’Martial Races’ in the Isle of Aphrodite

In the nineteenth century European powers employed “natives” perceived to be inherently “martial” as the mainstay of their imperial armed forces. This theory of “martial races” undergirded the composition, for example, of Britain’s Indian Army. An attempt in the 1890s to apply “martial races” theory to the formation of an indigenous defence force in Cyprus, however, proved to be an unqualified failure. Although the British government claimed that the scheme fell through because of inadequate funds, the main reason was that the decision to recruit the force exclusively from among the presumably more “martial” Turkish Muslim population of the island contradicted local ideas of identity by dividing Cypriots into “Greeks” and “Turks,” with unhappy consequences for the future.