Colonial Forestry and Environmental History: British Policies in Cyprus, 1878-1960
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Copyright by Sarah Elizabeth Harris 2007 The Dissertation Committee for Sarah Elizabeth Harris Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: COLONIAL FORESTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: BRITISH POLICIES IN CYPRUS, 1878-1960 Committee: Karl W. Butzer, Supervisor Gregory W. Knapp Kenneth R. Young Maria D. Wade Leo E. Zonn COLONIAL FORESTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: BRITISH POLICIES IN CYPRUS, 1878-1960 by Sarah Elizabeth Harris, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2007 Acknowledgements This dissertation has been six long years, five research trips to Cyprus, and two trips to London in the making. Over the course of this time, I have benefited from conversations with multiple people on diverse topics. There are far too many thank you’s to think that I am doing an adequate job with them, but nonetheless, an attempt is presented below. In the US, my dissertation committee patiently allowed me to progress through my research. My supervisor, Karl Butzer, deserves special thanks as he introduced me to the main schools of thought in geographic literature and fielded numerous questions on topics ranging from goats to vineyards to forest density to slope stability. The InterLibrary Services staff in the Perry-Castañeda Library were also essential to my research, and their ability to track down my multiple requests never ceased to amaze me. In Cyprus, this research would have been impossible to complete without the assistance of the Forest Department, which provided me with numerous departmental reports, a working space, coffee, food, a computer, and many conversations. Alexandros Christodoulou deserves extra thanks for arranging for me to have access to the departmental library and the Forestry College library. My gratitude is also extended to Charalambos Christodoulou, Andreas Antoniou, Thomas Kyriakou, and once again Alexandros Christodoulou for their willingness to share their knowledge of the Cypriot forests, include me on study trips into the forests, and introduce me to parents, grandparents and friends. Christodoulos Apostolides and his knowledge of computers was invaluable when mine crashed mid-study season. When not involved with the Forest Department, my time was frequently spent either at the Cyprus State Library or the Cyprus State Archives. The Director of the Cyprus State Library, Antonis Maratheftis, allowed me unfettered access to the library’s copies of the Cyprus Gazettes and Cyprus Blue Books as well as pointed out to me relevant publications to my topic. The staff at the Cyprus State Archives likely thought that I was never going to stop requesting archival files, but they met each request with a smile. The staff at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, my home base for close to two years, were also very helpful. Special mention must be made of Vathoulla and her endless ability to put you in contact with whomever you needed to contact. Phodoulla put up with my increasingly book and paper-strewn room, while also provided necessary cooking tips – without her my Cypriot coffee would be dismal and I still would not be able to satisfy my taste for mahlebi with rose water. Diana, CAARI’s librarian, saw to it that books I required were ordered for the library, even though my topic was somewhat different from that of most scholars at CAARI. She also made a special effort to alert me to relevant resources within the library, and, far outside of her library duties, even made a special trip to rescue several of us stranded with a dead battery! Gisela Walberg, whom I had as a professor during my Cincinnati days, always extended an invitation to visit her Episkopi-Bamboula project as well as provided feedback and photocopied materials to help my research throughout the entire process. Michael Toumazou, the director of the Athienou Archaeological Project that provided me with my first introduction to Cyprus when still an undergraduate classical archaeology iv major, kindly allowed me to stay at the “Palace” at Athienou multiple times and assisted my efforts to obtain maps of Cyprus. Michael Given and Jay Noller invited me to visit their Troodos Archaeological and Environmental Survey Project on several occasions, and Michael provided beneficial feedback on my dissertation proposal as well as a detailed bibliography. Recognition must also be made of a number of funding sources, without which this research would have been impossible. Specifically, thanks to the Fulbright Commission (Fulbright IIE fellowship), UT’s Study Abroad program (two International Education Fee Scholarships), UT’s Liberal Arts program (Liberal Arts Graduate Research Fellowship), the Department of Geography and the Environment (two Veselka Awards), and the general university (Pre-emptive Recruitment Fellowship, University Continuing Fellowship, and a Bruton Fellowship). My family cheerfully put up with my extended absences and random flight times, even when they were not too sure what exactly it was I was doing. Last but not least, John Oswald not only has been forced to endure this process with me, but he has also been cajoled into helping me with it. The beauty of the maps and tables within the dissertation reflect his insane abilities with Adobe Photoshop. Two quotes will suffice to close this section. A character (Larry) in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh utters the following lines: I was born condemned to be one of those of those who has to see all sides of a question. When you're damned like that, the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all questions and no answer. As history proves, to be a worldly success at anything … you have to wear blinders like a horse and see only straight in front of you. You have to see, too, that this is all black, and that is all white.1 In a review of my work written by a professor at UT, the individual made the following statement as a critique of my inductive leanings: “It is better to be wrong and interesting than right and boring.” What follows is an attempt to extract answers from the never-ending sea of questions before being buried under them, but in doing so to not succumb to the “easy out” recommended by the UT academic. Being “wrong and interesting” is a fairly simple task, often accomplished by following the advice above. As O’Neill’s Larry emphasizes, history tends to reward those who are able to see clearly in black and white, with no confusing shades of gray. Unfortunately, our world has never appeared so starkly dichotomized to me. The multiple shades of gray contained within this text are therefore purposeful, and my apologies in advance if the answers are not beaming brightly in black and white. 1My thanks to Guha (2006) for reminding me of this passage. v COLONIAL FORESTRY AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: BRITISH POLICIES IN CYPRUS, 1878-1960 Publication No._____________ Sarah Elizabeth Harris, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2007 Supervisor: Karl W. Butzer The forests of the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus, famous for their extent in antiquity, were described as severely damaged by misuse over the preceding centuries at the time of the British arrival on the island in 1878. The British colonial authorities sought to remedy this “degradation”, and their success in doing so before their departure in 1960 has seldom been questioned. This dissertation examines this accepted history of the colonial period by utilizing archival, ethnographic, and physical data and focusing upon the British impact on the landscape as well as the relationship between the British authorities and the Cypriot people. This reappraisal suggests several points. The British approached the Cypriot forests with certain misunderstandings and misconceptions in 1878. They believed that the majority of the forested areas on the island were unregulated commons, which they were not. They further misread the landscape by assuming that its appearance, quite different from that of a humid and temperate biome, indicated degradation. Within these concerns vi of degradation, they misinterpreted the Cypriot rural economy by holding that shepherds and agriculturalists did not and could not mix. These misunderstandings of Mediterranean ecology, combined with prevailing ideas for good forest management and agricultural intensification, and hampered by inadequate budgets, resulted in policies that did not initially “return” the forests to any imagined state of past verdure, and may instead have been harmful in certain aspects. Yet the British officials did not behave according to traditional stereotypes of colonial rulers either. The actions of many of the colonial foresters were not solely driven by a desire for instant profit; instead the majority consistently attempted to maintain and ameliorate the forests both for indirect ecosystem benefits (which they recognized would be remunerative to the island as a whole, even if not immediately to the department) and direct benefits of timber production. The meticulous records in the archives display a concern with doing what was best for the forests and for the people, which inevitably led to conflicts as to what was "fair" for the forest and "fair" for the inhabitants, however defined. vii Table of Contents List of Figures........................................................................................................ xi Prologue ...................................................................................................................1