” Having summoned them to his office, the district commissioner proceeded to “lecture” the signatories of the document, “emphasi[zing]
the necessity of being very careful to avoid inflaming the public feeling and their
own responsibility in that connection [and] announc[ing] [his] firm intention of
not tolerating any nonsense [. . .].”30
Meanwhile the situation at the factory was deteriorating rapidly, with the
striking spinners picketing in front of the premises and using force to prevent
their colleagues from going to work. Thirteen women were arrested and
brought to trial at the Famagusta district court on July 19 and 20, 1938. They
were charged with “creating a disturbance and assaulting the present workers
at the mills.” Four women were found guilty on counts of both assault and disturbance and were sentenced to terms of prison ranging from three to ten days;
seven spinners were bound over for the sum of ten pounds “to keep the peace
and be of good behaviour for the period of one year” while two defendants were
declared innocent.31 All of them were sacked from the factory.32
The Mavrovouni and Famagusta strikes, notwithstanding their differences,
share a similar pattern, starting with a labor dispute, which was immediately
covered by the press, and ending in court; in other words, a conflict in the
private sector was elevated to the status of a political struggle for social justice
by either the press––in the case of the miners’ strike––or the trade unions––in
the spinners’ case––before being reduced by public authorities to a penal matter
to be settled in court. The publicity surrounding the two cases probably illustrates
curiosity about a phenomenon not wholly anticipated by either the Cypriot elite or
the colonial authorities. Here was a movement that mobilized sections of the population hitherto not considered capable of acting in unison (Greek-Cypriots with
Turkish-Cypriots) or not expected to take a public stand at all (women); here
was a movement cross-cutting communal or gender boundaries and inducing
groups of individuals to push forward, collectively and publicly, in defiance of
colonial laws, with a sophisticated set of common goals that contrasted with the
modesty of the claims in previous strikes. Cooperation between Greek-Cypriots
and Turkish-Cypriots was not unheard of; they lived peacefully together in
well over a third of Cyprus’s 641 villages that were intercommunal in the early
thirties.33 But it seems that Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots had rarely
shared, under British rule, a common vision of a fair social order such as that
encapsulated in the memorandum the miners’ committee read in front of its
colleagues. Even more uncommon was the public mobilization of women.
One main difference between the two strikes concerns the presence of
trade unions. At the time, the district commissioner of Nicosia consistently
refused to grant permission to the miners to form a trade union, “after investigations which showed that the organizers were not miners at all”;34 the
Famagusta spinners, on the other hand were supported by the local committees
of trade unions. The extent to which the presence of trade unions gave a wholly
different shade to a strike is suggested by the involvement of the public authorities: In the miners’ strike, where trade unions were absent, the matter was
dealt with solely by the police and the colonial court; in the Famagusta case,
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where trade unions played an active part, the court was only the last stage of a
longer process in which the executive branch of the colonial government, in the
person of the British district commissioner, had been actively involved. The
differences in the treatment of each strike were also to be found in the journalistic coverage they received: Indeed, in the late 1930s, the Greek-Cypriot press
became the locus of an increasingly polarized contest between conflicting
interpretations of the labor movement.
Protecting or Empowering the Workers? The Labor Question in the
Cypriot Public Sphere
Following the repressive measures enacted in the wake of the 1931 uprising,
only the press survived as a public forum, though laws severely limited its
freedom to discuss “matters of public policy or general interest.”35 In the
1930s there were about twelve important Cypriot newspapers, ten Greek and
two Turkish.36 Among these, Eleftheria (Freedom), the newspaper I used for
my reconstruction of the miners’ strike, was one of the most influential; a
Greek-Cypriot, Nicosia-based daily of the highest standard,37 Eleftheria had
been founded in 1906 and was run by the lawyer and journalist Demosthenes
T. Stavrinidis, selling an average of 5,100 copies per day. In spite of the moderate
tone of its articles and a manifest concern to project a balanced account of
events, Eleftheria had become by 1931 “profoundly conservative”38 or nationalistic in the sense that its editors had fully embraced the cause of Enosis and presented it as the Greek-Cypriot community’s primordial political goal.
Nonetheless, the editors of Eleftheria enthusiastically endorsed the miners’
strike and conveyed their approval of its intercommunal aspect by reporting at
length on the ad hoc constitution of a fund by the miners to pay for the medical
expenses of one of their “Ottoman” (i.e., Turkish-Cypriot) colleagues, Ahmet
Necip, who had injured himself. The newspaper went to some length to present
the strike as “authentic,” quoting a Greek-Cypriot worker who reportedly said
that “the miners spontaneously and unanimously shared the desire to go on
strike” and “were not persuaded to do so by anyone [. . .].”39 The Famagusta
strike was a wholly different matter. The editors of Eleftheria thought that the
fact that it was entirely led by women was “a most unusual phenomenon in
Cyprus” that “call[ed] for special attention.” But they underscored that the
laborers could not “at heart, foster any hostile or militant spirit against their
employers [and] that their only demand [was] for employment under more
humane conditions in keeping with the spirit of Christianity.” Moreover, the
article praised the district commissioner for his “laudable endeavor [. . .] to discourage strikes as a means of expressing labor grievances” and “exhorted patience
and restraint pending the investigation of the whole labor question by
Government who should not be harassed by continuous agitation and demands
during this period of study and meditation.”40 This difference of perspective is
imputable to the presence of trade unions in the Famagusta strike. Indeed,
Eleftheria manifested a marked preference for unorganized labor agitation, the
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
201
spontaneity of which seemed to guarantee its “authenticity,” rather than for an
organized labor movement that not only appeared to be dispensing with but actually seemed to challenge the very existence of the established figures of authority
(the Church and the community’s most prosperous families) and to divert the
community’s attention from the sacrosanct nationalist cause.
However, in the second half of the 1930s, other newspapers contributed to transforming the “labor movement” into a “labor question.”41 Labor, as it were, constituted one of the only matters of societal importance that could be featured and
commented upon in the press, and the absence of any legislation on labor gave
much space for this increasingly political issue in the newspapers’ columns. By
1939, “working class,” “labor question,” and “worker” had long since been considered by the Greek-Cypriot press as valid denominations in issues involving
wage-earners of all professions. Thus in December 1935, Konstantinos
Konstantinides’ Nicosia-based Neos Kypriakos Fylax (New Cypriot Guardian) stated:
The shoemakers’ strike draws again the attention on the “labor question.”
Hundreds of “technicians” in Nicosia work 12 –14 hours a day in their shacks to
earn an insignificant wage, barely sufficient to buy the family’s dry bread . . .
This condition of the poor wage-earners deeply moves the whole society and for
this reason we recommend the enactment of laws to protect the working world
of the island, which is at the mercy of fate.
