%ULWLVK,PSHULDOLVPLQ&\SUXV7KH,QFRQVHTXHQWLDO 3RVVHVVLRQ UHYLHZ $OH[LV5DSSDV Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 27, Number 2, October 2009, pp. 448-451 (Review) 3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/mgs.0.0070 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mgs/summary/v027/27.2.rappas.html Access provided by KOC University (13 Nov 2015 10:00 GMT) 448 Book Reviews His critique of Europe and particularly the British Empire is not simply situated in the context of the war; it continues in the 1950s when he writes about the destructive policies of the British towards Cyprus. In translating and compiling Seferis’s view of the Levant, Beaton has presented the English-speaking reader with a work that confounds the standard orientalist frame. It is in this sense that I ind A Levant Journal a noteworthy achievement; it is indeed a work of paramount importance to scholars who wish to go beyond the discourse of the West’s ixating gaze on the Levant and explore the more nuanced perspective of a poet who perceived himself, and his country, as victims of European progress. A Levant Journal is also a work that presents us with poetry in its crudest form, its “cast-off clothes” as Seferis would have it. Beaton includes here six poems (ive from Logbook II and one from Logbook III ) that are not present in Seferis’s original diaries and which are markedly related to the journal entries. We read, for example, of Seferis’s visit to Engomi, Cyprus in 1953, and of his vision of dancing girls. Still in 1953, we read an early draft of the poem, “Engomi,” which Seferis takes up again in 1955, a short time after he describes an encounter with a belly dancer in Beirut. The inclusion of the actual poem—which describes a vision at Engomi and a certain “dance without movement”—helps illuminate some aspects of the poetic process and of the poet at work. Overall, A Levant Journal is a superbly translated and compiled volume. Beaton’s introduction and notes are illuminating and provide a clear frame through which the reader can fully appreciate Seferis’s encounter with the Levant. One hopes that this will encourage students and scholars who are interested in the study of Seferis’s perspectives on the Middle East, on Arabs and Jews, on Europe and the crumbling British Empire, or who are interested in Orientalism, Occidentalism, or Levantinism, to consider a more intricate exploration of Greek literary creation in an eastern Mediterranean context. Marinos Pourgouris Brown University Andrekos Varnava. British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2009. Pp. xiii + 321. 20 illustrations, 7 maps, appendices, bibliography, index. Hardback $89.95. “Is not this Cyprus,” wrote Fernand Braudel, “the sumptuous court of the Lusignan which diffuses to the West, in the ifteenth century, those fashions of the ancient and expired China of the Tang?” (La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. Tome 1: La Part Du Milieu, Paris, Livre de Poche, 1993 [irst edition 1949]). Cyprus as a crossroads of civilizations, the point of intersection between East and West, Christendom and Islam; no historian fails to mention the island’s key geographic position—so close to Anatolia, Syria, and, to a lesser extent, Egypt and Crete—to account for the fact that it was coveted by so many Book Reviews 449 successive civilizations. At times a blessing, the island’s strategic location has more often been a curse for its inhabitants, prompting one commentator to refer to Cyprus as a “hostage to history” (Christopher Hitchens, Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, London, Verso, 1997, 3rd edition). Nowhere has this emphasis on strategy, geopolitics, and Cyprus’s unenviable “destiny” been more pronounced than in the historiography dealing with the last oficial colonization of the island, namely by Great Britain between 1878 and 1960. Even though most historians remind us that the island played no signiicant part in the two world wars and became strategically relevant only in the 1950s, in the context of the Cold War and Britain’s shrinking empire in the East, they still maintain that Cyprus was occupied by the British exclusively for strategic reasons. It is in this context that Andrekos Varnava’s eight-chapter book, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession, offers a timely revision of lazy stereotypes which present the island’s history as predetermined by its geography. The author acknowledges that it was primarily strategic considerations, and speciically the Russian threat to the “Route to India,” that motivated the British government to look for and occupy a place d’armes in the eastern Mediterranean. But the reason the British settled on Cyprus owed as much to the power the island’s historic associations exerted on the imagination of British decision-makers as it did to its strategic value. In fact the central argument in Varnava’s book is that the latter was “always more imagined than real” (p. 3). Cyprus in British culture had always been associated with images and texts which shaped important markers of British identity: as part of the Near East, Cyprus was associated with the Holy Land, Christianity, the Crusades, and Richard Coeur de Lion, but as part of the ancient Greek world it was also conceived as resolutely European. Romanticism in the nineteenth century crystallized these different signiiers into a “Mediterranean ‘Eldorado’” placing Cyprus “within a tradition of Romantic adventure, strategic advantage, spiritual imperialism and a sense of possession” (p. 45). But because it was composed of so many disparate elements, the “Eldorado effect,” when put into practice, yielded contradictory consequences. First the alleged strategic value of the island had not gone undisputed: political leaders, major naval and military igures, but also colonial administrators in Cyprus became