Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2014
Cyprus and Malta: Two Colonial Experiences
ISSN: 1016-3476
Vol. 23, No. 1: 9–20
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CYPRUS AND MALTA: TWO COLONIAL EXPERIENCES
ROBERT HOLLAND
King’s College London
This article takes a broad perspective on the different ways in which Malta and Cyprus related to
British colonial experience. A core argument will be that whereas the British presence profoundly
affected Maltese life in many ways, this was by no means the case in Cyprus. Malta at many
levels (though by no means in all) developed on imperial lines defined by the classic tag ‘Imperial
Fortress’, whereas Cyprus, though belatedly a Crown Colony, was only a British possession in
limited and even superficial ways. These underlying themes will be commented on in relation to
strategic matters, economics and finance, irredentist orientations, constitutional development,
ecclesiastical life and relationships with the British monarchy. These aspects will be seen to have
underpinned rather different political cultures and a pattern of decolonization exhibiting more
differences than commonalities. At the end we will observe a curious paradox about the postcolonial and contemporary interaction between the United Kingdom and the two island societies
The following pages will try to identify certain similarities and, perhaps more especially,
differences between Malta and Cyprus in relation to the British Empire. Our basic point will
be that ‘British Malta’ evolved after 1800 as an authentically colonial and in key senses an
imperial possession, though one with a strong Latin counterpoise. Cyprus, after occupation by
the British from 1878, was by contrast always very partially and one may even say only
superficially ‘colonial’ (and not at all imperial along ‘British’ lines). Even after 1925, when
Cyprus finally became a Crown Colony, the colonial reality of the island remained largely,
though not exclusively, institutional, posing only a limited challenge to the overarching Hellenic
identity of the majority. As Mediterranean societies Cyprus and Malta shared structural and
cultural traits. But in terms of their trajectories as colonial or dependent polities, they were
more different than alike. This has significantly affected post-colonial developments in ways
that the other essays in this collection will explore more fully.
One thing shared in both Maltese and Cypriot experience was that, in first coming under
British occupation, they were not actually conquered by British arms. This perhaps has something
to do with the consistent fragility of expatriate rule in both cases, albeit with varying nuances.
The Maltese were able to argue that their own explicit agreement had been essential to the new
order after the expulsion of the French in September 1800 (Holland, 2012: 8). In the case of
Cyprus no fighting as such was associated with the British take-over, and at the time GreekCypriots contended that the immediate post-Ottoman dispensation was only ever meant as a
temporary expedient. The chronology relating to colonial rule, however, was crucially different.
From the surrender of the French garrison on Malta it was only thirteen years before a British
Copyright © 2014 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta.
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Governor was formally installed with the accompanying attributes of a Crown Colony. By
contrast almost half a century elapsed after the arrival of British occupying forces on 22
July1878 before Cyprus was fully integrated into the normative structures of that empire.
British colonial institutions therefore had a chance to bed down and mature in Malta, if with
many bumps in the road along the way, than was ever to be the case in Cyprus.
Malta evolved as the classic ‘Imperial Fortress’ amongst Britain’s Mediterranean possessions
(Frendo, 1979). Naturally this did not happen all at once. The first clearly ‘strategic’ use of the
island came during the operations leading to the Battle of Navarino in November 1827, an
engagement usually credited with paving the way towards the new independent state of Greece.
Malta was also a vital transit and logistical point during the Crimean War during the 1850s.
But it was the major investment in modern forts and gunnery around Valletta from the late
1860s that underpinned the ‘Imperial’ character of the island. In truth Malta was not as imperial
or as impregnable as the rhetoric suggested. Nevertheless, it became the regional exemplar of
Britain’s naval preponderance. Here we should also note that although Gibraltar had a totemic
significance of its own in this regard, the Rock was always too vulnerable to Spanish pressures
and a shade too insalubrious to acquire a comparable prestige to Malta (Constantine, 2009).
After 1919 Gibraltar, not Malta, bore the brunt of post-war cuts in British defence-related
expenditure in the Mediterranean, whereas in Cyprus such expenditure was anyway minimal
to start with. During the 1920s and early 1930s it was summer cruises of the British
Mediterranean Fleet pivoting around Valletta’s Grand Harbour which offered some classic
imagery of the United Kingdom’s regional and international power, the flavour conjured up in
the memoirs of the later film star, David Niven, who served in the Fleet during some of those
years (Niven, 1994).