The semantic shift which leads us here from the “shoemakers” to the “working
world” through to “the poor wage earners” is pregnant with meaning; and for
the press in general, as opposed to the colonial authorities, the defining criterion
of this “labor-class” was not the occupation of its constitutive members but
rather their shared socioeconomic predicament.
Instead of resorting to repression, the colonial government should, according to Neos Kypriakos Fylax, take “radical [legislative] measures” to protect the
vulnerable workers. Newspapers and trade unions thus managed to engineer a
consensus around the existence of a problem, the labor question, which eluded
the colonial administration’s control. But the political stakes behind the “labor
question” went even further. Neos Kypriakos Fylax thus went on to observe:
The prohibition of child labor, the regulation of working time, [the implementation
of an] occupational disease and accident insurance, as well as [the introduction] of
old-age pensions are the indispensable prerequisites set by the International
Labor Organization in order to improve the worker’s daily wage. When one
thinks that these measures were recommended by conservative representatives
of purely bourgeois governments, one cannot understand the hesitation towards
their piecemeal introduction in Cyprus.42
Hence the labor question was a reality so incontrovertible as to induce “bourgeois governments,” hardly prone to revolutionary methods, to contemplate
social measures. Implicitly, the conservative Neos Kypriakos Fylax suggested
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that it was important for established authorities to deal with an issue that could
otherwise be exploited by politically motivated elements. Indeed, Neos
Kypriakos Fylax, also a Nicosia-based Greek-Cypriot daily, was even more conservative than Eleftheria. Its owner-editor, Konstantinos A. Konstantinides, was
a theologian by profession and a very close adviser of Leondios, bishop of
Paphos and Locum Tenens of the Archiepiscopal See.
It was the very implicit fear that established authorities might be challenged that led Eleftheria to state, on the occasion of the Mavrovouni strike,
that “if going on strike is a sacred right and the main means of self-defense, it
has to be exerted as a last resort, if it is to retain its credibility or avoid provoking
unnecessary damage to the employers.”43 Hence behind expressions of solidarity for the welfare of the working world hid the concern of the newspaper to
tackle the labor question without jeopardizing the existing social order or, put
differently, to get “public order” and “social justice” to coincide. Likewise, the
rationale of labor legislation should thus be less to promote the interests of
the miners than to preserve existing equilibriums and avert social conflict.
However from 1938 onward, Anexartitos (The Independent), a
Nicosia-based daily founded by left-wing Greek-Cypriot journalist Lysandros
Tsimillis, took on the labor question in a tone that clashed with the paternalism
conveyed in the articles of Eleftheria or Neos Kypriakos Fylax. Where the latter
would champion arbitration and conciliation between the workers and the
employers, Anexartitos insisted on the absolute need to protect the workers
from the “greedy appetite and vindictive dispositions of the employer.”44 The
incompatibility of the interests of the workers and of “the employer” (the singular form suggesting here a homogenized and inimical social category) became
the newspaper’s basic premise.45
Since there was nothing to be expected from the employer, workers had
only themselves to rely upon; they should organize themselves into trade
unions and use these as instruments of warfare to persuade colonial authorities
to enact all-encompassing social legislation, the primary object of which would
be to safeguard the workers’ interests, namely through the institutionalization of
collective bargaining agreements.46 Trade unions were presented as the only
efficient,47 hence legitimate, means of struggle for the workers’ cause; and, in
blatant opposition to Eleftheria, Anexartitos overtly condemned spontaneous
outbursts of discontent within the “labor class”48 or even disagreements
within one single trade union.49 Not only were wage-earners of all professions
urged to create trade unions, but Anexartitos advocated the federation of existing unions into one Pan-Cypriot Working Confederation.50
Making self-organization its watchword, the newspaper quickly claimed
exclusivity in representing the workers’ movement. “There are indications,” a
1939 secret police report stated, “that the newspaper Anexartitos is seeking to
constitute itself a sort of Labor organ [sic] in order to direct the progress of
the labor movement.”51 In actual fact, the new daily systematically gave wide
publicity to initiatives taken by existing trade unions, especially their memoranda addressed to the colonial governor.52 Even though some other newspapers
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
203
appeared to be philergatikoi, or worker-friendly, Anexartitos contended that
most of them were in fact harming the workers’ cause, particularly––as in the
case of Neos Kypriakos Fylax, which became its favorite target––when they
undertook to voice the complaints of individual workers over the heads of
their trade unions, thus compromising considerably the unity of the
“movement.”
In this contest for mastery over the “labor question” in the Greek-Cypriot
public sphere, Anexartitos distinguished itself from other newspapers in three
ways: First, its articles were often written in demotic (i.e., vernacular) Greek,
as opposed to the customary katharevousa (i.e., formal) Greek, clearly indicating an intention to speak the language of the workers; secondly, Anexartitos presented workers not as passive victims in need of the Establishment’s attention
and protection, but as active agents in the struggle for the improvement of
their own living conditions; and finally, it adopted an increasingly combative
tone against the colonial government, which it accused of being lukewarm, if
not overtly hostile, to the labor question. During the first two years of its publication, the newspaper’s prey was “the employer”; the government was depicted
as a potential ally and was repeatedly urged to enact a legislation protecting the
workers.53 This, as we will see in the last section of this paper, changed drastically in 1940, when the Colonial Office dispatched its Labor Adviser to Cyprus.
Educate, Agitate: Trade Unions, Communists, and the Constitution
of a New Public Sphere
The press’s interest in the labor question was principally motivated by two concomitant evolutions: on the one hand, the increasing frequency of strikes involving workers from different industries; on the other, the growing number of
registered trade unions submitting gradually standardized demands to the
island’s authorities in the form of written petitions and memoranda. In 1935,
there were only two registered trade unions in Cyprus;54 this number increased
to six in 1937 (with 367 members) and reached forty-six (with 2,544 members) in
1939.55 What is more, these trade unions were working closely with one another
and displayed a consistent spirit of solidarity during strikes.56 In fact, solidarity
soon gave way to real unity: On August 6, 1939, the first Pan-Cypriot Labor
Conference––presented as a prelude to a Pan-Cypriot Labor Confederation––
gathered 101 delegates of registered trade unions at the Chatzihambi Theater
of Varosha (Famagusta District). They issued a sixteen-article declaration covering social as well as political matters, from the institutionalization of collective
bargaining agreements to the granting of universal elections and freedom of
the press.57
Anexartitos was no doubt an active defender of, and also an active agent
in, the unification of all trade unions and the standardization of their
demands. A few months after it was first published in late 1938, Anexartitos
outmatched Eleftheria as the most widely diffused newspaper within the
Greek-Cypriot community, selling a daily average of 6,000 copies,58 which
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the editor made or attempted to make available in every corner of the island,
down to the mines: On March 12, 1939, the journalist Lefteris Giannides
reported that one of Anexartitos’ newsvendors was called to the police station
of Lefka where he was reprimanded for reading aloud or explaining to the
miners of Mavrovouni the contents of one of the newspaper’s articles dealing
with their predicament.59
The contributors to Anexartitos came from a variety of political horizons,
and, in fact, Lefteris Giannides had also worked with the much more conservative Neos Kypriakos Phylax and Eleftheria. Nonetheless, the more prolific
among them––who either wrote articles or submitted the texts of speeches
they made in local clubs––were communists; Anexartitos was therefore the
legal façade for illegal communists who constituted the driving force
behind the island’s main strikes, the organization of trade unions, and the
unions’ efforts toward federation. Communists had been clearly identified
in the wake of “1931” as one of the main threats, along with nationalists, to
colonial authority,60 and the Communist Party of Cyprus had been prohibited
by order-in-council in 1933.61 In 1936 a law regulating immigration
was enacted, forbidding communists’ entry into Cyprus.62 Yet in spite of
the administration’s unabated monitoring of communist activities, they
managed to organize and secretly reassemble the proscribed Communist
Party of Cyprus.
