The Uncharted World of Cypriot Colonial Servants
and the Ideological Foundations of British Rule
ALEXIS RAPPAS*
Abstract
As historical and anthropological studies show, British colonial rule contributed decisively to the
institutionalisation, politicisation and deterioration of intercommunal differences in Cyprus.
However at the same time as British colonial authorities implemented divisive policies, they
created one institution necessitating the smooth cooperation between Greek and Turkish
Cypriots: the colonial bureaucracy, the structure and function of which remains understudied.
Based on the cases of three Cypriots appealing against their dismissal from the colonial civil service,
this paper argues that exploring the uncharted world of ‘native’ employees provides important
insights into the inconsistencies underpinning British rule. Indeed, the debates prompted by the
dismissal procedures shows that notions such as ‘nationality’, ‘loyalty’, ‘legality’ and ‘civilisation’
constituting the ideological foundations of colonial rule are rather indeterminate. The article
makes a case for the study of subaltern Cypriots as a vantage point to explore the points of
articulation and cross-fertilisation between colonial morality and local self-representations.
Keywords: colonialism, interethnic conflict, subaltern studies, microhistory
Between Colonialism and Nationalism: In Search of Suppressed Voices
In 1915, thirty-seven years into the British occupation of Cyprus, the colonial governor1 Sir John
Eugene Clauson, shared his impressions of the island’s inhabitants with his patron:
*
1
This article is the outcome of a presentation made at the international conference ‘One Island, Many Histories:
Rethinking the Politics of the Past in Cyprus’, held at Ledra Palace, Nicosia, on 28-29 November 2008, organised
by Prof. Rebecca Bryant and sponsored by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). I am grateful to the
conference’s organisers and sponsors and particularly to Rebecca Bryant for inviting me to this important event. I
wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed critiques as well as Professor ‹pek Çelik (Brown
University) for her valuable suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. Finally I extend my thanks to Professor
Alexander Apostolides (European University Cyprus) for kindly providing me a copy of his doctoral dissertation.
The thorough revision of this article in Fall 2011 was supported by a LabexMed postdoctoral fellowship at the
Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de
l’Homme).
Or ‘high commissioner’ as governors were styled until 1925.
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‘It is creditable, in a way, to the Cypriot Greeks that they are as insistent as ever on Union.
When the inconveniences of heavy taxation, conscription and other concomitants of Greek
administration might seem to loom larger, one might have expected them to sing smaller.
But their better part is bound up in the Quest, as well as their windiness, and their ideal and
their appreciation of our English ways give them a much needed lift along the path of the
civilisation they talk about so much and practice so little. The Turks of course simply point
to their loyalty (not always stalwart at the division bell!) and appeal to our gentlemanly
feeling.’2
Written at a time of great uncertainty for the political future of the island,3 this commentary
encapsulates the main narrative of political histories of Cyprus under British rule: The increasingly
vocal movement for Enosis – or the political union of Cyprus with Greece – among Greek
Cypriots led to a tactical alliance between frustrated British officials and worried Turkish Cypriot
leaders. According to the same historiography, British attitudes towards Greek nationalism
escalated from caustic indifference – as reflected in the above citation – to frontal opposition.4
Then as Greek Cypriot nationalism became more radical, colonial policy eventually degenerated
into crude divide and rule policies, and Turkish Cypriot forces were enrolled to repress the
nationalist guerrilla campaign led by EOKA in the 1950s. This seamless and much repeated
narrative is the product of an elitist, rather than simply nationalist, bias stemming from a
conventional reading of official archives: The drama of British rule in Cyprus is often reduced to
the squabbles between nationalist – ‘Greek’ and later ‘Turkish’ – Cypriot elites and their colonial
rulers, as the former are taken to be speaking on behalf of their entire ‘communities’.
Another historiographical approach adopts a longue durée perspective. Analyses of this type
have argued that colonial rule not only exacerbated, but in fact helped congeal pre-colonial religious
affiliations and practices into ‘Greek’ and ‘Turkish’ ethnic commonalities.5 Political scientist
2
3
4
5
Main Bodleian Library, Oxford University, Dep. 475: Lewis Harcourt, Colonial Office, Correspondence with
Governors, B-C. Sir John Eugene Clauson, letter to Lord Lewis Harcourt, former secretary of state for the colonies,
4 January 1915.
Cyprus, occupied by the British in 1878, remained under Ottoman suzerainty. The island was annexed by the
Crown shortly after the beginning of World War 1, on 5 November 1914. Less than a year later, Great-Britain
officially offered – in an aborted deal – Cyprus to Greece in exchange for the latter’s entry into the war. This makes
the allusion in the text to the Greek Cypriot wish for ‘Union’ and the preoccupation with Turkish Cypriot loyalty
clearer.
Especially in G.S. Georghallides’ work, a scholar who has written the most thoroughly-researched political histories
of Cyprus under British rule: (1979) A Political and Administrative History of Cyprus, 1918-1926: With a
Survey on the Foundations of British Rule, Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre; and (1985) Cyprus and the
Governorship of Sir Ronald Storrs: The Causes of the 1931 Crisis, Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre.
Drawing on F. Cooper and R. Brubaker, ‘commonality’ is here preferred to ‘identity’, regularly used in the
historiography reviewed here: (2000) ‘Beyond Identity’, Theory and Society, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 1-47. As the authors
note, ‘identity’ has no analytical value, ‘as it is riddled with ambiguity, riven with contradictory meanings, and
encumbered by reifying connotations. Qualifying the noun with strings of adjectives – specifying that identity is
58
THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
Adamantia Pollis was among the first to underscore the culture-defining capacity of British
colonial institutions through what Foucauldian social scientists would later call ‘modern
technologies of power’.6 Under the preceding Ottoman regime, Cypriots located themselves
socially according to religion, class, kinship, patronage and locality. Their religious leaders –
primarily the Greek-Orthodox Church – possessed wide civil powers over them and mediated
their interactions with the state. Through their instruments of rule – censuses, surveys, registers –
the British collapsed fuzzy religious and linguistic differences into three administrative categories:
‘Greek’, ‘Turkish’, and ‘Other’.7 In turn these categories served as the basis for the creation of
administrative and political institutions – the legislative and municipal councils – and an
educational system where Cypriots returned representatives according to their religion.8 In other
words, the British supplanted Ottoman transversal and hierarchical relations with two vertical
ones, with all Cypriots becoming separately equal before the (colonial) law.
