The Sultan's Domain: British Cyprus' Role in the Redefinition of Property Regimes in the Post-Ottoman Levant

This article argues that property law is the main means through which Britain built its imperial sovereignty on Cyprus and in the post-Ottoman Levant. It charts the development of an official British expertise in Ottoman land legislation following the so-called affair of the Sultan's claims to properties in Cyprus. To settle this matter in the island which they had obtained to ‘occupy’ and ‘administer’ through a treaty with the Sublime Porte, colonial authorities were compelled to become conversant with the 1858 Ottoman Land Code. Hence, the article argues that because of its ambiguous status – a province occupied and administered by Britain but under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan from 1878 to 1914 – Cyprus, as the first Ottoman territory to pass under direct Western rule, played a decisive role in the elaboration of a colonial knowledge in Ottoman land laws. And this, despite long-standing economic and political ties between Britain and the Ottoman Empire and exposure to other settings where layered land tenure systems prevailed. Published in treatises authored by British administrators of Cyprus, the legal expertise in Ottoman land law thus acquired was then transposed to other territories which passed under British rule, such as Palestine.     

The migrancy of racial and settler imaginaries: British migrants in Auckland,Aotearoa New Zealand

The position of migrants within Eurocolonial settler cities has received growing interdisciplinary attention. Within the field of geography there have been calls for new avenues of research into the encounters of bodies with different histories of arrival and experiences of racialization in such contexts. However, there remains little research on the position of British migrants, despite their ethno-historical links, and the ongoing popularity of such destinations among British emigrants. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with first-generation British migrants to examine their reflections on the bicultural and multicultural landscapes of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. This paper makes a number of contributions. First, it documents both the racial and settler imaginaries of British migrants. Second, it highlights the ways normative temporal and spatial assumptions shape encounters with difference in urban settler environments. Finally, through an examination of the heterogeneity of perspectives, histories and investments at work among British migrants, this paper seeks to complicate monolithic ideas of belonging, otherness and identity in racialized settler societies.     

Writing violence in Seventeenth-Century Yucatan: Fray Bernardo de Lizana's Devocionario de nuestra Señora de Izamal y Conquista espiritual de Yucatán (1633)

Although long considered a minor work, Franciscan friar Bernardo de Lizana's Devocionario de nuestra Señora de Izamal y Conquista espiritual de Yucatán (1633) is key for understanding what the author himself termed the ‘spiritual conquest’ of colonial Yucatan. Deploying José Rabasa's concept of ‘writing violence,’ this essay shows how this text works to promote a culture of forceful spiritual conquest, reminiscent of the culture of spiritual conquest of the primitive Yucatecan church (1545–1562), in order to complete the conquest of the last independent Maya on the peninsula.     

From an Inconsequential Legacy to National Heritage: Revisiting the Conservation Approaches Towards the Ottoman Buildings in British Colonial Cyprus

Cyprus came under British control in 1878. At this time the Western-based orientalist mind-set, which saw ‘Ottoman’ as a synonym for stagnation was at its zenith, and this view was strategically disseminated as the European empires expanded. This also coincided with the evolution of the ethnic-nationalism that facilitated the formation of national heritage constructs. By analysing the case of Cyprus, a place which is entangled with British colonial governance as well as revolutionary Turkey, this paper aims to widen the discussion on the conservation trajectory of the Ottoman built heritage in post-Ottoman environments. Approaches to the restoration, interpretation, and management of Cyprus’s Ottoman buildings between 1878 and 1960 are dissected, assessed and categorized through British-era archival collections. The history of conservation practices is contextualised in changing political and professional perspectives, which reveal the role of Eurocentric paradigms of orientalism and nationalism in managing the perception and treatment processes of Ottoman-built heritage.     