By educating and agitating, the local communists sought to create a public
domain for the quasi-proletarianized Cypriot “workers”; together with the trade
unions and the journalists––particularly Anexartitos’s contributors––they contributed to the formation of a public sphere where an actual debate took
place about important societal matters, involving persons of various political
shades, and inconspicuously reintroduced a dose of criticism against government
policy. To follow up Frederick Cooper’s analysis of the labor movement in colonial Senegal, the larger goal of left-wing politicians was to crack the rigid classification established by colonial authorities distinguishing only between “paysans
and évolués”63 and to force into the island’s sociology and legitimize the position
of a new actor, the worker.
Colonial authorities were aware that communists or communist sympathizers operated in Cyprus; in early 1938 they noted with some satisfaction that
“[t]he total number of communists registered with the Police on December 31
was 175 as compared with 185 at the end of June.”64 Yet they seemed to have
begun to suspect the importance of an “external influence” rather late,
around November 1939, when Governor Sir William Denis Battershill reported
the discovery of local “pencil manuscripts” designed to combat Trotskyism and
defend Stalin’s policies.65 Under Battershill’s predecessor, Governor Sir
Herbert Richmond Palmer, the colonial administration had officially acknowledged communist influence behind the trade union movement but systematically downplayed its importance. The reason for this, as the following section
suggests, was that Palmer and his aides had invested all of the administration’s
efforts and resources into a wholly different policy, namely the fight against
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
205
nationalism; labor in these circumstances constituted for them a dangerous
diversion.
Agricultural Development vs. Labor Organization: The Anti-politics
Machinery66
The idea of adopting an official labor policy in response to the bubbling activity
in the press had always met with strong reservations by the Cyprus government.
With regard to the female strike at the cotton factory in Famagusta, Governor
Palmer wrote: “[I]t would be the greatest mistake to draw wild inferences
from the rather peculiar case of Ioannou at Famagusta and the report about it
which may have appeared.”67 The governor was even more explicit in his
secret dispatch to the secretary of state:
In Cyprus it is exceedingly difficult to differentiate between “labor questions” or
“labor agitation” of a genuine type or founded on any real grievance, and the political ends or purposes for which manufactured labor agitation [was] very commonly used as a cloak.68
Labor, according to Palmer, was a fabrication. What his administration rejected
was what they perceived as the intentional and malignant amalgamation by the
Greek-Cypriot press of different social realities under the broader notion of
labor. Thus, while the 1931 census meticulously grouped the 134,279 men and
women employed or self-employed in the private sector into thirty-two occupational categories, only one––accounting for roughly 2.4 percent of the
total––was given the label “other laborers in mines and quarries.”69 Indeed,
according to Palmer, the only corps of workers that could “in any real sense
be termed ‘Labor,’ and, as such, [was] capable of combination into genuine
‘Trade Unions’ for legitimate purposes” was “a certain proportion of the
skilled and semi-skilled Labor employed in the mines.”70
According to Governor Palmer’s rationale, if no “real” labor class existed,
then trade unions were superfluous at best, suspicious at worst. Indeed, ever
since the 1931 Greek-Cypriot uprising, colonial authorities in Cyprus felt very
mistrustful of local claims to collective self-representation. Any claim to such
representation was understood by colonial authorities as politically-laden and
became inadmissible, especially if it was given any form of publicity. In this
context, acknowledging the statements published in the press or the claims of
trade unions as to the existence of a labor question, entailed the risk of officially
establishing them as public (i.e., political) intermediaries; a telling illustration of
this climate was that newspaper articles appealing for the enactment of labor
legislation were placed in the press officer’s report under the head “agitation.”71
What exactly was thought to be the purpose of “labor agitation” and who
precisely were believed to be its masterminds are not always clear in the official
correspondence. In his annual report for 1938, the district commissioner of
Famagusta stated that “[a]s to Communists, the Police have had to admit that
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their registered reds [communists] gave no sign of communistic activity but confined their efforts to furthering the Labor movement in a perfectly legitimate
manner.”72 However, in his official correspondence with the metropolis,
Palmer never linked the labor question with communism. A probable reason
for this is that communism was, by the mid-thirties, considered overpowered;
thus the quarterly or annual reports on the political situation in Cyprus for
the years 1937 and 1939 stated that there was little or no communist activity
in the island thanks to the vigilance of the police.73
For Palmer and his aides, the driving force behind the labor agitation was
to be looked for elsewhere, namely among nationalist agitators. Replying to
Assistant Undersecretary of State for the Colonies A. B. Acheson, who
suggested Cyprus might draw its inspiration for labor legislation from other
colonies, the governor stated that “there [was] no other Colony in which
there [was] anything like the standing danger of Enosis and, to some extent
Kemalism ready all the time to exploit [. . .] anything of the nature of a Labor
Department if that Department were outside and above District
Administration.”74
The reference to Kemalism, namely the attachment of certain
Turkish-Cypriots to the national policies of Mustapha Kemal Atatürk in
Turkey, is one of the very few occurrences where Turkish-Cypriots are specifically designated as potential actors of the labor movement; in the overwhelming
majority of cases, the latter was considered by colonial authorities as a
Greek-Cypriot artifact, and it was this view that gained currency at the
Colonial Office in London. Thus principal Duncan L. P. Tovey could write
that “in the special conditions in Cyprus, there [would] be a strong tendency
for any labor movement to assume a political aspect: and to a Cypriot, politics
mean agitation against British rule in favour of the Union of Cyprus to
Greece.”75 The real standing danger would be the emergence of a centralized
labor organization (a sort of Cypriot Trades Union Congress), “a form of organization which would be far more dangerous because it would inevitably become
political”;76 and the administration did all it possibly could to pre-empt the federation of trade unions, be it through speeches directly addressed by the district
commissioners to the workers,77 or, as already mentioned, by the refusal to
allow the formation of trade unions in the mines, which attracted an ominously
dense labor population.