Historians often mention the use of colonial institutions as platforms for the diffusion of
nationalism in Cyprus. Paschalis Kitromilides shows how Greek Cypriot notables and
schoolteachers, having received their higher education at the ‘national centre’, Athens, availed
themselves of the liberal policy characterising the first years of British rule to promote Greek
irredentism: Enosis thus became a fixture of debates and press articles covering the elections to the
various representative bodies, from the municipality to the Legislative Council. School curricula
were modelled on those of mainland Greece and children ‘were socialised in Greek nationalist
values’.9 Andrekos Varnava recently revised this thesis by underscoring how the activities of
‘Hellenised’ Cypriots, making good use of the enhanced civic space under British administration,
combated and eventually prevailed over, partisans of a more Orthodox-centric order.10
These studies illustrate the political and institutional transformations laid out by British
colonial rule but do not – because it is not their primary concern – address their impact at the
6
7
8
9
10
multiple, fluid, constantly re-negotiated, and so on – does not solve the Orwellian problem with entrapment in a
word. It yields little more than an oxymoron – a multiple singularity, a fluid crystallisation – but still begs the
question of why one should use the same term to designate all this and more’. (p. 34).
B.S. Cohn, and N.B. Dirks (1988) ‘Beyond the Fringe: The Nation State, Colonialism and the Technologies of
Power’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 224-229.
C.-4264 Report on the Census of Cyprus, 1881. With Appendix, by F.W. Barry, London, Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1884.
A. Pollis (1973a) ‘Intergroup Conflict and British Colonial Policy: The Case of Cyprus’, Comparative Politics, Vol.
5, No. 4, pp. 575-599; idem., (1973b) ‘Colonialism and Neo-colonialism: Determinants of Ethnic Conflict in
Cyprus’, in Kitromilides, P. and Worseley, P. (eds), Small States in the Modern World: The Conditions of Survival,
Nicosia: Stavrinides Press, pp. 45-80.
P. Kitromilides (1990) ‘Greek Irredentism in Asia Minor and Cyprus’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp.
3-17, here p. 5. See also idem., (1979) ‘The Dialectic of Intolerance: Ideological Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict’,
Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 5-30.
A. Varnava (2009) British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878-1915: The Inconsequential Possession, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, chapter 6.
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level of social practice. In other words, they do not measure the impact of colonial social and
political engineering on the nationalist elites’ capacity of mobilising their coreligionists and
transform their self-representations. This is more thoroughly pursued in Rolandos Katsiaounis’
work on the labouring poor (the great majority of the inhabitants) of Cyprus. Focusing on the
pivotal transition from Ottoman to British rule, his study highlights the political usage of financial
leverage in rural Cyprus and the ambiguous role of patrons – the Orthodox Church or the
moneylenders – as both protectors and oppressors. Class is thus put in balance with nationalism
and formal colonial rule and sheds some important light on how local clientelistic networks were
marshalled in the frame of elections and modern politics.11
Rebecca Bryant’s work also explores the sinews of politicisation in Cyprus under British rule.
Concentrating on the relations between modernity and nationalism, Bryant evinces how, with the
abolition of official hierarchies by the British and the establishment of equality before the law, elite
Orthodox and Muslim Cypriots began to compete for power over their coreligionists. In so doing
they elicited the participation of the masses, through the press or petition campaigns requiring the
signatures of the ‘simple ones’. This newly created ‘public sphere’ incited otherwise unrelated
Cypriots to perceive themselves as belonging to one of two mutually exclusive, imagined national
communities.12
The works of Katsiaounis and Bryant greatly advance our understanding of the processes of
mass politicisation under British rule and, consequently, the crystallisation of religious affiliations
into ethnic allegiances in Cyprus. But out of necessity, their approach rests on a degree of
abstraction. The Cypriot ‘people’ – as opposed to the elites – whose social and cultural
environment is so vividly portrayed, remains a silent majority: The tension underpinning their
quotidian transactions with their patrons on the one hand, and British officialdom on the other, is
inferred from their socioeconomic background rather than collected from their own testimonies.
In addition, Bryant and Katsiaounis’ analyses of intra- and intercommunal relations are refracted
through colonialism which tends to be presented as a cohesive process. Indeed a recurrent trend in
the historiography of Cyprus is the radical distinction between ‘colonialism’ – understood either
as British officialdom or a larger process such as ‘modernity’ – and Cypriot society. This premise
compels scholars to envisage British occupation as a period of concatenated fissions where the
colonial state’s divisive policies and institutions compounded the existing cultural and class
divisions.
11
12
R. Katsiaounis (1996) Labour, Society and Politics in Cyprus during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,
Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre. The order of the words in the title, relegating ‘politics’ at the end – as in fact, an
epiphenomenon of ‘labour’ and ‘society’ – denotes the author’s Marxist, or rather Thompsonian approach. The
mobilisation of clientelistic relationships is also the subject of H. Faustmann’s (1998) ‘Clientelism in the Greek
Cypriot Community of Cyprus under British Rule’, The Cyprus Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 41-77. The author,
however, challenges the political usefulness of these relations (p. 46).