This contrast with Cyprus is essential to our argument. Prime Minister Disraeli famously
claimed that the island was ‘the key to western Asia’, whilst Admiral Hornby, who oversaw
the occupation in 1878, commented that Cyprus ‘would be capable of sheltering more ironclads
than the Grand Harbour of Malta’ (Hill 1952: 255–256). There were, however, many British
naval officers and strategic experts who did not share this view, and their skepticism soon
proved to be well-founded. It cannot really be said, somewhat disparagingly, that Cyprus was
‘an inconsequential possession’, as the title of one book contends (Varnava, 2009), if only
because, for the British, actually possessing it meant that none of their strategic rivals were
able to have it for themselves. As a Cypriot historian has recently underlined (Hadjikyriakou,
2011), such strategic denial had been the principal motive for Ottoman rule in Cyprus,
characterized by centuries of extremely constrained fiscal outlays on the island, just as it
remained so for their British successors. Indeed, this key motivation continued to apply to the
Sovereign Base Areas retained by the United Kingdom after Cypriot independence, so that in
1973 it was stated in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office summary that the true value of
these bases lay in the ‘ability to use them in an emergency . . . as well as to deny their use
to the Russians’ (National Archives of the United Kingdom). Still, the on-going practical
advantages of Cyprus for British campaigning in the region should not be ignored, providing
a sanatorium for wounded or sick personnel and, amongst other things, a source of foodstuffs
and mules that made a significant contribution to such key junctures as the occupation of
Egypt in 1882, the re-conquest of the Sudan in 1885 and the (admittedly mostly static)
Macedonian front after 1916 (Panayiotou 2010; Holland 2012; Heraclidou 2014).
Yet the utility of Cyprus from a British metropolitan standpoint was nonetheless always
limited and fluctuating. At the end of the nineteenth century years could go by without a
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Royal Navy vessel making any appearance, and British troops, scarcely numbering two hundred
in total, remained hidden away up in the Troodos highlands. It is true that on several
occasions Whitehall did consider making a major military investment in Cyprus (mainly
around Famagusta) due to uncertainties arising elsewhere, principally concerning the likely
availability of the port of Alexandria in Egypt. Such possibilities were aired in 1936 and again
two years later. The decision, however, went against any such initiative. It is telling that one
argument clinching the conclusion lay in the Admiralty’s view that there was no point in
spending much money when Cyprus was bound sooner or later to become part of Greece
(Holland 2012: 221). Although later on, after 1954, the British did start spending money on
a new base, the conception remained that of a logistical and planning centre rather than a
fighting platform as such; it was Malta that again played the key regional role in the invasion
of Egypt during 1956. In sum, in imperial and strategic terms Malta always had a clear
rationale, whereas Cyprus kept falling between various stools. Hence arose all those
problematical clichés—‘Cinderella’, ‘anomalous’, ‘Orphan, ‘peculiar’ —that always got attached
to Cyprus as a place apart, a formal British colony perhaps, but not quite like any other. This
continuing problematic was one reason why the Colonial Service in Cyprus was always
regarded as sub-par in London, paid lower rates of pay, its expatriate members rarely enjoying
promotion to more desirable postings elsewhere in the Empire.
The financial and developmental implications of this contrasting background were profound.
Over time the British came to spend a considerable amount of money in Malta. It is suggestive,
for example that during the 1820s and 1830s whereas in Corfu, then under British Protection,
maintaining the local fortresses was funded by local taxation, in Malta the burden was diverted
to a greater extent on the distant metropole (one thing it was suggestive about being how
desperately poor Malta was). The cash payments arising from the large number of British and
French troops crammed into the latter island during the Crimean conflict led to an unparalleled,
but by no means permanent, prosperity in a society hitherto often struggling even to feed
itself properly (Price 1954: 83). During the second half of the nineteenth century the Admiralty
emerged as by far the largest employer in Malta. A new dockyard proletariat took shape in
an increasingly, if always patchily, anglicized milieu. Under such conditions the onset of
modernity in Malta went hand in hand with a dynamic colonial order. There was a price to
pay in this pattern, not least in a skewed economy over-dependent on unstable outside factors—
but then this had at least equally been so in the days of the old Knights. It was to follow
logically that—to a far greater extent than almost any other British Crown Colony—
decolonization, and indeed post-colonial relations with Britain, were to be defined in Maltese
affairs as a strictly financial and economic issue. Nevertheless, for many decades employment
and consumption for many—even most—Maltese people ebbed and flowed with the arrival
and departure of Royal Navy ships and the rhythms of Admiralty investment.