This equivalency drawn between trade unionism and nationalism probably
accounts for the fact that colonial authorities did not linger over the very specific
features of labor discontent, namely its intercommunal and cross-gendered
aspects, which distinguished labor unrest from the Greek-Cypriot, male, and
bourgeois outlook of nationalist enosist activism. But such imperviousness on
the part of the Cyprus colonial government was not necessarily due to its misapprehension of labor discontent; rather, the governors thought the labor question threatened to drain the energies and resources allocated for their two main
policy goals, namely the development of agriculture on the one hand, and the
strengthening of district administration on the other.
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
207
In 1930, the Cyprus Government published in a Survey of Rural Life in
Cyprus the results of one of their most thorough and detailed socioeconomic
studies of the local population, which would contribute decisively to establishing
Cyprus as a peasant society.78 In 1935, the financial commissioner’s report would
further validate this representation by devoting its main recommendations to
the issue of agricultural indebtedness.79 “The labor problem which is of most
immediate concern,” Governor Palmer wrote, “is the settlement of the [agricultural] debt question, because nine-tenths of the miners are really farmers, and if
it were not for debt could commune almost any wages.”80 Labor, according to
this rationale, was the abnormal outgrowth of an unhealthy agriculture; and
miners were first and foremost indebted farmers who were compelled to sell
their mortgaged land to honor their debts. In these circumstances, dealing
with labor meant above all grasping this “genuine” identity of miners;
thereupon the administration’s attention and resources should be focused not
“downstream” (i.e., on the miners who were the consequence of the problem)
but “upstream” (i.e., on the nature of the problem of agricultural indebtedness).
Throughout the 1930s, the colonial administration deployed a far-reaching
activity to assist the development of agriculture and promote the farmers’ wellbeing. Already in 1925 an agricultural bank had been created in order to provide
credit at a low interest rate to farmers, and it was subsequently reformed in
1937.81 In 1934 a registrar of cooperative and cooperative credit societies was
appointed to bolster the farmers’ financial autonomy82 and in 1936 was made
the head of a separate department.83 An important step was taken in early
1940 with the appointment of an Agricultural Debt Settlement Board; its
powers were quasi-juridical and its rulings, which could not be appealed, were
“as a general rule” more accommodating to the farmer than to the creditor.84
In contradistinction to this hyperactivity in the domain of agriculture, the colonial government confined itself, in the other economic sectors, to the promulgation of ad hoc legislation exemplified by the 1928 “Protection of Female
Domestics” and “Employment of Young Persons and Children”85 laws and
the 1937 “Trades and Industries (Public Health) Regulation” law.86
Aside from the fact that the overwhelming majority of Cypriots were
involved in “agricultural occupations,” there were also political reasons for
the primacy given to agriculture in the administration’s developmental
policy. Over the years, the urban moneylender––a merchant, a lawyer, or a
medical doctor by profession––came to represent for colonial authorities the
ultimate adversary, an opponent commanding his debtors’ allegiance
through a vast client network animated by financial leverage;87 and since
many Greek-Cypriot nationalist leaders were merchants, lawyers, or medical
doctors, these categories––nationalist and moneylender––ended up overlapping in the eyes of colonial administrators.88 Colonial authorities were thus
very keen on curbing the moneylender’s financial and political influence on
the indebted farmer; and this objective found its paramount expression in a
constitution drafted by the Cyprus government in 1930––though never put
into practice––the aim of which was to “free [. . .] the peasantry, who are
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Cyprus, from the shackles in which they are bound and giv[e] them a free voice
in the Government . . . [by] circumventing the professional politician.”89
The reasons behind the thorough involvement of the colonial administration in the agricultural sector were the same as those commanding their noninvolvement in the labor sector. In both cases, the attention of the colonial
administration was set on potential leverages. In the first case, agriculture, the
objective was to sever the leverage of the creditor on the debtor; in the
second, labor, the idea was to avoid strengthening the leverage of the trade
union on the worker. The logic was always the same, namely, to sever, freeze,
or merely contain intra-Cypriot power relations likely to elude the reach of
the colonial administration.
But there was more to it. Palmer’s successor, Governor Battershill
(1939– 1941), believed that refraining from tackling the agricultural problem
“would go far to shatter the confidence which the peasantry has slowly but
surely gained in the Government . . . and would likely have far-reaching and
deplorable effects.”90 Hence, the peasantry, a world at least as heteroclite as
the labor class, was established as a homogenized silent majority whose confidence became the repository of the colonial government’s legitimacy. In
post-1931 Cyprus, the geographical as well as social dichotomy opposing the disaffected urban elements to the loyal rural majority shaped an administrative
policy that Palmer called “decentralization.” Under Palmer’s regime
(1933– 1939), the powers of the six district commissioners (i.e., the executive
officials each governing one of the six districts administratively dividing
the island) were greatly enhanced, to the point of encroaching upon those of
the police91 and the justice departments.92 In these circumstances, a labor
policy which would rely on a central labor department was considered by
Palmer a deadly threat to the administration’s grip on the country because “it
[was] difficult at one and the same time to pursue a policy of decentralization
. . . and simultaneously keep adding to the incubus of centralized control by
means of new departments. These two methods seem[ed] mutually contradictory and mutually destructive one of the other.”93 Instead, Palmer believed
that “[i]f we have competent commissioners, it is they who are in the best position to advise government as to facts and all the complicated circumstances,
political or otherwise, that play their part in affairs the press may designate
labour.”94
Giving Birth to the Trade Union Infant or Taming the Labor Hydrae
In spite of the forceful way in which they tried to convey the impression of labor
as a “standing danger,” the Cyprus government failed to convince the Colonial
Office. In the late 1930s, the “labor question” was hardly a Cypriot exception
and had become the British government’s “daily bread” in the wake of social
unrest in Britain (two to three million unemployed between 1931–1935)95 and
throughout her Empire. Labor troubles in the dependencies, from the Northern
Rhodesian copper-belt strikes of 193596 to the Mauritian agricultural labor
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
209
disturbances of 1937 and 1938,97 reached an apex with the May-June 1938
plantation-worker riots in Jamaica.98 The riots and other labor disturbances
within the Empire brought some changes in both the organization of the
Colonial Office and its policymaking.99 As an instance of the latter, the advice of
the British Trades Union Congress was sometimes sought;100 in fact, its secretary
general, Sir Walter Citrine, was a member of the Royal Commission that inquired
into the Jamaican riots.101 Moreover, within the Colonial Office, “a Social Services
Department was established with G. M. Clauson as its secretary.”102 Hence the
influence of new “labor experts,” such as Clauson and J. G. Hibbert, responsible
for a labor section in the general department of the Colonial Office, grew.