R. Bryant (2004) Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, London: I.B. Tauris.
60
THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
What such representation fails to capture however is the colonial state’s efforts – of varying
intensity and nature according to context – to gain the consensual acceptance of the vast majority
of Cypriots, essentially the peasantry, independently of religious affiliation. Drawing on Gramsci,
scholars of Southeast Asian and African history have termed these colonial designs in securing
their subjects’ acquiescence to imperial rule ‘colonial hegemony’.13 While the use of ‘hegemony’ is
controversial in colonial studies,14 a scrutiny of the ways in which the colonial state sought to
legitimise itself through its daily transactions with ordinary Cypriots is assured to open new
research perspectives. For one, it would embed the colonial state into the local society thereby
eliding the risk of ‘treating colonialism as an abstract process’.15 In addition, it would encompass a
wide range of possible Cypriot responses, from consent, to strategies of accommodation, survival
and resistance. This would show that Cypriot agency cannot be confined to the enactment of an
ethnic ‘identity’. And this in turn would dissipate the aura of inevitability on the gestation of
ethnic conflict under colonial rule. In short, highlighting the frailty, and the anxieties marking the
everyday interactions between colonial officials and ordinary Cypriots would reveal that
nationalism was but one of the political options available to the latter. This approach would eschew
implications that Cypriots were content with and under colonial rule.16 In effect, acquiescence is
not collaboration, it means agreeing to play by the rules to pursue objectives that do not always fall
in the realm of nationalism but could nonetheless be eminently subversive of the colonial order.17
13
14
15
16
17
See D. Engels and S. Marks (eds), (1994) Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India,
London: I.B. Tauris. Especially the essays by the editors, ‘Introduction: Hegemony in a Colonial Context’, pp. 1-15,
W.G. Clarence-Smith, ‘The Organisation of Consent in British West Africa, 1820s to 1960s’, pp. 55-78, and P.
Chatterjee, ‘Was There a Hegemonic Project of the Colonial State?’, pp. 79-84.
S. Sarkar recalls that ‘hegemony’ in Gramsci’s work ‘is bound up with developed capitalist civil society’ and
therefore uneasily transposable to colonial settings characterised by an essentially agricultural economy. He further
notes that disentangling hegemony from coercion and reducing the former ‘to some sort of liberal consensual
model, marginalising domination and conflict’ is analytically flawed. See his ‘Hegemony and Historical Practice’,
in Contesting Colonial Hegemony, op. cit., pp. 277-281. Essentially for the same reasons, R. Guha prefers the
notion of ‘dominance’ instead of ‘hegemony’ to illustrate relations of power between the colonial state and the
subject society. See his (1997) Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India,
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (1989) ‘Introduction: Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule’,
American Ethnologist, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp. 609-621, here p. 609.
N. Doumanis, seeking to debunk the Greek nationalist myth of resistance to Italian rule falls precisely into the
trap of making the implication that Orthodox Dodecanesians were happy with their colonial rulers. See his (1997)
Myth and Memory in the Mediterranean: Remembering Fascism’s Empire, London: Macmillan.
This approach might seem reminiscent of J.C. Scott’s concept of ‘everyday forms of resistance’. See his (1986)
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press. But the
suggestion in this paper is that all forms of interactions between ordinary Cypriots and the state need not be
construed as falling within the realm of ‘resistance’. Nor is it necessary, or indeed desirable, for research to be
tracking open acts of resistance exclusively: The implication is that routine interactions between the state and its
subjects could be subversive of the colonial order independently of the actors’ intentions.
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References to ‘ordinary Cypriots’ are numerous in the historiography. But with the exception
of the works of Katsiaounis and Bryant, they often serve to paint a reverse image of Cypriot society
under British rule. Drawing on the research conducted by Early Modernists,18 scholars regularly
point to the hybridity of pre-colonial popular culture in Cyprus. Religious syncretism, crosscultural political protests against fiscal oppressors (the Orthodox Church or the Ottoman state),
linguistic affinities and inter-religious sexuality are regularly invoked to stress the high degree of
cultural assimilation between Christian and Muslim Cypriots. These allusions to a pre-colonial
situation of ‘peaceful coexistence’19 where ‘identities’ were fluid too often construct what an
observer termed an ‘essential folklore’20 and are deeply inflected by nostalgic political concerns in
face of the island’s lingering division. They are, in short, a discourse on the masses rather than of
the masses.
Based on the cases of three Cypriot functionaries appealing against their dismissal from the
colonial service, this paper explores ways to recover the voice of the masses. It urges to locate and
analyse sources and archives ensconcing testimonies of ordinary Cypriots in order to better
examine how they understood, internalised and negotiated the boundaries of colonial rule. And it
makes a case for the study of subaltern Cypriots as a vantage point to explore the points of
articulation and cross-fertilisation between colonial morality and local self-representations.
Locating Subaltern Cypriots: The Example of the Colonial Bureaucracy
Ranajit Guha demonstrated that adopting the subaltern classes’ perspective enables to elucidate
the series of codes defining and regulating their existence as members of the colonial society.21 He
famously defined the category of the ‘subaltern’ as including the demographic difference between
a total population and its elite. This was an intentionally broad characterisation aiming at
18
19
20
See, among others, R.C. Jennings (1993) Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean
World, New York: New York University Press; and K. Çiçek (1993) ‘Living Together: Muslim-Christians
Relations in Eighteenth Century Cyprus as Reflected by the Shari’a Court Records’, Islam and Christian-Muslim
Relations, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 36-64. Although they are not Early Modernists, mention needs be made of the work
of historian M. Aymes and political scientist C.M. Constantinou and particularly their rehabilitation of the
syncretic community known as Linobambakoi, too long considered as opportunists shifting between Islam and
Christianity according to the political climate. See M. Aymes (2005) ‘Lin-Coton: l’étoffe d’une communauté
partagée’ [Lin-Cotton: the fabric of a community shared], Labyrinthe: Atelier Interdisciplinaire, Vol. 21, No. 2,
pp. 111-120; and C.M. Constantinou (2007) ‘Aporias of Identity: Bicommunalism, Hybridity and the “Cyprus
Problem”’, Cooperation and Conflict, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 247-270, here pp. 251-253.
This is the title of a book by C.P. Kyrris (1977) Peaceful Coexistence in Cyprus under British Rule (1878-1959)
and After Independence: An Outline, Nicosia: Public Information Office. For a discussion on the dangers
associated with this concept, see R. Bryant and M. Hatay (2008) ‘The Jasmine Scent of Nicosia: Of Returns,
Revolutions, and the Longing for Forbidden Pasts’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 423-449.
