This thesis traces the ways in which Cyprus is inscribed within the British Empire’s time and space by focusing on documents and objects composed and collected in the first thirty years of the British occupation. In so doing, it investigates practices of knowledge production in and for Cyprus — such as writing, photographing, collecting, mapping, surveying, displaying — and highlights how they engender bifurcations of belonging to history.

The thesis adds to the research on colonial practices of knowledge production, and to critiques of imperial epistemologies by tracing how historical time in and of the West is written in and for Cyprus. Specifically, it implicates colonial archaeology within the imperial historical time wherein Cyprus is inscribed as a colonial space. Using a multi-layered approach to archival methods, the thesis traces genealogies and microhistories of power, while potentializing gaps and failures in colonialism’s nexus of narrating, documenting, and archiving.

I first engage with materials of writing Cyprus from the beginning of the British occupation. These place Cyprus in the empire’s time, but outside of the empire’s space, through the concept and the object of the ruin. With abundance of ruins, Cyprus becomes a place of extracting the West’s history. This connects to an epistemological turn across Western disciplines, from the legitimacy of texts to that of objects, whereby ancient objects evidence bifurcations of East and West.

Continuing from the macro to the micro, I then zoom-in on the archives of Francis Hill Guillemard, a British academic who visited Cyprus, collected objects for what he called “museum-stuffing”, and co-established the Cyprus Exploration Fund which excavated the island. Through his diaries and memoirs I trace the proliferation of “the collection” and “the knower” of history.

I proceed by following another colonial agent through the archive: Horatio Herbert Kitchener — the mapmaker of Cyprus. I trace how Cypriots and their landscape were mapped and surveyed, eliminating Ottoman social relations and religious syncretism through documentation. I follow the process of fixation as various concepts of ascribing difference are tried out by colonial administrators to reach the ethnoreligious. I then track Cypriot lifeworlds left out: those that are not registered in the map and census, but are found in petitions and complaints filed-away in archives.

As syncretic lifeworlds are dismissed, I trace how colonial pathways to modernity are displayed. They are displayed in the present as pathways to “progress” in the Colonial Exhibition; and in the past, through the archaeological Cyprus Museum, that, I argue, acts as a storage-room for Britain’s institutions.

Finally, I zoom in again, this time on an object that was discussed and photographed intensely until it failed the discourse of collectable ancientness: a perforated monolith. I trace how this “failure” to enter Western history can potentialize ways of unlearning imperialism following Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s work.

I conclude by suggesting the concept of imperial timescape to explain how Cyprus is used as a landscape of extractable time, and how it enters the West through a useful-for-the-empire ancient, rather than recent, past.