The pregnancy of this wider imperial context can be inferred from the numerous references, in the Colonial Office minutes dealing with Cyprus, to labor policies
prescribed for other colonies, especially the West Indies.103 This political context
incited officials in the metropolis to considerably qualify Palmer’s theory according
to which Cyprus constituted a case sui generis where “‘models’ and ‘ideas’ brought
from outside”104 were hardly applicable.105 Generally, officials at the Colonial
Office thought that “labor questions [in Cyprus couldn’t] wait.”106
If the need to intervene in Cyprus was unanimously shared in the Colonial
Office, no such consensus existed as to the shape this intervention might take.
Broadly speaking, the routes contemplated by the Colonial Office were three:
to abstain altogether from interfering; to encourage regional, as opposed to
central, labor organization; or to educate Cypriot trade unionists in England
to allow them to form their own Trade Union Council.107 However this latter
course did not meet many partisans at the Colonial Office; in fact, most officials
at Downing Street shared to an extent the governor’s concern with regard to the
potential politicization of the labor question in Cyprus.108 Ultimately, the only
policy the Colonial Office could agree on was to “temporize” until Palmer
ended his term in Cyprus,109 since it was believed and hoped that “his successor
may well take a different view.”110
When Palmer retired in May 1939, the Colonial Office found in his successors
more tractable interlocutors, and talks were opened to appoint a Labor Adviser.
The latter would be detached from the Ministry of Labor, although it was understood that he should not hold any executive functions.111 Furthermore, his role
would be to encourage trade unions in Cyprus to limit their action within the
frame of their specific trade and to discourage them from forming any
Pan-Cypriot trade union federation; in other words, the Labor Adviser’s duty
would be to see that trade unions remained regionally circumscribed and professionally fragmented. Finally, the Labor Adviser would not head an independent
department, and he would only provide technical guidance to district commissioners who were ultimately responsible for “the administration of labor.”112
The growing intensity of the confrontation between workers and the colonial
government––forty persons were arrested in March 1940––and, of course, the
beginning of the war, which made the Cyprus Government extremely sensitive
on the question of public order, rushed the procedure: in May 1940 William
Johnson Hull, officer third class at the Ministry of Labor, was officially appointed.
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Hull was charged with a heavy task, namely with helping the governor to
draft a program of legislation with the following proposals: the replacement of
the existing trade union legislation with a law on the lines of the Leeward
Islands Act 16 of 1939; a minimum wage law; a trade disputes (arbitration and
inquiry) law on the lines of that enacted in Trinidad; a workman’s compensation
law; and a factories law, the inspiration for which could be found in the Jamaica
Factories law.113 In other words, contrary to Palmer’s wishes, legislation would
incorporate to a large degree “models and ideas” imported “from outside.”
What is remarkable about the debate on labor in Cyprus at the Colonial
Office is the absolute centrality of politics. At no point is there any substantial
attempt at assessing the labor situation as such. Notoriously meticulous when
dealing with issues such as agriculture or market trends and an avid consumer
of statistics on both these subjects, the Colonial Office did not ask the Cyprus
government for any systematic survey of other sectors involving the island’s
working population. The Labor Adviser, originally supposed to educate
Cypriot trade unions, was in fact hired as a technical expert responsible for
advising the government on the labor question and on the “authenticity,” or
lack thereof, of any given strike or trade union. The stand of colonial authorities
in this respect, whether local or metropolitan, is reminiscent of the one
described by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his seminal essay on the Calcutta jute
workers; in both cases, to the “official mind, labor conditions deserved investigation only when they posed law and order problems.”114
“Class” against “Colonial Ruler”: A Centralized Labor Movement Faces a
Centralized (Government) Labor Management
At first Anexartitos interpreted the appointment of a Labor Adviser as a sign
that colonial authorities were ready to acknowledge the existence of a labor
problem and to act upon it; the newspaper went as far as to depict the Labor
Adviser as the advocate of the trade unions in their dealings with the colonial
government, a spokesman of the workers assisting them in obtaining recognition
and respect as both employees and full members of the society.115 But when the
Labor Adviser explicitly declined to take on any such role,116 Anexartitos
denounced the authorities’ aloofness:
Mr. Hull [the Labor Adviser] sees the Cypriot working class and studies its claims
not under the Cypriot sky, not inside Cypriot reality, but through the lens of the
English mentality, projecting them on the screen of the developed English labor
reality. Mr. Hull could not escape from the influence of the local official bias
which turns against every demonstration of the Cypriot working class.117
Hence the problem remained fundamentally circular; while journalists disparaged the colonial officials’ aloofness, the latter in turn believed that, in
Hannah Arendt’s words, “[i]ntegrity and aloofness were symbols for an absolute
division of interests to the point where they [were] not even permitted to
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
211
conflict.”118 More specifically, for Anexartitos, the disillusion brought by the
Labor Adviser meant that the last link between an estranged and suspicious
government and an increasingly dissatisfied working class was broken.
Changes were thus to be instigated by the workers themselves who, organized
into trade unions, became bearers of a new social project. Systematically
encouraging the various and eventually successful attempts at establishing a
Pan-Cypriot confederation of trade unions (November 1941),119 Anexartitos
was also the only Cypriot daily to add the granting of political rights to the
workers to the usual requests for the enactment of social legislation echoed in
other newspapers: “the working class [should] be represented in the administration of the country, and the labor representatives [should] be elected by
the people.”120
The extent of the successful legitimation, through the effects of the trade
unions and the press, of the labor semantic field is neatly suggested by an islandwide movement of petitions that began in the spring of 1939.121 These petitions,
emanating from most Cypriot villages, were submitted to the colonial governor
and their central request was full-fledged self-government for the island. The
most interesting feature of the petitions is the evolution of the signatures
appended to them. Signatures were important to the organizers of the movement themselves since they mentioned the signatory’s occupation, admittedly
with the intention to show colonial authorities the genuinely rural and
popular origin of the petitions. And, whereas the signatories of the first petitions
identified themselves with the traditional name of their craft––shoemaker,
weaver, barber122––subsequent petitioners used the generic term “workman”
to define themselves.123 A striking illustration of the efficacy of this new identity
is the fact that later petitions included signatures of Turkish-Cypriots and
women.124 But whether this movement was spontaneous or not is not, contrary
to what colonial authorities believed, of immediate relevance: What matters is
that people throughout the island were involved or involved themselves in a
conscious process of construction of a “working-class” allegiance.