S. Pesmazoglou (2000) ‘Essay Review: The Cyprus Problems’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1,
pp. 199-208, here p. 203.
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THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
underscoring the importance of chronological and geographical context: subaltern groups might
‘under circumstances act for the “elite” (...) and therefore be classified as such’.22 Irrespective of
context however, a colonial subject is a subaltern when she or he undergoes at least two kinds of
domination, that of the coloniser and that of the native elite.23
In Cyprus – as in most colonial settings – ‘native’ colonial civil servants would perhaps best
be classified as members of the elite on account of their income and social prestige. Yet their
activities were framed by rigid regulations and, more importantly, they could never reach the
higher administrative jobs occupied by British officials. They made visible, then, the racial divide,
what Partha Chatterjee called ‘the rule of colonial difference’, which is the essence of colonialism.24
Hence they were subalterns in a very strong sense, and this is the line which will be adopted here.
We know next to nothing about Cypriots who presented the peculiarity of being both
colonial public servants and members of one of the subject communities. And yet the corps of
Cypriot colonial civil servants represented a non-negligible social reality: By 1939, the colonial
administration employed 2,045 permanent Cypriot colonial officials25 (out of a population of
383,96726) to whom can be added 1,400 elementary schoolmasters and mistresses remunerated by
government funds.27 Theirs was an enviable position in a society of indebted smallholding peasantproprietors as it opened prospects of financial autonomy. Considering that there were slightly less
than a hundred British officials in Cyprus in 1939,28 Cypriot functionaries were the everyday face
of colonialism in Cyprus. Finally, out of necessity, religious and linguistic differences were played
down in the colonial bureaucracy and the administration’s official language was English.
The historiography’s neglect of Cypriot civil servants under British rule is not surprising.
Governed by a strict set of rules and regulations which left them little initiative,29 they often
unhesitatingly espoused official policies. Hence if we are to believe Governor Sir Ronald Storrs,
Greek Cypriot colonial employees were immune to Enosis since ‘[o]nce ... a Greek Cypriot had
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
R. Guha (1983) ‘The Prose of Counterinsurgency’, in Guha, R. (ed.), Subaltern Studies I1: Writings on South
Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-42, here p. 1.
R. Guha (1999) ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Guha, R. (ed.), Subaltern Studies
1: Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-8, here p. 8.
G.C. Spivak famously unearthed a third kind of domination, that of gender. See her seminal (1988) ‘Can the
Subaltern Speak?’ in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, pp. 271-316.
P. Chatterjee (1993) The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, pp. 14-34.
The Cyprus Civil List 1939, Nicosia, Government Printer, 1939.
The Cyprus Blue Book of Statistics for the Year 1940, p. 214.
Report of the Department of Education for the School Year 1933-1934, Nicosia, Government Printer, 1935, p. 8.
The Cyprus Civil List 1939, op. cit.
Cyprus Government Standing Orders 1933. Together With a Table of Distances, Nicosia, Government Printer,
1933.
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been admitted to the Civil Service, it became a point of honour, which so far as I know was never
transgressed, to support the Government loyally through thick and thin’.30 The implication is that
Cypriot colonial officials were a mere extension of the colonial state: Hence it seems that little is to
be gained in studying a group which, in post-colonial Cyprus, carries the stigma of ‘collaboration’,
which, pace Robinson,31 maintains its pejorative undertones.
Of course, only positivist research would select its historical objects according to some alleged
intrinsic value; and Cypriot colonial officials certainly do not fit into nationalist narratives which
are written in the positivist vein. Scholars have demonstrated that ‘indigenous’ colonial civil
servants could not be reduced to mindless performers or ‘transparent, unthinking conduits’ of
colonial rule.32 David Arnold’s research on the Madras constabulary evinced the ways subaltern
constables handled the potential conflict between their cultural background and their status as
colonial employees.33 Emily Lynn Osborn, who worked on the Guinée Française and the Soudan
Français showed how ‘low-level colonial employees ... possessed the linguistic capabilities, symbolic
trappings and cultural know-how to mediate colonial rule’ and reap benefits and power for their
own personal use.34 This paper goes further, and proposes to consider the lower echelons of the
colonial bureaucracy as the interface between colonial rule and local society: As Cypriot colonial
civil servants were both agents and subjects of colonial rule they blurred and often sought to
renegotiate the boundaries between coloniser and colonised. In turn, the reactions they elicited
from their British superiors illustrate what Cooper and Stoler refer to as ‘colonial anxieties’ that
tensions among them might emerge, compromise the moral foundations of their dominance and
‘fracture the façade’.35
The remainder of this paper is built around the memoranda of three subaltern Cypriot
officials appealing against their dismissal from the colonial civil service: a Greek Cypriot prison
warder, a Turkish Cypriot schoolmaster and a Turkish Cypriot computation officer of the land
registration department.36 The objective is not to restore the elusive – maybe illusory – agency of
one category of Cypriot subalterns under British rule. This will not be an argument about an
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
R. Storrs (1937) Orientations, London: Ivor and Nicolson, p. 551.
R. Robinson (1972) ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’,
in Owen, R. and Sutcliffe, B. (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, London: Longman, pp. 117-141, here
p. 120.
E.L. Osborn (2003) ‘Circle of Iron: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French
West Africa’, Journal of African History, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 29-50, here p. 36.
D. Arnold (1985) ‘Bureaucratic Recruitment and Subordination in Colonial India: The Madras Constabulary,
1859-1947’, in Guha, R. (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV. Writings on South Asian History and Society, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, pp. 1-53.
Osborn, 2003, op. cit., p. 30.
Cooper and Stoler, 1989, op. cit., p. 609.
The right to appeal against dismissal was a formal right, enshrined in the Colonial Regulations, See Regulations
for His Majesty’s Colonial Service, London, HMSO, 1923, regulation 212.
