The Cyprus Proposition: Lord Curzon and Cyprus in British Imperial Strategy, 1914 to 1919

Abstract

Debate about the strategic importance of Cyprus to Britain during and immediately after World War I has been overlooked by historians. During this period several key departments, politicians and officials argued strongly and in a concerted way for British retention of the island. This article investigates their reasoning and the arguments of those who championed its cession to Greece. Particular attention is given to the opinions of Lord Curzon, whose career was steeped in long-standing Anglo-Russian rivalries in Asia and the strategic doctrines which underpinned it. Reference is also made to the political, diplomatic and strategic context in which Curzon and his colleagues debated the issue.     

A Technocratic Vision of Empire: Lord Montagu and the Origins of British Air Power

This article advances the existing literature on British imperial aeronautics by explaining how Lord John Montagu’s extensive collaboration with military and government officials during the first decades of powered flight expanded the global distribution of the air forces and anticipated their important later role in facilitating international communication and security. In reconsidering problems of conquest and governance through an aeronautical perspective, Montagu strengthened critical junctures between British civil and military affairs, while his innovative employment of the new technology also complicated divisions between the metropolis and periphery in ways that would intensify the destructiveness of modern warfare across the planet.     

Ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe: Poles and Ukrainians beside the Curzon Line

ABSTRACT. The article draws on anthropological fieldwork in southeast Poland to illuminate both the historical development of national identities and the contemporary revival of ethnic tensions. For many centuries Eastern Galicia, and within it the town and district of Przemys?l, exemplified what Ernest Gellner refers to as the diversity of the ‘Agrarian Age’. A drive towards homogenisation (associated by Gellner with modern industrial society) began here in the later Habsburg period, and reached its culmination after the imposition of a new and much sharper national boundary in 1945. The socialist period opened with a further burst of ethnic cleansing. Memories of this and of earlier confrontations this century are central to the antagonisms that have emerged in the new public sphere since 1989. It is important to move beyond Gellnerian abstractions and to examine both the social mechanisms and the symbols whereby ethnic and national sentiments are mobilised for political ends. In these case materials, as elsewhere in the region, symbols related to religion and to violence seem to be the most powerful, while the main agents of ethnic antagonism are ex-communists.     

Edwardian Conservatism and the Constitution: The Thought of Lord Hugh Cecil

This article presents an analysis of the political thought of Lord Hugh Cecil. It argues that in order to understand Cecil's thought it is necessary to emphasize the role of the constitution in his thinking. There are three reasons for this. First, his opposition to Chamberlain's tariff reform campaign was rooted in a view of the detrimental effects the policy would have on politics, evidence for which Cecil saw in the tactics used by the tariff reformers. Second, because his opposition to the Parliament Bill and to the home rule proposals, which lay behind the removal of the house of lords' veto, was similarly rooted in what he saw as the unconstitutional nature of these measures. Third, because Cecil was an active proponent of constitutional reforms that were designed to ensure that the second chamber could still exercise a restraining influence on government and so stand up for the interests of what he saw as the moderate majority of the people.