In Cyprus the British spent relatively very little money indeed. One Englishman present
in 1879, Lieutenant Kitchener, before long to achieve much higher rank in the British Army,
foresaw great possibilities if Cyprus was ‘put in the hands of the capitalist’ (Magnus 1958:
23), but it was never to be so (at least, not in the hands of the international capitalist). A
Colonial Office expert was dispatched to the island to assess prospects, and his advice was
that investment should be kept to a minimum. A few roads and bridges were built during the
early years of British occupation, and new warehouses at Larnaca, but such initiatives largely
dried up. Continued payment of the old Ottoman Tribute gobbled up what little local fiscal
surplus there was, and the Cyprus Government had to plead, often unavailingly, for modest
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supplementary grants-in-aid from London. Local opinion resented every penny spent on
expatriate officials, but the fact was that the salaries available in Cyprus were, as we have
already noted, not at all generous by the standards, say, of the Malayan Colonial Service, let
alone the ‘heaven-born’ Indian Civil Service. Parsimony was built into the fabric of most
British colonial administrations, but this was particularly true in the case of Cyprus, where the
official mentality was necessarily often downright stingy.
This is not to say that British occupation and administration were irrelevant to the development of Cypriot society in a wider sense. The effects of foreign rule were fundamental. For
example, as a recent study of British colonial architecture in Cyprus has shown, urban planning
in the island was progressively revolutionized away from the old Ottoman convention of
joined-up buildings of an inward orientation to a more European pattern of detached, freestanding structures designed for nuclear families with an open outlook onto the street (Georghiou
2013: 42). This marked a cultural and psychological as well as physical transformation. Other
professions in Cyprus bore a strong British imprint as time went on, including professional
practice and qualification, as in architecture and business accountancy. In the realm of political
economy, the colonial regime was driven in the era of depression after 1929 to assume a more
interventionist role; state action to reduce rural indebtedness in the 1930s led to the innovation
of rural Co-Operatives that were to remain so much a part of the Cypriot social scene.
Arguably the sector of life in the island that was most comprehensively affected under British
administration was forestry, so that for decades after independence in 1960—and in effect still
today—the Forestry Department remained the most ‘British’ of government institutions. Yet
for all these things it cannot be said that any Cypriot social classes—that is, the mentalities,
beliefs and, crucially, personal loyalties of large masses of the population—were in any sense
profoundly recast through direct British action. Had it been so, the later history of the island
would have been very different. There was, for example, no dock proletariat in Famagusta to
resemble the workforce around Valletta’s Grand Harbour, with its developing Anglican tastes,
Royal ties (embodied in the names of the popular Band Clubs) and colonial consciousness.
In Malta modernity and colonialism went together, including improvements in such basic
urban amenities as gas-lit streets and sewerage in expanding suburbs like Sliema. Most
profoundly it embraced an enhanced alertness to a wider world beyond the purely localized
frame. In Cyprus the relatively circumscribed character of this dynamic meant that modernity
came much more slowly, and in more ambiguous forms.
All this partly explains why party political institutions in Cyprus lagged those in Malta.
Although there was a Communist Party in the former island from the mid-1920s, and AKEL,
an incipiently mass party of the Left, was constituted in 1943, there was nothing like the
Malta Labour Party, with its tentacles in every Maltese village and town. The Cypriot Right
was still more unorganized and based on personal clans. There was no foundation for a
Cypriot equivalent to the political dynasty of Lord Gerald Strickland in Malta, its founder the
offspring of a father who was a Captain in the Royal Navy and a mother from the local
nobility. Against this background, socio-economic issues barely entered into Cypriot public
discourse, especially once the old Tribute matter was resolved in the later 1920s; they
were certainly secondary when it came to the pre-independence struggle. Indeed, it long
became a matter of honour in Enosis ranks that union with Greece was to be preferred to
belonging to the British Empire regardless of its material consequences; such a mindset was
inconceivable in Malta, where money—also part of being ‘modern’—defined most things,
local and imperial.
