Disraeli, 'the key of Western Asia' and the Echoes of History in the Levant

This contribution was first delivered orally to an academic audience in Gladstone Street in Nicosia. ¹ This is not without irony. After all, Benjamin Disraeli, the long-standing adversary of William Ewart Gladstone, had a much more profound practical impact upon Cypriots than Gladstone, the latter of whom is immortalized in street names in Nicosia and beyond. Whereas Gladstone impressed Cypriots from a distance with what he said, Disraeli affected them directly with what he did. More particularly, it was the Conservative administration led by Disraeli which, during the summer of 1878, brought Cyprus into the British Empire as part of a broader bilateral diplomatic agreement signed on 4 June 1878: the Anglo-Turkish Convention of Defensive Alliance. Subject to various conditions set out in the convention and in an accompanying annex, ² the transaction involved the conveyance of the administration and occupation of Cyprus from the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to the Queen of the United Kingdom. ³