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THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
atypical form of resistance to the arbitrariness of colonial rule where the aggrieved officers manage
to ‘use the system to beat the system’; in fact as will be seen, one of the officers failed to overturn
the decision of his dismissal while the fate of the other two is not documented.37 Instead, the paper
argues that the dismissal of these officers generates enlightening debates on the constantly
readjusted relations between national self-identification, imperial loyalty, civilisation and legality in
colonial Cyprus; and that observing how these concepts were invested with different meanings
according to the context is essential to understand the ideological foundations of British colonial
rule in Cyprus. After briefly presenting the political conditions prevailing in the island in the
1930s, the cases will alternately be examined and will serve to discuss the heuristic potential and
theoretical implications of a history of colonial Cyprus drawing on methodologies developed by
Subaltern Studies and microhistory.
Cyprus in the 1930s and Colonialism’s
‘Only Means of Contact with the Outside World’
In 1934, the district commissioner of Nicosia, Charles-Henry Hart-Davis, a veteran colonial
officer who presented the fast disappearing quality of speaking both Greek and Turkish, returned
his memorandum on the mudirs. These Cypriot officials, who would later be called district
inspectors:
‘are the only agents for work outside the office at the disposal of a Commissioner. They are
employed on enquiries into complaints and petitions of every kind. They keep the
Commissioner informed of the condition and requirements of the villagers in their
respective areas. They have to conduct inquiries, sometimes of a confidential nature, on
behalf of the commissioner. They are, in fact, apart from the Commissioner’s personal visits
to villages and interviews with Mukhtars [village headmen] and other villagers, the
Commissioners’ only means of contact with the outside world.’38
In the 1930s, this remark could easily be extended to all Cypriot colonial employees. Seizing the
opportunity of an island-wide revolt in October 1931 leading to the burning down of the
governor’s residence, British authorities abolished all the representative institutions they had
37
38
Beyond this practical difficulty, as R. O’Hanlon and J. Wilson showed, the very concept of agency as a tool to
‘recover the subject’ and her/his capacity for autonomous initiative is theoretically flawed: Intended to outline a
domain untinged by colonialism, it encapsulates some of the strongest tenets of Western Enlightenment
(liberalism, free choice, individualism). R. O’Hanlon (1988) ‘Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and
Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 189-224; J. Wilson
(2006) ‘Subjects and Agents in the History of Imperialism and Resistance’, in Hirschkind, C. and Scott, D. (eds),
Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 180-205.
Cyprus State Archive, Ministry of Justice and Public Order, SA1 484/1934 Mudirs. Improvement of the Position
of – Memorandum by C.-H. Hart-Davis, district commissioner, Nicosia, 1934.
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gradually granted the Cypriots since 1882.39 The uprising was essentially motivated by fiscal and
economic reasons against the background of the Great Depression,40 and while only Greek
Cypriots partook in it, the repressive measures were applied to all of the island’s inhabitants
indiscriminately.
In reality the revolt was a pretext to stamp out Enosis and the fledgling Kemalist movement
from Cyprus, and implement an interventionist form of colonial rule relying on a public authority
sufficiently strong to fast-track reforms without much time lost in deliberations. Pushing aside the
Cypriot notability, which they represented as a ‘numerically insignificant class of parasites who
made a living out of the [peasant producer]’,41 British authorities set out on a quest to find and
protect an equally undifferentiated and imagined ‘peasantry’ as the legitimating basis of their
policies. As they would accept no interlocutors to speak on behalf of ‘bona fide agriculturalists’,42
colonial authorities relied exclusively on the civil service as their official interface with Cypriot
society.43 This put tremendous pressure on their recruiting policy which increasingly focused on
‘loyalty’. An illustration of this is the following request by assistant colonial secretary Robert C.S.
Stanley to the district commissioner of Limassol, Oswald R. Arthur:
‘The Promotions Board have been considering the filling of the vacancy of first clerk created
by the retirement of Vassiliades. Your Chief Clerk, Soteriades, is very much in the picture
and there are one or two others who judged by their reports have at least as good a claim to
consideration. I know Soteriades personally and agree with everything that has been said
about him in his confidential reports as to his ability, adaptability, initiative and energy. It
would very much assist us if you could let me have a personal report on his politics,
associations, partiality or otherwise for intrigue and in fact anything affecting his personal
outlook and character which might assist us in forming a judgment.’44
Behind the veil of authoritarianism, these testimonies reflect the beleaguered mentality of British
administrators in the wake of what they euphemistically called the 1931 ‘disturbances’.45 At the
time, the irruption of political violence in the island had transformed Clauson’s confident
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
See D. Markides and G.S. Georghallides (1995) ‘British Attitudes to Constitution-Making in Post-1931 Cyprus’,
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 63-81.
A. Apostolides (2010) ‘Economic Growth or Continuing Stagnation? Estimating the GDP of Cyprus and Malta,
1921-1938’, unpublished PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, pp. 201-207.
Storrs, 1937, op. cit., p. 553.
Storrs, 1937, op. cit., p. 587.
For a discussion of British policies in 1930s Cyprus, see A. Rappas (2008) ‘The Elusive Polity: Social Engineering
and the Reinvention of Politics in Colonial Cyprus, 1931-1941’, unpublished PhD dissertation, European
University Institute.
SA1 949/1928 Promotion Board. Minutes of Meeting. Assistant Colonial Secretary Robert Christopher Stafford
Stanley, dispatch to Oswald Raynor Arthur, district commissioner of Limassol, 16 September 1940.
National Archives, London, CO 67/243/1 and CO 67/243/2 Cyprus. Report on the Disturbances of October 1931,
parts 1 and 2.
66
THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
causticism into alarmism. And, as the first case will show, questions of self-identification in the
colonial service became a primary source of anxiety for British authorities.