The divorce between the labor movement on the one hand and colonial
authorities on the other took its full magnitude in 1941. In January of that
year, Governor Battershill, departing from Palmer’s policy, informed the
Colonial officials––to their surprise––of his intention to create a central Labor
Department, though he would entrust it to a tried administrative officer;125
three months later, on April 14, 1941, thirty-five delegates––including numerous
communists but also non-party members such as the editor of Anexartitos,
Lysandros Tsimillis––gathered at Skarinou (Larnaca district) and issued the
program of the Progressive Party of the Working People (AKEL), which
included a clause calling for the end of British rule on the island.126
Conclusion: Labor Lexicology and Group Solidarity
The colonial authorities’ refusal to acknowledge the “labor question” as a
problem that required their attention and legislative intervention allowed the
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press and the public sphere (clubs, trade unions) to seize the matter and create a
public debate around it. Indeed the “labor movement” became a “labor question,” generating a debate in the Cypriot public sphere between different understandings of the place of the working class within society. This debate
contributed significantly to bringing a whole new vocabulary––notions such as
“workers,” “working class” and “labor”––into common usage. The purpose of
this overarching vocabulary, encompassing wage-earners of various extractions,
was to defy the usual and official colonial categories (the peasant and the babu)
and hence thwart the Cyprus government’s quest for social transparency, which
in itself was considered a prerequisite for the efficient surveillance, hence rule, of
Cypriot society. To this extent, the activity of the driving force behind this
debate, the communist-led trade unions, was a success.
But it was also partly a failure. The connection labor activists sought to
establish was that, for instance, a Greek-Cypriot female worker in the
Famagusta cotton factory and a Turkish-Cypriot male miner in Mavrovouni,
would both claim the common identity of “worker.” Nevertheless, the labor
movement during the 1930s, and the Progressive Party of the Working People
(AKEL), remained a Greek-Cypriot, if “proletarian,” affair. Although
Turkish-Cypriots individually participated in the movement, the bulk of the
community remained uninvolved. Thus, even though the Greek-Cypriot-led
labor movement had seriously undermined the nationalists’ predominance, its
project failed to convince the Turkish-Cypriot community.
NOTES
I wish to thank my colleagues Georges B. Dertilis, Diogo R. Curto, Gunvor Simonsen,
Hanna Sonkajarvi and Evi Gkotzaridis, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
1. Sir Ralph Oakden, Report on the Finances and Economic Resources of Cyprus,
Government of Cyprus, 1935, 105.
2. National Archives, London, Colonial Office, Cyprus, Original Correspondence (henceforth CO 67), CO 67/278/6 Cyprus: Activities of the Cypriot Press, June– July 1937. Secret report
of the press officer, enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch, July 1, 1937.
3. Sir Ralph Oakden, Report, 5.
4. Ibid., 104–132.
5. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Cyprus, Nicosia,
Government of Cyprus Printer, 1936, 26.
6. Larry Butler, “Industrialisation in Late Colonial Africa. A British Perspective,”
Itinerario 23 (1999):123 –135, here 125.
7. Georgios S. Georghallides, Cyprus and the Governorship of Sir Ronald Storrs: The
Causes of the 1931 Crisis (Nicosia, 1985). Diana Markides and Georgios S. Georghallides,
“British Attitudes to Constitution-Making in Post-1931 Cyprus,” Journal of Modern Greek
Studies 13 (1995):63– 81.
8. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a
Bourgeois World (Berkeley, 1997), 18.
9. My understanding of the public sphere in this paper is inspired by Craig Calhoun and
refers to public rational-critical debates around issues of societal importance and implying a
wider variety of private individuals than in Habermas’s use of the term. See Craig Calhoun,
“Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed.,
Craig Calhoun (Cambridge MA, 1992), 1– 45, here 3.
10. Sir Ralph Oakden, Report, 11.
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
213
11. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Cyprus 1933,
London, His Majesty’s Stationary Office, 11.
12. Sir Ralph Oakden, Report, 11-26.
13. Cyprus. Report of the Census of 1931, prepared by C. H. Hart-Davis, superintendent
of the census, Nicosia, Government Printer, 1932, 14–16.
14. Cyprus. Census of Population and Agriculture 1946. Report and Tables prepared by
D. A. Percival, colonial administrative service, superintendent of the census, London, Crown
Agents for the Colonies, 65.
15. François Crouzet, Le Conflit de Chypre 1946–1959 vol.1 (Brussels, 1973), 68.
16. Anexartitos (Nicosia-based, Greek-Cypriot daily newspaper), June 17, 1939.
17. Eleftheria (Nicosia-based, Greek-Cypriot daily newspaper), June 21, 1938.
18. Scott Atran, “The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917– 1939,” American
Ethnologist 16 (1989): 737.
19. David Lavender, The Story of the Cyprus Mines Corporation (San Marino CA, 1962),
79, 110, 120, 177.
20. Lavender, The Story, 118.
21. Lavender, The Story, 237; Sir Ralph Oakden, Report, 21; Neos Kypriakos Fylax
(Nicosia-based, Greek-Cypriot daily newspaper), September 13, 1936.
22. Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the People of Cyprus 1933,
London, HSMO, 28. 540 piastres equals £3.
23. Statistics drawn from Annual Report on the Social and Economic Progress of the
People of Cyprus 1933 and 1936, 29 and 28 respectively.
24. Eleftheria, September 1, 1936.
25. Michalis Michaelides, “The Turkish Cypriot Working-Class and the Cyprus Labour
Movement, 1920– 1963,” The Cyprus Review 5 (1993):33–57, here 39.
26. Eleftheria, September 11, 1936.
27. Lavender, The Story, 108.
28. CO 67/277/15, Cyprus. Administrative and Political Reports for Various Districts,
1937. Report of the district commissioner of Famagusta for June 1937, enclosure to governor’s
secret dispatch, July 8, 1937.
29. Oakden (Report, 22) reports that there were 63 cotton ginneries in Cyprus in 1933,
employing a total daily labor of 97.
30. CO 67/291/4, Famagusta Cotton Factory. Strike At- 1938, report of the district commissioner, Famagusta, to the colonial secretary, Cyprus, June 7, 1938, enclosure to governor’s dispatch to the secretary of state for the colonies, June 11, 1938.
31. CO 67/291/4, extract from English-language Cypriot newspaper Embros of July 21,
1938.
32. CO 67/291/4, the extract of the aforementioned English-language newspaper Embros
states that “[t]he accused were former workers at the mills (. . .).”
33. Jan Asmussen writes that 252 villages were intercommunal in 1931; see “Life and Strife
in Mixed Villages: Some Aspects of Inter-Ethnic Relations in Cyprus Under British Rule,” The
Cyprus Review 8 (1996):101-110, here 102.