very critical not only of Cyprus’s actual strategic value within the British imperial structure, but also of its potential. The island’s climate threatened the troops’ health while various commissions estimated that the costs to it out its harbors as naval bases or simple coaling stations were prohibitive. It was not long before a “fantastic disparity” emerged “between the aims and expectations in occupying Cyprus and the realities and achievements” as the island “crashed from a ‘gem’ to a ‘millstone’” (p. 120). The greater part of the garrison was withdrawn, propositions to raise a local (Cypriot) defense force were turned down, as were plans to use the island for maneuvers, or even as a sanatorium for convalescent troops (p. 230). Eventually a reduced garrison was maintained, principally as a dissuasive force in view of Greek nationalistic activism and its unpredictable impact on intercommunal relations. If exaggerated expectations about the island’s strategic role led British 450 Book Reviews political, military, and colonial authorities to cruel disappointments, their perception of Cyprus as “European” induced them to implement measures locally with unpredictable consequences. In the name of the island’s “European civilization,” British authorities discontinued the Ottoman millet system of governance whereby religious authorities had been granted extensive civil, inancial, and political powers over their co-religionists. By refusing to co-opt the traditional Christian and Muslim elite, the British split each of the island’s two main communities: as the traditional pro-British elite were losing ground, a nationalist faction emerged. Within the more numerous Orthodox community, nationalists claiming Enosis (Union [with Greece]) beneited from the tolerance of British authorities (partly a result of the Cabinet’s indecision with regard to the future of Cyprus) who allowed Orthodox schools to adopt the curricula in force in Greece and oficially recognized katharevousa as the language of the Orthodox community for instance. Subsequent British initiatives, such as the institution of a legislative council elected by two separate electoral colleges, Muslim and Christian, not only accelerated the process of politicization and nationalization of the communities, but contributed to creating intercommunal suspicion, sometimes leading to violence, as in 1912. Neither a fortress nor exactly a model of governance at which the “Near East would marvel,” this “inconsequential possession” was swiftly reduced to a diplomatic pawn (p. 274). In 1912, a particularly unpredictable year in the Mediterranean, the British offered Cyprus to the Greek government in return for the right to use Argostoli on Cephalonia, a Greek island in the Adriatic Sea, as a naval base. In October 1915 Cyprus was again offered to Greece—also in an aborted deal—this time in exchange for her military assistance to Serbia. The 1915 offer, which closes the book, marked a new phase for Cyprus’s position in the British imperial structure as committed imperialists, galvanized in the frame of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement delineating areas of inluence in the Middle East between the British and the French, thwarted all future plans of parting with the island. Varnava’s book is irst and foremost a convincing and unprecedented answer to three questions: Why was Cyprus occupied by the British in the irst place? Why did the British fail to meet their ambition to make it an “Eldorado”? And why did they end up keeping it? In his account of the slow demotion of Cyprus in the British imperial structure, from an “Eldorado” to a “millstone” to a “backwater” and ultimately a “pawn” (the titles of his chapters), Varnava consistently maintains a single straightforward line of inquiry, namely the growing discrepancy between British expectations for Cyprus and the ultimate outcome. His methodology consists of alternating between macro and micro scales of analysis: the longue durée perspective allows him to describe the intricate interweaving of domestic political rivalries in Britain between Conservatives and Liberals or between government departments and to observe Cyprus’s changing positions within the broader British imperial structure; his analyses focusing on the shorter term enables him to link local activism in Cyprus to international events and their impact on British strategic considerations, but also to shed light on important, but heretofore neglected details, such as the fact that the Book Reviews 451 Argostoli deal was every bit as serious as the 1915 offer or that the “scramble for Africa” began with the British occupation of Cyprus in 1878 and not of Egypt, to mention but two instances. Varnava’s analysis of the nationalization and politicization of the island’s communities is perhaps a little more problematic. This chapter is richly documented, but the reader sometimes gets the impression that nationalism was imposed on the island from outside through the British, “Hellenised Cypriots,” or Greek nationals residing in Cyprus. This may be blurring the Cypriots’ own role in spreading irredentism and their responsibilities for the degradation of intercommunal relations. Moreover, Varnava mentions nationalism primarily because it has induced British authorities to revise their strategic considerations; considering that his subject, which accounts for the richness and originality of his work, is the place of Cyprus within Britain’s broader imperial structure, this chapter (the longest in the book) may be too long for its purpose. Otherwise, Varnava’s work is an overdue reassessment of common wisdom in the history of Cyprus which will also appeal to students of Cypriot history as well as the reader interested in international relations and politics in the Near East at the beginning of the twentieth century. Alexis Rappas Princeton University