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Basically, therefore, the British and their colonial apparatus almost always remained on
the margins of Cypriot society, somewhat incidental to its internal evolution, whereas they
were integral in Malta. Paradoxically, but in a way quite logically, this by no means meant
that Anglo-Maltese relations were any the easier or less problematical, or indeed less complex,
than their Anglo-Cypriot counterpart, and if anything the reverse. For example, the Language
Question in Malta (that is, the struggle between English and Italian-usage) could certainly
match the force and intensity of the controversy surrounding Union with Greece in Cyprus,
at least until that bitter contest ebbed away from the 1920s onwards; perhaps inevitably, both
the main ‘outside’ languages were finally displaced in public, as well as private, discourse by
the Maltese vernacular. Education in Malta, however, nonetheless became overwhelmingly
framed by English norms, and even during the Second World War—with the island being
crushed by enemy bombs—the Cambridge Local Examinations for Maltese pupils were not
interrupted. Any such thing would have been inconceivable in the Cypriot context, where the
English School—set up by an English canon in 1900—was a lone outlier of instruction on
British lines (its role, indeed, has become more, not less, controversial during post-independence
times). This educational theme is explored more carefully in another essay in these pages. It
is simply one aspect of a broad construction whereby Malta was part, in however qualified
or mixed a fashion, in that phenomenon of a ‘British World’ which has recently attracted a
good deal of scholarly attention (Bridge and Fedorowich 2003); Cyprus, however, existed
only at the most acute tangent to such a cultural and mental entity.
One obvious overlap between Maltese and Cypriot experience is that the historical
contingency of a colonial tie was off-set by a close relationship with another country (Italy
in the first case, Greece in the second). To that extent, in both cases the British felt a sense
of unease about competing attachments. However, the dynamics of these alternative and at
least potentially irredentist linkages were very different in both cases. The sentimental leaning
towards Italy (Italianíta) in Malta marked a linguistic preference and a cultural loyalty amongst
the old noble class—parts of which from early on stood aloof from what they saw as a rather
vulgar British connection—and segments of the bourgeoisie harbouring patrician aspirations
of their own. Amongst the latter various professional cadres stood out, but above all the
lawyers. Yet this instinctive orientation towards Italian ways stopped well short of indicating
in any sense a political desire for union. Already by the time that Malta became a British
Colony proper in 1813 (confirmed by the Treaty of Paris two years later) no Bourbon flags
flew in the island, and certainly the flag of the unified Kingdom of Italy after 1861 flew from
no public or private residence in Malta except the new Italian Embassy. It was said in the
1880s that you could count on the fingers of two hands the number of Maltese individuals
who expressed any loyalty to the Italian state (though that did not stop some in the Colonial
Office in London worrying about ‘the Italia Irredenta party gaining a foothold in the country’
[Holland 2012: 121]. For one thing, the Catholic Church of Malta, with its dominant hold on
the affections of most Maltese, evinced nothing but contempt for the anticlericalism flowing
through the Risorgimento and secular Italian politics. Whatever few vestiges there were of a
political inclination towards Italy were eventually polished off once the Italian Air Force
started dropping bombs on the Maltese (and of course on the local British military and civilian
population too) after June 1940 (Jellison, 1984). Pro-Italian feelings in the island did revive
after 1945 but for a long time only in a halting and tentative manner.
The role of the movement for Enosis or ‘Union with Greece’ in Cyprus was clearly of a
different order. By the 1920s at the latest (if not quite before 1900) the British found themselves
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facing a highly politicized and implacable Hellenic phenomenon (Georghallides 1979).