34. CO 67/299/2, Cyprus: Political Situation February 1939 to April 1940. Extract from
monthly report on the Nicosia and Kyrenia districts for March 1939 by the commissioner,
enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch, April 20, 1939.
35. Supplement No. 1 to The Cyprus Gazette No. 2223 of June 10, 1932, “A Law to Amend
the Newspaper, Book and Printing Presses Law, 1930,” 2– 3.
36. The Cyprus Blue Books of Statistics for the Year 1937, 218.
37. CO 67/299/2. In his monthly report for March 1939, the district commissioner of Nicosia
wrote that D. Stavrinides was “an exception” and of “a higher standard of intelligence,” Section 1
“Political” (b), enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch, April 20, 1939.
38. Georghallides, Cyprus and the Governorship, 201.
39. Eleftheria, September 1, 1936.
40. CO 67/291/4, Resume of leading article in Eleftheria, June 6, 1938, enclosure to governor’s dispatch to the secretary of state for the colonies, June 11, 1938.
41. CO 67/299/2, “Secret. The Political Situation in Cyprus from the 1st April to the 30th
June, 1939,” enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch, July 7, 1939.
42. Both extracts in Neos Kypriakos Fylax, December 3, 1935.
43. Eleftheria, September 15, 1936.
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ILWCH, 76, Fall 2009
44. Anexartitos, June 6, 1939.
45. Anexartitos, June 6, 1939 and ibid., August 5, 1939.
46. Anexartitos, July 14, 1939.
47. See series of articles Anexartitos, May 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, 1939.
48. Anexartitos, December 12, 1938.
49. Anexartitos, December 15, 1940.
50. Anexartitos, May 20 and 21, 1939, and July 14, 1939. See also CO 67/299/2, secret
report, enclosure in Governor’s secret dispatch, October 13, 1939.
51. CO 67/299/2, “Secret. The Political Situation in Cyprus from the 1st April to the 30th
June, 1939”, enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch, July 7, 1939.
52. Anexartitos, March 8, 29, 30, and June 30, 1939; ibid., February 13, 22, March 6, and
August 1, 1940.
53. Anexartitos, March 12, April 1, and June 6, 1939; ibid., January 17, 1940.
54. Michalakis Ioannou, “I Exelixi tou Syndikalismou stin Kypro (The Evolution of Trade
Unionism in Cyprus),” in Kypriaka 1878–1955. Dialexeis Laı̈kou Panepistimiou No. 2 (Cypriot
Issues. Proceedings of the Conference of the Popular University 2), ed., G.K. Ioannides (Nicosia,
1986), 114.
55. CO 67/305/5, Cyprus: Appointment of a Labor Adviser, 1939. J. G. Hibbert, minute,
December 6, 1939. See also Crouzet, Le Conflit, 135– 138 and Nicos Peristianis, “To Kinima
tis Aristeras kai I Dekaetia tis Vatheias Diairesis ton Ellinokyprion (The Left-Wing
Movement and the Decade of Deep Division of the Greek-Cypriots),” in O Fifis Ioannou,
I Aristera kai to Kypriako (Fifis Ioannou, the Left and the Cypriot Question), ed., Nicos
Peristianis (Nicosia, 2004), xxiv.
56. Anexartitos, March 30, 1939; ibid. March 6, 1940.
57. Anexartitos, July 8, 1939. For the “building-up” to the Conference, ibid., May 20 and 21,
1939 and ibid., June 12 and August 8, 1939.
58. The Cyprus Blue Book of Statistics for the Year 1938, 228.
59. Lefteris Giannides, “Oi Metallorychoi [The miners],” in Anexartitos, March 12, 1939.
60. CO 67/253/4 Cyprus. Political Situation 1934, “Cyprus. Memorandum by Sir R. E.
Stubbs,” October 16, 1933.
61. The Cyprus Gazette (No. 2320, Friday October 27, 1933), “Order-In-Council No. 1543
Made Under the Cyprus Criminal Code, 1928 to 1933,” 534.
62. Eleftheria, April 18, 1936.
63. Frederick Cooper, “Our Strike: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the French
West African Railway Strike of 1947– 1948,” Journal of African History 37 (1996): 81– 118,
here 83.
64. CO 67/274/5, Cyprus. Political Situation. Quarterly Reports Jan. 1937– 1938, The
Political Situation in Cyprus from November 1 to December 31, 1937, enclosure to governor’s
secret dispatch, January 21, 1938.
65. CO 67/299/2, Governor’s secret dispatch, November 14, 1939.
66. The title of this section is inspired by James Ferguson’s The Anti-politics Machine.
“Development,” Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge, 1990).
67. CO 67/291/9, Cyprus: Labor Adviser Vacancy 1938. Governor’s semi-private letter to
A.B. Acheson, August 11, 1938.
68. CO 67/291/9, Governor’s secret dispatch to the secretary of state, July 6, 1938. Italics
added, “real” underlined in the text.
69. Cyprus. Report of the Census of 1931, prepared by C. H. Hart-Davis, Superintendent of
the Census, Nicosia, Government Printer, 1932, 14– 15.
70. CO 67/305/5, Governor’s secret dispatch, March 3, 1939.
71. CO 67/278/6 Cyprus. Activities of the Cypriot Press. June–July 1937, secret report of
the press officer to the colonial secretary, 30 June 1937, enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch,
July 1, 1937.
72. CO 67/299/2, Extract from the annual report of the district commissioner, Famagusta,
for 1938, enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch, March 10, 1939.
73. Respectively, CO 67/274/5 and CO 67/299/2 (annual reports from district
commissioners).
74. CO 67/291/9, Governor’s semi-private letter to A. B. Acheson, August 14, 1938.
75. CO 67/291/9, D. L. Tovey, Colonial Office, letter to F. W. Legett, Ministry of Labor,
October 5, 1938.
The Labor Question in Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941
215
76. CO 67/274/5, Secret political report in respect of the period of two months which ended
on June 30, 1937, enclosure to governor’s secret dispatch, July 16, 1937.
77. Anexartitos, April 7, 1939.
78. B. J. Surridge, district commissioner of Larnaca, Survey of Rural Life in Cyprus,
Nicosia, Government Printer, 1930.
79. Sir Ralph Oakden, Report, 5.
80. CO 67/291/9, Governor’s semi-official letter to A. B. Acheson, August 11, 1938.
81. CO 67/274/3, Cyprus: Agricultural Bank, 1937, governor’s confidential dispatch No. 3,
November 26, 1937.