Being Greek in a Time of Crisis:
Nationality, Loyalty and the Sense of Duty
On 13 November 1931, A.E. Gallagher, chief commandant of police and inspector of prisons
requested that fifty-one year old Styllis Savvas, assistant chief warder of the central prison in
Nicosia be dismissed from the colonial service. The prison guard was found guilty of having
displayed signs of a ‘nervous and unreliable temperament in an emergency [which] consequently
[made him] unfitted to occupy the post he is now filling’.46 During the events – namely the 1931
revolt – Savvas had asked his superior, resident superintendent of prisons H.L.D. Gee, not to be
given the responsibility of Greek Cypriot political leaders arrested and awaiting deportation.
Specifically he stated that:
‘I asked Mr. Gee not to put the Bishop of Kyrenia under my charge, because the Prison
Warders, some of whom are my enemies, would get me into trouble by concocting stories
that I was treating him favourably … Regarding the Bishop of Kyrenia, as I am a Greek and
he is a Greek, I asked [the superintendent of prisons] to place Turkish warders in charge as
I was afraid that if I were in charge of him, the warders might imply that I was carrying
messages from him to outside persons and similarly conveying messages.’47
This reasoning the colonial governor Sir Ronald Storrs found unacceptable as he observed that ‘the
greater proportion of the Police and Prisons establishment is composed of Greeks on whose loyalty
and sense of duty, overriding sentiments of nationality, this Government is bound to rely for the
maintenance of administration’.48 But whereas Styllis Savvas’ reference to his ‘Greekness’ was
unacceptable to the governor, the Colonial Office in London on the contrary found that it was
fully understandable. ‘An officer with 33 years public service should deserve rather more
consideration. It was after all’, as a principal secretary at the Colonial Office stated, ‘an exceptionally
exciting and trying position for a Greek warder to find himself in’.49 Hence the secretary of state
for the colonies’ official reply stated that:
‘[T]he circumstances explained in Mr. Gee’s report would scarcely seem …, having regard to
the difficult position of a Greek warder in the late emergency, to constitute sufficient
46
47
48
49
CO 323/1134/3 Cyprus: S. Savva, Assistant Chief Warder at the Central Prison 1931-1932. A.E. Gallagher, chief
commandant of police and inspector of prisons, confidential dispatch to the colonial secretary, 13 November 1931.
CO 323/1134/3, op. cit., report of the resident superintendent, central prison, read by A.E. Gallagher on 28
December 1931 and signed by Mr. Styllis Savvas, 28 December 1931.
CO 323/1134/3, op. cit., Sir Ronald Storrs, confidential dispatch to the secretary of state for the colonies, 13 January
1932.
CO 323/1134/3, op. cit., G.E.J. Gent, minute, 20 October 1931.
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THE CYPRUS REVIEW (VOL. 23:2 FALL 2011)
grounds for removing, on the ground of inefficiency, an officer of Mr. Savvas’s long and
apparently satisfactory service, without a personal and detailed investigation by the Head of
his Department into his reported failure on the recent occasion.’50
The conclusion of this case remains unknown. The records only show that Savvas himself
asked the chief commandant of police not to dismiss him but to allow him instead to apply to be
retired on full pension.51
The crux of the problem in this case centred on the term ‘Greek’. Being Greek for Savvas may
have meant being ‘Greek-Orthodox’. But he clearly understood that in the political configuration
created by the revolt, his superiors construed claims to Greekness as national self-identification
and, thence, as potential acts of sedition. Hence he crafted his statement around a plea for honesty
and anticipated his loyalty would exonerate him from not performing his duty. The Colonial
Office accepted this stand which they justified in regard to Savvas’ seniority and impeccable record
of service. The chief commandant of police and the colonial governor interpreted the situation in
the exact reverse way: They saw the paralysing effects of conflicting loyalties, as Savvas was torn
between the traditional leaders of his community for whom he refused to serve as gaoler and the
state; and this was precisely the sort of dilemma they would be insistent in stamping out in the
1930s. It should be noted, finally, that the differing views of the metropole and the local colonial
authorities may have hinged on different understandings of the word ‘Greek’. As often noted,
officials in London were more indifferent – and occasionally mildly sympathetic – to Cypriot
claims to Greekness;52 on the other hand, colonial administrators in the island became increasingly
less permissive to the point where Sir Reginald Stubbs requested that the term ‘Greek’ be removed
from all official correspondence when referring to Orthodox Cypriots53 (these ‘bogus Greeks’ as he
colourfully put it54).
This case highlights the centrality of loyalty in the colonial administration as well as the
impossibility of reaching a consensual, uniformly applicable definition of the term. It is not Savvas’
failure at accomplishing his duty that creates the debate; it is the fact that he presents his selfidentification as ‘Greek’ as a proof of his loyalty. In this sense his deposition reveals a fundamental
tension in the colonial regime between overlapping and conflicting senses of belonging. But what
happens when no such ambiguity exists around loyalty? The following case explores another
tension, this time between legal procedure and disloyalty.
50
51
52
53
54
CO 323/1134/3, op. cit., secretary of state for the colonies, draft confidential dispatch to the governor of Cyprus, 12
December 1931.
CO 323/1134/3, op. cit., A.E. Gallagher, chief commandant of police and inspector of prisons, confidential dispatch
to the colonial secretary, 28 December 1931.
See for instance Varnava, 2009, op. cit., p. 159.
CO 67/254/4 Cyprus: Political Situation, 1934. ‘Memorandum by Sir. R.E. Stubbs’, 16 October 1933.
CO 67/251/7 Cyprus: Setting Up of an Advisory Council 1933. Governor Stubbs, semi-private letter to the
secretary of state for the colonies, 18 August 1933.