Coincidentally in this context, Maltese events for a brief while after 1918 hinted at another
trajectory for Greek-Cypriot political development than amalgamation into Greece itself. The
self-governing constitution inaugurated by the Prince of Wales during 1921 in the legislature
in Valletta—blending imperial and purely local or indigenous elements in island governance
—was taken up by some Greek-Cypriot politicians as offering a model capable of leading
their own society towards a viable future with a continuing British link. These moderates,
however, made little headway and after the public disorders in Cyprus during October 1931,
in which demands for Enosis were prominent, such people were largely consigned to the
margins. Admittedly there were always more ‘moderates’ in Cypriot political life, including
collaboration in local British-led institutions, than one would easily gather from the
historiography, since the legend of EOKA has involved writing such elements out of the
‘national’ memory. It is also true that had the Constituent Assembly held in Cyprus in 1947–
1948 led to an agreement between the various parties such moderate constitutionalism under
British colonial auspices would probably have become entrenched, leading inevitably in a few
years to real self-determination by the majority. But by the 1940s ‘Enosis and only Enosis’
had become too dominant a rallying-cry within Greek-Cypriot culture to permit such an
evolution. As we have already stressed, constitutional politics British-style in Malta did not
itself guarantee stability, and from the 1880s onwards Maltese history is littered with suspensions
of the electoral process. Yet the constitutional principle, one way or another, had never been
wholly absent from the Anglo-Maltese tie, and although decolonization was to prove extremely
bumpy in the island, the process ultimately unwound on lines defined by legal and juridical
continuity. Again, this only has to be stated for the difference with the Cypriot pattern to be
self-evident.
Both Malta and Cyprus, of course, were deeply religious societies where ‘national’ Churches
(Roman Catholic in the former case, Greek Orthodox in the latter) inevitably played political
as well as religious roles. This was always bound to cause problems in a British colonial
setting, not least given the Anglican assumption that Church and State should keep to their
distinctive realms and not hamper each other. In Malta the new British rulers after 1800,
however, always treated the Church with considerable circumspection and respect, and in
particular fully recognized its traditional rights. British officials especially cultivated the
episcopacy. It would have been fatal to good relations if any encouragement had been given
to proseletyzing Protestant divines. The Methodists did set up a printing press on Malta in the
1820s, intending to propagandize their beliefs, but such attempts received short shrift from the
authorities. Queen Adelaide (widow of William IV) visited in 1840 to inaugurate the new
Anglican Cathedral in Valletta, to which she contributed £40,000 of her own money, but there
was nothing zealous in the aims of this initiative and Roman clergy attended the enthusiastic
reception given to her on arrival (Sandars 1915: 275). The colonial government and the
Roman Church indeed often shared opponents in these years, most notably their common
dislike of anticlerical radical exiles on the rebound from Austrian despotism in Italian states.
The independent and secular state in Italy after the Risorgimento (especially after it snatched
away the residual rump of Papal territories save the environs of the Vatican itself) was never
likely to win the admiration of the religious in Malta. By 1912 it was even possible for
Archbishop Pace to be awarded (and to accept) an official royal British decoration, whilst his
successor, Archbishop Caruana, spent much his adult life before elevation ministering in a
Scottish Catholic parish.
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This did not mean there were no tensions at all in the mutual dealings of local colonial
officialdom in Malta and the Roman Church, and there was a degree of anti-Britishness at the
level of the parish clergy. In this context the experiment in internal self-government (or ‘dyarchy’)
after 1921 posed real dangers because colonial authority could hardly escape being compromised
in the increasingly bitter struggle between Lord Strickland’s Constitutional Party, with its
stridently loyalist and ‘Anglo’ politics, and his Nationalist opponents for whom pro-Italian
sentiment operated as a natural counterpoise (Fenech, 2005: 184–211). Strickland himself was
a Catholic, and never strayed from being a son of the Church, but there was an anti-Catholic
strain in at least some sections of his supporters. The late 1920s and 1930s therefore witnessed
instability in Church-State relations in the island, before, however, restabilizing as the wider
regional crisis of the 1930s unfolded (Frendo, 1995: 51). The crude irreligiosity of Mussolini’s
fascist regime in Rome was, after all, from the viewpoint of Maltese clergy even more despicable
than Risorgimento liberalism had once been. By the end of that decade, facing the possibility
of war in the Mediterranean against Italy, the British both in Valletta and back in London were
keenly aware that keeping the island steady in such circumstances would require the full cooperation of the Church; without it, any war effort would be impossible to sustain (Holland
2012: 218; Manduca: 2004). They were not to be disappointed. One of the most striking
photographic images of the ensuing conflict surging around Malta was of the parish priest of
Senglea escorting King George VI around the ruins of that town on the latter’s famous visit
in June 1943. After the war the ecclesiastical leadership in Malta, far from wanting the British
to get out, were keen to see them stay as a guarantee against the godless Left gathering around
the Malta Labour Party. This is a situation we shall come back to shortly.