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano: desacralisation of a fascist relic

The Monument to Victory in Bolzano, raised to remember Italian soldiers who fell in the First World War and to celebrate the victory over the Austro-Hungarian army, was contested from the moment of its installation in 1928. The German-speaking inhabitants of Bolzano were offended by its expression of Italian patriotism and the monument continued to symbolise the antagonism between the Italian- and the German-speaking population in the period following the end of Second World War. The monument’s explicit fascist propaganda attracted strong polemical reactions and some political groups even asked for it to be demolished. A recently-opened permanent exhibition in the crypt of the monument explores the twentieth-century dictatorships of Italy and their impact on Bolzano. Its historicisation offers a new interpretation of the monument – not one based on a schism between the populations of Bolzano, but rather one proposing reconciliation. This historicisation happens through the contextualisation of the monument, an efficient tool for the ‘desacrilisation’ of politically charged buildings; by exposing the detested ideology that they represent, they are stripped of their original ‘sacred’ character. This process also shows that it is possible for controversial, politically significant structures to become legitimate parts of a country’s modern heritage.     

Making Headlines in a State of Emergency: The Case of the Times of Cyprus, 1955–1960

The final years of British rule in Cyprus were marked by the colonial government’s use of authoritarian measures to impose control over the local press. The most problematic publication during the 1955–60 period was the Times of Cyprus, an English-language newspaper edited and owned by experienced British journalist Charles Foley. This article examines the fraught relationship between Foley’s newspaper and the colonial government against a backdrop of social instability and political violence. In particular, it focuses on the role the newspaper played as a conduit of information between Cyprus and Britain, conveying the experience of colonial rule to influential readers in London and reporting British support for self-determination to a Cypriot reading public. This ability to undermine official control over the flow of intelligence between the colonial periphery and its metropolitan centre unsettled the British administration, leading to repeated but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to proscribe the newspaper.     

‘Operation Legacy’: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide

The end of the British Empire in the mid-twentieth century was accompanied by a large-scale rearrangement of sensitive colonial records worldwide. A great number of these records were destroyed and a sizeable portion sent to Britain to be kept secret. This article advances studies of this policy, eventually code-named ‘Operation Legacy’, by reading the ‘migrated archives’ that have been newly discovered and declassified in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. It asks where the policy was decided, for what reason and how it was carried out. Sources suggest that the policy was not planned in the Colonial Office in London and delivered to the colonies in a hierarchical fashion, but, rather, significant elements of the policy were developed in the colonial governments overseas in response to each local context. The general idea was to save Britain’s honour and to protect its collaborators. However, the limitations in terms of time and manpower often prevented the officers from putting sufficient thought into the actual screening of the documents. At the same time, some officers demonstrated a level of historical awareness regarding their actions. The episode reminds us that the official mind as it relates to decolonisation is to be understood not only by reference to the highest levels of strategic planning but also in terms of how it worked at the lower levels, in the colonial administrations on the ground.     

METROPOLITAN PROCESSES IN POST-COMMUNIST STATES: AN INTRODUCTION

This study introduces a collection of theme issue papers on metropolitan processes in post‐communist states. We first identify and discuss five key significant socialist‐era legacy aspects that continue to mould the course of events in the post‐communist urban scene. These are central planning, land allocation, the second economy, defence considerations, and the implications of the ideological leadership of the communist parties. We then procede to investigate the literature on the unfolding urban geography of post‐communism and the factors underpinning its development, and we place the papers collected in this theme issue into their context.     

Creole Architecture: A Comparative Analysis of Upper and Lower Louisiana and Saint Domingue

What factors accounted for variations in architectural traditions in the French colonial settlements of the New World? This paper tests several of the propositions of culture theory against what is known of the process of tradition-formation in the French vernacular architecture of the Illinois Country, Lower Louisiana, and the Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue. It explores the extent to which generalized cultural processes such as preadaptation, founder’s effect, and cultural syncretism account for changes in the forms of typical settler’s houses.     

The role of black Barbudans in the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the colonial Caribbean and South Carolina

Some significant problems remain in understanding the establishment of open-range cattle herding in the Caribbean and North America, especially regarding the role of blacks in that process. Research to date has identified the Greater Antilles, especially Spanish Cuba and British Jamaica, as the sole Caribbean sources of settlers who established the herding systems of, respectively, Mexico and South Carolina. Yet an open-range cattle herding system also occurred in the British Lesser Antilles, which provided many of the settlers for the South Carolina colony. Archival and field research in Antigua and Barbuda provide the basis for comprehensive reconstruction of that system's material culture and herding ecology, demonstration of the role of blacks in its operation, and comparison with other relevant systems to consider whether the British Lesser Antilles might also have been involved in the process through which open-range cattle herders established themselves in South Carolina during the late seventeenth century.