68
THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
Law vs. Loyalty:
On the Blind Spots of ‘Modern’ Colonial Governance
Mehmet Teki, headmaster of a Turkish Cypriot elementary school of Polis in Paphos and
representative of the Turkish teachers’ committee in Cyprus was dismissed in 1933 from the
education department on the charges of drunkenness while on duty, absenteeism, attacks in the
press against the education department, political propaganda and ‘presumptuous public speeches
to schoolmasters’. The colonial governor justified the sanction stressing the schoolmaster’s links to
the Kemalist Turkish National Congress – an organisation created in May 1930 by Necati
Özkan55 – and the fact that his insubordination had made him something of a hero in the eyes of
many Turkish Cypriot nationalists.56 Teki did not overtly contest the charges brought against him;
instead he claimed that:
‘Even if the delinquencies attributed to me by the Director of Education in his letter of June
23rd 1933 (…) were true, article 31 of the law cannot be applied owing to the fact that article
13 of the Regulations clearly stipulates the penalty for such delinquencies. Furthermore the
delinquencies have not been proven.’57
His dispassionate denunciation of a legal irregularity proved disconcerting with colonial
authorities. Although the Colonial Office agreed with the governor that it was undesirable to keep
Teki in the colonial service,58 ‘the secretary of state considered that, as a matter of principle, he must
satisfy himself fully in regard to [the allegation of illegality made by Teki]’.59
Whereas loyalty was at the centre of the debate in Savvas’ case, here it is not even an issue.
With his intimate knowledge and brazen utilisation of the colonial administration’s rules and
regulations, Teki appears to be what James C. Scott terms an ‘intermediary’: Namely a subaltern
enhancing his agency through his fluency in the legal terminology and administrative
technicalities of the state.60 But there is another element to this case which may better explain the
anxiety of colonial authorities over procedure. Teki was writing from Ankara in the new Turkish
alphabet although he was fluent in English: This was a statement in itself as the dismissed
schoolteacher positioned himself not as a colonial subject pleading for the clemency of his colonial
55
56
57
58
59
60
F. Crouzet (1973) Le Conflit de Chypre, 1946-1959, Vol. 1 [The Cyprus Conflict, 1946-1959, Vol. 1], Brussels:
Emile Bruylant, p. 172.
CO 67/252/15 Cyprus: Petition from M. Tekki Effendi Against Dismissal as a Schoolmaster Nov. 1933-Feb.
1934. Acting governor’s official dispatch No. 457 to secretary of state for the colonies, 20 December 1933.
CO 67/252/15, op. cit., Mehmet Teki, translation of a letter to the secretary of state for the colonies, 15 November
1933, enclosure to under-secretary of state for Foreign Affairs’ official dispatch to under-secretary of state for the
colonies, 6 December 1933.
CO 67/252/15, op. cit., A.B. Acheson, minute, 12 January 1934.
CO 67/252/15, op. cit., Sir Cosmo Parkinson, minute, 28 January 1934.
J.C. Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,
New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 48.
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THE CYPRUS REVIEW (VOL. 23:2 FALL 2011)
master, but as the citizen of the Kemalist Turkish Republic that demanded to be treated on equal
terms by European powers with which it shared ‘modernity’ – secularism, law and order, equality
before the law, rationalism, etc. By disclosing a procedural error which he exposed as an arbitrary
decision, Teki reversed the roles and placed himself on a higher civilisational ground. The Colonial
Office’s anxiety indicated a desire to restore and hide again the ‘rule of colonial difference’
ensconced into the impersonal regulations and divulged by the ex-schoolmaster’s initiative. But
while procedure constituted a safe ground to discuss proper governance, the following case suggests
that no such consensus existed among colonial authorities with regard to the notion of civilisation
which nonetheless gave them a moral, if implicit, basis for the exercise of their rule.
When Otherness Pierces through Sameness:
Honour and Civilisation
Thirty-three year old Ahmed Ratib, computation officer in the department of land registration
and surveys, was dismissed by the government of Cyprus on the count of ‘gross cruelty to a child’
on 23 November 1933. This decision was reached after Ratib had been found guilty by the district
court of Nicosia of having chained and beaten a six-year old girl whom he had hired as a servant.
For the colonial governor, Ratib’s conduct made him an unfit person to remain in the service of
the Government.61 In his memorandum appealing against his dismissal, Ratib set out to correct
the facts that were reproachful to him. He thus wrote that the girl was 11 and not 6-years old and
that he did not beat her. He reported that the child had run away on two occasions from his house.
On one of these occasions the dismissed computation officer had found her in a field, four miles
away from Nicosia, accompanied by an unknown labourer:
‘It was at this stage that I thought that the best way to support her life and her honour was
to tie her for some hours with a thin chain so as to prevent her from running the risk of
being molested. As she was under my charge I thought it was my duty to deliver her to her
parents unmolested. I admit that at that time I could not apprehend that I was doing
something wrong as I was under the impression that I was acting properly to safeguard the
honour and life of a young girl who had been entrusted to my charge. I am extremely sorry
that I could not then perceive that the steps taken by me were wrong and I now feel
extremely sorry. I beg leave, Sir, to add that this girl was never ill-treated in my house. She
was looked upon as a member of my family. She was living together with other members of
my family. She was well dressed and even decorated with bracelets and earrings.’
Ratib added that the reason the girl repeatedly ran away was because her mother-tongue was
Greek which prevented her from communicating with his family. He requested to be reinstated to
61
CO 850/28/4 Cyprus: Cruelty 1933. Governor’s official dispatch No. 424 to the secretary of state for the colonies,
17 November 1933.
70
THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
his post, suggesting that the conviction of the magisterial court which had sentenced him to pay a
í25 fine was sufficient a punishment. 62
Though an investigation verified and confirmed Ratib’s allegations, the governor noted that
the computation officer was ‘notoriously primitive in his rule of life’, and should on this account
be removed from the colonial service. In recommending this course of action, he wrote, ‘the
Executive Council was not so much desirous of punishing him as of removing from the service a
person of a semi-civilised type who was not fitted to be a member of it’.63 Although they regretted
that the investigation leading to Ratib’s conviction at the district court of Nicosia and his
subsequent dismissal had been so hastily and carelessly led, London officials agreed that Ratib was
better out of the service.64
Colonial authorities presented the computation officer’s actions as too alien to their own sense
of ethics, what the governor of Cyprus called the ‘Western mind’. This radical otherness made it
impossible, in their minds, to conceive of him as a representative of the British colonial civil service.