The Cypriot context in these respects was very different. In the received Greek-Cypriot
version of events—though tentatively interrogated by at least one local historian on the Left
(Katsiaounis 1996)—the Orthodox Archbishop welcomed the British arrival at Larnaca in
1878 on the explicit understanding that, as deliverers from an Ottoman yoke, the island would
soon be handed over to Greece as the natural Motherland. Whatever the precise terms used
by Archbishop Sofronius on that occasion (Katsiaounis 1996: 25–28), the practical reality was
that the two leading powers in Cypriot life—the British occupiers and the Church – were
bound in the following years to rub along together to serve their mutual, and often interlocking,
needs. Bishops served on the Legislative Council, and on one occasion in 1897, for example,
that body was actually convened by Governor Sendall at the remote Kykko Monastery. In the
early twentieth century the Church was overwhelmingly preoccupied with an internal battle
over a vacancy at the Archbishopric, taking popular pressure off British administration. The
new Archbishop after 1916, Cyril III, seemed to be exactly the sort of ecclesiastical figure the
British liked: one dedicated to religious, not political, action. Ironically, from that point on—
though not because of Cyril—the Church slid into more or less open leadership of the movement
for Union with Greece, and in consistent friction with the British presence. As a generality,
then, the relationship between the Church and colonial State in Cyprus was one of reluctant
co-existence overlaid by mutual incomprehension often mixed with a certain degree of contempt
(Holland and Markides 2006: 167–168). It remained extremely unlikely that a Cypriot
archbishop could ever—like Caruana in Malta—attain his position after many years actually
living in Britain. Cypriot Orthodoxy and Maltese Roman Catholicism shared a common
hatred for secularism, the Left and often modernity in general, but this fear was to play out
contrastingly in the two islands under late colonial conditions because in other ways the
legacy in relation to the British connection was so fluctuating.
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This pattern of a certain commonality pulled into different shapes by varying contingent
factors was also expressed in an important structural dimension of Cypriot and Maltese affairs
during their mature phases as British colonies. Certainly the political struggles that emerged
in both islands were essentially triangulated, whereby the British, though constitutionally
sovereign, became in many senses over time the weakest leg. In Cyprus the competition lay
between an expatriate administration, a socially very conservative Hellenistic Right and a
secular Left whose latent strength from the 1920s increasingly showed itself in growing
organizational depth. It is important to note that in this configuration the Turkish-Cypriot
community was for a long time a largely passive entity in a strictly political sense, confident
in its reliance on the British to ensure that Greek aspirations for Enosis remained purely
theoretical (McHenry, 1987). It was only later, partly given the failure of other parties to
thresh out any workable consensus, that impelled the chief minority community as a matter
of necessity to evolve a dynamic and distinctive identity of its own quite independent of
British (but not Turkish) manipulation (Gates, 2013). Meanwhile in Malta the defining political
division was also a three-way affair made up of the British, a rather old-fashioned Italian
bourgeoisie of moderate disposition and an increasingly assertive working-class formation
institutionalized in the Malta Labour Party. The point here is that in both Malta and Cyprus
any attempt to interpret events through a simple binary split between ‘imperialism’ and
‘nationalism’, that hoary old chestnut of imperial history, breaks down under close examinations.
The internally driven conflicts were the most powerful and threatened to overwhelm the British
so long as they remained committed to staying rather than leaving.
