Book Review of Yiannos Katsourides, The Greek Cypriot Nationalist Right in the Era of British Colonialism: Emergence, Mobilisation and Transformations of Right-Wing Party Politics

After publishing his first monograph in 2014 on communism in Cyprus, Yiannos Katsourides has backed this up with this book on the emergence of the Greek Cypriot nationalist right. While the former looked at communism until the formation of AKEL in 1942, this latest work extends the period of focus until the end of the British colonial period. In both cases the methodology adopted is similar, reflective of Katsourides’ discipline, political science, rather than that of history; thus both books are not grounded in the thorough and meticulous analysis of the archives, and are based to a larger extent on secondary sources and published primary sources, supplemented by the sporadic use of the archives. This in no way diminishes the worth of either, but places each in their appropriate methodological context.

Katsourides states that the aims of his book are to analyse the processes and factors that contributed to the emergence, constitution and consolidation of the Greek Cypriot nationalist right during colonialism. This he achieves, and for the most part he presents a good case, even if it does lack an archival grounding. The chronological-thematic structure adopted is appropriate and the period is covered relatively thoroughly within the confines of the research undertaken, which is mainly based on secondary sources with a good use of Cypriot newspapers, Blue Books and some Colonial Office files. One minor irritation is that the referencing system adopted is hard to follow, as primary sources appear in the footnotes and secondary sources in the text.