Not possessing Teki’s bodacious rhetorical dexterity, Ratib reinforced the impression of an
individual uneasily poised between two mutually exclusive moral universes, thereby exemplifying
what Homi Bhabha called the ‘mimic man’: A subject who in spite of having assimilated the
coloniser’s language and norms remains ‘emphatically’ different, ‘repeatedly turn[ing] from
mimicry – a difference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a difference that is
almost total but not quite’.65 But this difference between a ‘modern’ attitude shying away from
corporal punishment and a ‘primitive’ tradition of rough handling women may have been a
construction, a means for colonial authorities to negotiate their moral superiority. It is not clear
that ‘defending the honour and life’ of a little girl and protecting her from the corrupting contact
with older ‘labourers’ should appear so bizarre to British officials who were so anxious at home
about what they perceived as the declining morality of women and girls.66 Ratib’s attitude, where
moral concerns intersect with class prejudice could hardly shock a generation steeped in the
literature of the likes of Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope or Wilkie Collins.67
CO 850/28/4, op. cit., Petition by Ahmed Ziaeddin Ratib Effendi to the secretary of state for the colonies, 23
November 1933, enclosure to acting governor’s official dispatch No. 456 to the secretary of state for the colonies,
18 December 1933.
63 CO 850/28/4, op. cit., acting governor’s official dispatch No. 456 to the secretary of state for the colonies, 18
December 1933.
64 CO 850/28/4, op. cit., A.B. Acheson, minute, 30 December 1933.
65 H. Bhabha (1984) ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October, Vol. 28, pp. 125-133,
here p. 132.
66 S.O. Rose (1998) ‘Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain’, American Historical Review, Vol.
103, No. 4, pp. 1147-1176.
67 Bodleian Rhodes House Library, University of Oxford, Brit.Emp.s.364, David Athelstane Percival: Letters
Home, Northern Nigeria, 1929-1939, Cyprus 1930-1939, box 2. D.A. Percival, letter to his mother (where he
mentions his readings), 10 September 1936. D.A. Percival remained for a long time in Cyprus serving at various
positions. He is mostly known for coordinating and publishing the 1946 Cyprus census.
62
71
THE CYPRUS REVIEW (VOL. 23:2 FALL 2011)
Another feature of this case which calls for comment but was ignored by British authorities
is that the little girl whom Ratib was accused of having chained was obviously Greek-speaking.
Although it is impossible to conclude that she was Christian, scholars have noted that the practice
of impoverished rural families to send their daughters to work as domestic servants in rich urban
families of a different faith was not unheard of.68 If we assume that she was Christian, could not
Ratib’s anxiety over her honour and life be indicative of his eagerness to respect some tacit rule of
intercommunal coexistence in Cyprus centred on the safeguard of the honour of women?
By Way of Conclusion:
Permanent Exceptionalism as the Foundation of Colonial Rule
This paper investigated ways to recover the subaltern Cypriots’ voice. It showed that this can be
done primarily through a microhistorical approach:69 Perusing through court records, complaints,
and any litigation, one will find testimonies of ordinary Cypriots, in however fragmentary form
and however inaccurately transcribed.70 A very close reading of these testimonies, ‘against the
grain’ as it were – namely against the intention of those who produced them – might disclose the
complex ways in which Cypriots understood, internalised and sought to negotiate the – sometimes
conflicted – ways in which British colonisers sought to position themselves as their trustees.
It is indeed interesting to note how a fairly routinely procedure such as the dismissal of a
Cypriot colonial civil servant generated debates which illustrated the tensions around notions such
as ‘national sentiment’, ‘loyalty’, ‘civilisation’, which are nonetheless at the core of the ideological
foundations of colonial rule. Members of a subject community, Cypriot colonial civil servants were
also the everyday face of the colonial state. Their own self-understanding as agents and subjects of
colonial rule mostly overlapped but occasionally conflicted with the expectations of British
colonial authorities. The anxieties unmasked through such conflicts shed light on the multi-faceted
relations between British rulers and Cypriot subjects and underscore the inconsistencies
characterising these relations; in other words these conflicts highlight the shifting boundaries of
colonial rule.
There is one general conclusion that can be drawn from the three cases. Taken together, they
reveal colonial rule as a being in a state of ‘permanent exceptionalism’71 which can be defined in the
V. Argyrou (1996) Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: The Wedding as Symbolic Struggle,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 31-32.
69 The literature on microhistory is voluminous, but a good clarification of its objectives and methodology can be
found in C. Ginzburg (1993) ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know About It’, Critical Inquiry, Vol.
20, No. 1, pp. 10-35 and M. Peltonen (2001) ‘Clues, Margins and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical
Research’, History and Theory, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 347-359.
70 This discussion draws on G. Simonsen’s remarkable work (2007) Slave Stories: Gender, Representation, and the
Court in the Danish West Indies, 1780s-1820s, unpublished PhD dissertation, European University Institute.
71 The expression is borrowed from L. Panitch and D. Swartz, see their (1984) ‘Toward Permanent Exceptionalism:
68
72
THE UNCHARTED WORLD OF CYPRIOT COLONIAL SERVANTS
following way. The impersonal bureaucratic procedure allowing aggrieved ‘native’ officials to
appeal to the secretary of state had a double purpose: It aimed to routinise – and therefore make
predictable – these officials’ potential conflicts with their British employers; and it was intended to
uphold the Cypriots’ confidence in the justice of British rule. Yet when Cypriot officials used this
right, they generated conflicts between the metropole and local colonial authorities which were
usually settled outside the realm of legality. The cases presented here qualify the much cited social
performativity of colonial bureaucratic governance. Instead, they suggest that this ‘modern’
governance could be incapacitating when it raised hopes of fair and equal treatment and therefore
ran counter to the fundamental arbitrariness of colonial rule. Each of these conundrums was
treated as an exception and settled illicitly or discreetly shelved. The permanent exceptionalism
buttressing the daily transactions between British administrators and subaltern Cypriots is
indicative of the tensions lying at the core of colonial rule. Hence the scrutiny of such transactions
allows a better grasp of the subtleties behind the irruption of political violence.
_______________
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