82. CO 67/257/16, Cyprus: Cooperative Credit Societies: Appointment of a Registrar,
1934. Secretary of state for the colonies, confidential dispatch to the governor of Cyprus,
November 19, 1934.
83. Kyriakos Agkastiniotis, O Synergatismos. Gennisis kai Anaptyxis tou en Kypro
(Cooperation. Its Birth and Evolution in Cyprus) (Nicosia, 1965), 62–64.
84. CO 67/309/6, Cyprus: Appointments to the Debt Settlement Board, 1940. Governor,
confidential dispatch, February 9, 1940.
85. CO 67/247/9, Cyprus: Survey of the Administrative, Economic and General
Development of the Colony, 1927– 1932. Governor, official dispatch No. 272 of June 9, 1932.
See also Surridge, Survey, 27.
86. CO 67/291/9, governor’s secret dispatch, July 6, 1938, same file A. B. Acheson,
Colonial Office memorandum, August 12, 1938.
87. Hubert Faustmann, “Clientelism in the Greek Cypriot Community of Cyprus Under
British Rule,” The Cyprus Review 10 (1998): 41– 77.
88. An occurrence most vividly expressed by Governor Sir Ronald Storrs (1927– 1932) in
his memoirs, Orientations (London, 1937), 553.
89. CO 67/233/14 Cyprus: Question of Revision of the Constitution 1930, Cyprus government memorandum, enclosure to Governor Storrs’ confidential letter to Sir John
Shuckburgh, assistant undersecretary of state for the colonies, February 12, 1930.
90. CO 67/309/6, Cyprus: Appointments to the Debt Settlement Board, 1940. Governor,
confidential dispatch, February 9, 1940.
91. CO 67/264/10, Cyprus: Constitutional Situation, May 1936– Jan. 1937. Governor, secret
dispatch to secretary of state, May 15, 1936.
92. Eleftheria, August 15, 1936.
93. CO 67/305/5, governor, semi-official letter to A. B. Acheson, assistant undersecretary
of state for the colonies, March 1, 1939.
94. CO 67/291/9, governor, semi-official letter, to Acheson, August 11, 1938.
95. Andrew Thorpe, Britain in the 1930s. The Deceptive Decade (Oxford, 1992), 14; Sarah
Vickerstaff and John Sheldrake, The Limits of Corporatism. The British Experience in the
Twentieth Century, (Aldershot, 1989), 27.
96. David Killingray, “The Maintenance of Law and Order in British Colonial Africa,”
African Affairs, 85 (1986), 411– 437, here 435.
97. Matthew Lange, “Embedding the Colonial State. A Comparative-Historical Analysis
of State Building and Broad-Based Development in Mauritius,” Social Science History, 27
(2003), 397– 423, here 408.
98. Marjorie Nicholson, The TUC Overseas: The Roots of Policy, (London, 1986), 199,
201–206 and 223. See also David Meredith, “The British Government and Colonial
Economic Policy, 1919–1939,” The Economic History Review 28 (1975), 484–499, here 484.
99. J. M. Lee and Martin Petter, The Colonial Office, War, and Development Policy.
Organisation and the Planning of a Metropolitan Initiative, 1939– 1945, (London, 1982), 29.
100. Ross M. Martin, TUC: The Growth of a Pressure Group, 1868–1976, (Oxford, 1980), 239.
101. Lee and Petter, The Colonial Office, 39, 43 and Nicholson, The TUC Overseas, 199.
102. Nicholson, The TUC Overseas, 199 and Lee and Petter, The Colonial Office, 31– 32.
See also Neal R. Malmsten, “British Government Policy toward Colonial Development,
1919– 39,” The Journal of Modern History 49(1977), D1249–D1287, here D1279– D1282.
103. CO 67/305/5, A. B. Acheson, minute, October 5, 1939 (referring to situation in
Mauritius), J. Hibbert, minute, December 6, 1939 (referring to measures proposed for
Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana); CO 67/315/5, Cyprus. Post of Labour Adviser 1941,
J. Hibbert, minute, January 30, 1941, same official, minute, March 17, 1941 (referring to situation
in West Africa and West Indies).
216
ILWCH, 76, Fall 2009
104. CO 67/291/9, Governor’s semi-official letter to A. B. Acheson, August 11, 1938.
105. CO 67/291/1, A. B. Acheson, memorandum, August 12, 1938.
106. CO 67/305/5, J. B. Williams, minute, February 8, 1939.
107. CO 67/291/1, A. B. Acheson, memorandum, August 12, 1938.
108. CO 67/305/5, G. M. L. Clauson, minute, May 23, 1939.
109. CO 67/291/1, A. B. Acheson, memorandum, August 12, 1939; CO 67/305/5,
J.B. Williams, minute, February 8, 1939; same file, R. W. Barlow, minute, March 17, 1939.
110. CO 67/291/1, A.B. Acheson, memorandum, August 12, 1939.
111. CO 67/305/5, Acheson, minute March 23, 1939.
112. CO 67/305/5, “Particulars of the Office of Labor Adviser Now Vacant in the Colony
of Cyprus,” enclosure to acting governor’s official dispatch No. 298, June 29, 1939.
113. CO 67/309/10, Cyprus. Appointments to the debt settlement board 1940. Secretary
of state’s saving telegram No. 42, October 31, 1940, to governor of Cyprus.
114. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions:
Employers, Government and the Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1890– 1940,” in Selected Subaltern
Studies, ed., Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New Delhi, 1988), 179– 230,
here 191.
115. Anexartitos, October 15, 1940.
116. Anexartitos, January 28, 1941.
117. Anexartitos, February 12, 1941.
118. Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York, 2004), 275.
119. Crouzet, Le Conflit, 138.
120. Anexartitos, October 23, 1940.
121. Anexartitos, July 11 and 12, 1939. See also CO 67/299/2, A. B. Acheson, Colonial
Office, minute, July 28, 1939; ibid. A. B. Acheson, minute, November 13, 1939.
122. See, for instance, Archives of the Ministry of Justice, Cyprus, SA1/738/1939/1
Constitutional Liberties. Petitions for the grant of––”. Petition signed by 398 inhabitants of the
village of Lapithos, Kyrenia district, May 8, 1939.
123. See, for instance, SA1/738/1939/3, petition signed by 177 inhabitants of the village
of Kambos, Nicosia district, November 27, 1942.
124. SA1/738/1939/1, petition signed by 398 inhabitants of the village of Lapithos,
Kyrenia district, May 8, 1939, including twenty-eight Turkish-Cypriot signatures. SA1/738/
1939/3, petition signed by 177 of the village of Kambos, Nicosia district, November 27, 1942,
including forty-six signatures of women.
125. CO 67/315/5, Governor’s secret telegram No. 26, January 27, 1941.
126. Anexartitos, 16 and 17 April 1941.