Britain annexes Cyprus

On 5 November 1914, the day on which Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire, King George V issued at a meeting of the Privy Council an Order in Council annexing Cyprus. The island, formally still part of the Sultan’s possessions, was incorporated into the British Empire. Its inhabitants, until then Ottoman subjects, became British subjects.

A lease from the Sultan

The British had been in Cyprus for 36 years. Under a convention concluded on 4 June 1878, just before the Congress of Berlin, the Ottoman Empire had handed them the island to administer. In return Britain undertook to defend the Sultan’s Asian possessions against Russia, which had just defeated Turkey in war. Cyprus was to be a Royal Navy base in the eastern Mediterranean, although its importance had already diminished in 1882, when the British occupied Egypt with Alexandria and the Suez Canal. The Sultan’s sovereignty remained, and London paid Constantinople an annual sum calculated from the surplus of the island’s revenue.

When Turkey sided with Germany, this arrangement lost its point. The British declared the 1878 convention void and announced the annexation. In practice little changed: the island was still governed by a British High Commissioner, at the time Hamilton Goold-Adams, and the same institutions continued to function. Most of the island’s inhabitants were Orthodox Greeks, among whom the aspiration to enosis, union with Greece, had long been alive. The Muslim Turkish minority accepted the annexation calmly, and its leaders assured the High Commissioner of their loyalty.

The island as a bargaining chip

Only a year later there was an attempt to trade Cyprus. In October 1915, when Bulgaria entered the war against Serbia, London offered to cede the island to Greece if Greece came to Serbia’s aid in accordance with the alliance of 1913. The government in Athens, in which, after the resignation of Eleftherios Venizelos, the supporters of King Constantine I’s neutrality had gained the upper hand, rejected the offer after a few days. The British never renewed it.

Turkey recognised the annexation in the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. Two years later, in 1925, Cyprus formally became a British crown colony, and the High Commissioner took the title of governor. The island gained independence only in 1960.