The Gradual Transformation of a Rural Economy

In the 1930s, “Cyprus [was] an agricultural country and agriculture [was] the main occupation of its inhabitants.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁵ As the immediate product of the difficult economic situation of the 1930s, there emerged a significant “class of landless ex-proprietors”Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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 semi-proletarianized Palestinian villager was well on the way to becoming a ‘Partner of the Wind’ (Shrik el-Hawa).”Footnote 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 formalityFootnote ¹⁹ 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²¹

Until 1933, at thirty-one copper piastres [cp.] (£0.17) per diem,Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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 […].”Footnote 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.Footnote ³¹ All of them were sacked from the factory.Footnote 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.Footnote 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”;Footnote 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, 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.”Footnote ³⁵ In the 1930s there were about twelve important Cypriot newspapers, ten Greek and two Turkish.Footnote 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,Footnote ³⁷Eleftheria 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”Footnote 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 […].”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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 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:

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 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴⁶ Trade unions were presented as the only efficient,Footnote 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”Footnote ⁴⁸ or even disagreements within one single trade union.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵² Even though some other newspapers 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.Footnote 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;Footnote ⁵⁴ this number increased to six in 1937 (with 367 members) and reached forty-six (with 2,544 members) in 1939.Footnote ⁵⁵ What is more, these trade unions were working closely with one another and displayed a consistent spirit of solidarity during strikes.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,Footnote ⁵⁸ which 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.Footnote 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,Footnote ⁶⁰ and the Communist Party of Cyprus had been prohibited by order-in-council in 1933.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1936 a law regulating immigration was enacted, forbidding communists' entry into Cyprus.Footnote 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”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 nationalism; labor in these circumstances constituted for them a dangerous diversion.

Agricultural Development vs. Labor Organization: The Anti-politics MachineryFootnote ⁶⁶

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.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The governor was even more explicit in his secret dispatch to the secretary of state:

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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 their registered reds [communists] gave no sign of communistic activity but confined their efforts to furthering the Labor movement in a perfectly legitimate manner.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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”;Footnote 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,Footnote 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.

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.Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1935, the financial commissioner's report would further validate this representation by devoting its main recommendations to the issue of agricultural indebtedness.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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' well-being. 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.Footnote ⁸¹ In 1934 a registrar of cooperative and cooperative credit societies was appointed to bolster the farmers' financial autonomyFootnote ⁸² and in 1936 was made the head of a separate department.Footnote 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.Footnote 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”Footnote ⁸⁵ laws and the 1937 “Trades and Industries (Public Health) Regulation” law.Footnote 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;Footnote 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.Footnote 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 Cyprus, from the shackles in which they are bound and giv[e] them a free voice in the Government … [by] circumventing the professional politician.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 policeFootnote ⁹¹ and the justice departments.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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)Footnote ⁹⁵ and throughout her Empire. Labor troubles in the dependencies, from the Northern Rhodesian copper-belt strikes of 1935Footnote ⁹⁶ to the Mauritian agricultural labor disturbances of 1937 and 1938,Footnote ⁹⁷ reached an apex with the May-June 1938 plantation-worker riots in Jamaica.Footnote ⁹⁸ The riots and other labor disturbances within the Empire brought some changes in both the organization of the Colonial Office and its policymaking.Footnote ⁹⁹ As an instance of the latter, the advice of the British Trades Union Congress was sometimes sought;Footnote ¹⁰⁰ in fact, its secretary general, Sir Walter Citrine, was a member of the Royal Commission that inquired into the Jamaican riots.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, within the Colonial Office, “a Social Services Department was established with G. M. Clauson as its secretary.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ were hardly applicable.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Generally, officials at the Colonial Office thought that “labor questions [in Cyprus couldn't] wait.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Ultimately, the only policy the Colonial Office could agree on was to “temporize” until Palmer ended his term in Cyprus,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ since it was believed and hoped that “his successor may well take a different view.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.

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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ¹¹⁵ But when the Labor Adviser explicitly declined to take on any such role,Footnote ¹¹⁶Anexartitos denounced the authorities' aloofness:

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 conflict.”Footnote 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),Footnote ¹¹⁹Anexartitos 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.”Footnote 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 island-wide movement of petitions that began in the spring of 1939.Footnote 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, barberFootnote ¹²²—subsequent petitioners used the generic term “workman” to define themselves.Footnote ¹²³ A striking illustration of the efficacy of this new identity is the fact that later petitions included signatures of Turkish-Cypriots and women.Footnote 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;Footnote 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.Footnote ¹²⁶