A key contingency that ultimately led to divergent trajectories between Malta and Cyprus,
however, lay in the constitutional sphere. This has already been touched upon but needs more
emphasis. Each possessed a very patchy record in this area (and which was to continue, as
the logic of our argument suggests, well beyond independence). In Malta a series of constitutions
had been periodically suspended since the first one had been inaugurated at the end of the
1840s. In Cyprus the ‘British’ constitution introduced in 1882 was viewed without affection
on all sides, and by the 1920s not only was the Greek-Cypriot elite not interested in any mere
reform of its perceived ills, but the British themselves were keen to sweep it aside, something
the troubles of 1931 conveniently allowed them to do. Amidst the regional tremors running
across the Mediterranean at the outset of the 1930s both these islands had their constitutions
suspended following a short but sharp spasm of violence in Cyprus, and the threat of disorder
in Malta. But already by the end of the 1930s Malta had regained a working constitution of
sorts (albeit one that generated little local interest, let alone enthusiasm), whereas in Cyprus,
although in London the desirability of a similar move back to constitutional practices was fully
recognized, there was no obvious pathway to any such attainment. The pattern of war in the
Mediterranean after 1940 and its consequences drove a deeper wedge between Maltese and
Cypriot experience. Malta, awarded the George Cross by the British monarch himself in June
1942 for heroic resistance to Italian and German aggression, received yet another updated
constitution a few years later. This meant that, in however messy and contested a manner, some
sort of workable political process got a fresh boost in the critical aftermath of the war. Cyprus,
as always, differed. The pre-existing internal struggles were at first temporarily put on hold
as war arrived, but soon reasserted themselves and showed signs of being more envenomed
than ever by mid-1945 (Yiangou 2010: 145–160). Although a self-governing constitution,
which would certainly have resembled the one just instituted in Malta, was discussed at a
Constituent Assembly in Cyprus during 1947–1948, there was never really much likelihood
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of it getting off the ground, and the possibility of such a consensual basis to further political
development disappeared, never to return before independence. As we shall see, whereas in
Malta violence often threatened to derail an always precarious stability, but was always ultimately
banished by the key players as fatal for all concerned, in Cyprus worsening disorder and
frequent assassinations eventually came to fill the void left by ‘ordinary’ political conflict. The
political cost was to be very high, above all for the society itself.
Taken together, these observations mean that it is not at all surprising that the nature of
decolonization assumed very different forms in Malta and Cyprus. One reflection was that
whereas Caruana’s successor as Roman Archbishop in Malta, Michael Gonzi, played a
stabilizing role as seen from London, the Orthodox Archbishop Makarios III in Cyprus became
one of the chief ‘bogey-men’ of the British end of empire. Malta in fact became the only
British Crown Colony where a logical exit from colonial status appeared at one time to be
full integration into the United Kingdom (Smith, 2006). Under this formula Malta would
become a County Council something like Surrey or Devon, except that it happened to be in
mid-Mediterranean. The principle of such integration was actually agreed at a Malta Round
Table Conference in December 1955, but subsequently unraveled owing to fears on the British
side of the expense involved; the Roman Catholic Church, too, was understandably concerned
at the implications of absorption into a country where Protestantism was the established
confession. Admittedly once union with Britain was ruled out as an option for Malta, the lack
of attractive or viable alternatives introduced a potential for instability. The leader of the
Malta Labour Party, Dom Mintoff, who had championed integration, made it clear that if he
did not get a deal on that basis, he would play hard-ball thereafter in raising questions
regarding Britain’s continued access to the island’s strategic facilities. This came at a time
when the importance of those facilities remained far from exhausted, as the crisis in Egypt
over the nationalization of the Suez Canal illustrated. The scope for political trouble in Malta
was reflected in the cynical retort of Harold Macmillan, currently Chancellor of the Exchequer,
that ‘We shall soon be shooting the Cypriots for wanting to leave us, and the Maltese for
wanting to join us’ (Catterall 2003: 443).
In fact there was a mini ‘Emergency’ in Malta after yet another suspension of the
constitution in 1958 and the re-imposition by London of direct rule. Yet crucially the
administration (overwhelmingly staffed by Maltese) continued to function as normal, as did
the Malta Police. The threat of violence by now lay not between the Maltese and the British,
but between the chief Maltese political parties (the Nationalists and the Labour Party, the
former under Borg Olivier being most closely associated with the colonial government).
Indeed, ahead of independence on 21 September 1964 civil war appeared an ominous prospect,
with some concern felt that the Queen’s Consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, in attending the
occasion might get caught in any cross-fire (Holland 2012: 328). In the event things passed
off with only a few scuffles. Malta duly became a sovereign state within the Commonwealth,
and with Queen Elizabeth II (for whom Malta provided the only home she has ever had
outside the United Kingdom itself) still presiding as monarch; her visit to the island in 1967
was attended by huge crowds similar to those that had greeted her father twenty-five years
earlier. Meanwhile the British Armed Forces continued to enjoy unrestricted access throughout
Malta. The island did not become a Republic till 1971, by which time Dom Mintoff had
once again become Prime Minister, orienting the island for a time away from NATO and
Europe and towards alternative patrons such as Libya’s new dictator, Colonel Gaddafi. By
April 1979 all British military and naval forces had at last departed. Yet Mintoff himself,
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Robert Holland
an ex-Rhodes Scholar, never shrugged off a certain English nostalgia (Mizzi, 1995), whilst
visits by British Royalty have still been very regular in the intervening decades.
Not much more needs to be said here as to how this essentially contrasted with Cypriot
experience. Following the outbreak of a rebellion calling for Enosis, led by an organization
known as EOKA, an Emergency was formally declared in November 1955. Subsequently
the British enjoyed almost no Greek-Cypriot interlocutors of note and by 1958 even their
relations with the Turkish-Cypriots (and more importantly, Turkey) were compromised.
Effective civil administration was left in disarray. When independence arrived for Cyprus
on August 16, 1960 (on a basis the principles of which had been principally fixed by
Greece and Turkey, not the United Kingdom) there was no possibility of the British monarch
remaining as Head of State; and although Cyprus joined the Commonwealth in 1961, the
entry was at first attended by a rather grudging spirit on all sides. British military forces
withdrew from the Republic of Cyprus’ territory, though certain facilities continued to be
leased and two small British Sovereign Bases were retained. In sum, Maltese decolonization,
though especially fractious over the money issues involved, unfolded in a broadly stable
manner, and without a fundamental breakdown in the UK-Malta relationship. By contrast,
the counterpart process in Cyprus ran out of anybody’s control, leaving a legacy of suspicion,
alienation and sometimes outright ill-will by no means entirely eradicated by the passing
years, if only because events after independence helped to keep them alive.
Yet having said all this, a paradox arguably remains. Although the logic of our description
implies that under post-colonial conditions the Anglo-Maltese tie would prove more resilient
than the Anglo-Cypriot connection, this is by no means entirely the case. The cultural, educational
and other human flows between the United Kingdom and Cyprus have if anything become more
intense, and those between Britain and Malta relatively less prominent. This probably has
something to do with the fact that in Britain there is a substantial and very active Anglo-Cypriot
community, many of whose families first arrived in the troubled 1950s with an additional surge
after 1974, and which maintains a sustained interaction with the old home island. There are
multiple Cypriot organizations in Britain whereas their Maltese equivalents appear to be thinner
on the ground. It is also true that as a Guarantor Power stemming from the 1960 independence
arrangements, and through two adjacent Sovereign Base areas that display a very practical utility
in successive regional crises in the Middle East, the United Kingdom has an on-going engagement
with Cypriot affairs that has no parallel in the context of Malta (Kyriakides: 2006, 511–534.).
When the current writer joined a mini-cruise for tourists around Valletta’s Grand Harbour several
years ago, the commentary coming over the loud-speaker failed to mention the Royal Navy—
for so long an intrinsic part of its life—once, whilst the old Knights of Malta, formerly so despised,
loomed romantically large, perhaps understandably so for purely touristic purposes. It is natural
enough that over time a national memory should excise some relationships, and play up others.
Britain and Cyprus, for all their mutual gripes, are yet too tangled up with each other for any
such forgetfulness to take hold.
But it is the legacy for the respective political cultures that matter for this volume of
essays, rather than any connection with the United Kingdom. For Malta, the colonial period
was generally speaking a time of administrative growth, civic engagement and public
consciousness that had important political effects. Cypriot experience along these lines was
more partial and often distorted. In short, there was in the Cypriot case a relatively much more
pronounced institutional deficit stemming from a very particular colonial past compared to its
Maltese counterpart. Fundamentally this reflected wider disparities between central and eastern
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Cyprus and Malta: Two Colonial Experiences
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Mediterranean contexts which require more discussion than a short piece such as this allows.
Whether common membership of an ‘ever closer’ European Union will erode the relevance
of such contrasts is the point where historical (including colonial) and contemporary debates
collide.
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