Britain’s Cold War in Cyprus and Hong

Kong: A Conflict of Empires 1st Edition

Christopher Sutton (Auth.)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/britains-cold-war-in-cyprus-and-hong-kong-a-conflict-
of-empires-1st-edition-christopher-sutton-auth/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Women Doing Intimacy: Gender, Family and Modernity in

Britain and Hong Kong Stevi Jackson

https://textbookfull.com/product/women-doing-intimacy-gender-
family-and-modernity-in-britain-and-hong-kong-stevi-jackson/

Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War 1st Edition

Christopher B. Balme

https://textbookfull.com/product/theatre-globalization-and-the-
cold-war-1st-edition-christopher-b-balme/

The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education

in the Post-Cold War Era Luigi Cajani

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-palgrave-handbook-of-
conflict-and-history-education-in-the-post-cold-war-era-luigi-
cajani/

Critique of Hong Kong Nativism From a Legal Perspective

Jie Zhu

https://textbookfull.com/product/critique-of-hong-kong-nativism-
from-a-legal-perspective-jie-zhu/
Nationalism, Militarism and Masculinity in Post-
Conflict Cyprus Stratis Andreas Efthymiou

https://textbookfull.com/product/nationalism-militarism-and-
masculinity-in-post-conflict-cyprus-stratis-andreas-efthymiou/

Trilingual Education in Hong Kong Primary Schools Lixun

Wang

https://textbookfull.com/product/trilingual-education-in-hong-
kong-primary-schools-lixun-wang/

Oral Histories of Older Gay Men in Hong Kong Unspoken

but Unforgotten Queer Asia 1st Edition Travis Shiu Ki
Kong

https://textbookfull.com/product/oral-histories-of-older-gay-men-
in-hong-kong-unspoken-but-unforgotten-queer-asia-1st-edition-
travis-shiu-ki-kong/

Network and System Security 12th International

Conference NSS 2018 Hong Kong China August 27 29 2018
Proceedings Man Ho Au

https://textbookfull.com/product/network-and-system-
security-12th-international-conference-nss-2018-hong-kong-china-
august-27-29-2018-proceedings-man-ho-au/

Bank Asset and Liability Management 1st Edition The

Hong Kong Institute Of Bankers

https://textbookfull.com/product/bank-asset-and-liability-
management-1st-edition-the-hong-kong-institute-of-bankers/
 B R I TA I N A N D T H E W O R L D

Britain’s Cold War in

Cyprus and Hong Kong
A Conflict of Empires

Christopher Sutton
 Britain and the World

Edited by The British Scholar Society

Series Editors:

A.G. Hopkins
Martin Farr
Gregory A. Barton
Michelle D. Brock
Richard C. Allen
James Onley
Eric G. E. Zuelow
Aims of the Series
Britain’s influence on the world was profound and far-reaching, touching
every continent and subject, from Africa to South America and archaeology
to zoology. From the sixteenth century onward, the histories of Britain and
the world became increasingly intertwined. Yet mainstream British history
still neglects the world’s influence upon domestic developments and British
overseas history remains largely confined to the study of the British Empire.
This series takes a broader approach to British history, seeking to investigate
the full extent of the world’s influence on Britain and Britain’s influence on
the world.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14795
 Christopher Sutton

Britain’s Cold War in

Cyprus and Hong
Kong
A Conflict of Empires
Christopher Sutton
University of East Anglia
Norwich, United Kingdom

Britain and the World

ISBN 978-3-319-33490-5 ISBN 978-3-319-33491-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33491-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958145

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: © Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

While I ponder something witty or lofty to add here, I must thank those
who have contributed to my endeavours in writing this book—with the
caveat that all mistakes and misjudgements are entirely my own.
First, I would like to thank the British Scholar Society—particu-
larly Bryan Glass, Martin Farr, Michelle D. Brock, and Leslie Rogne
Schumacher—for their inclusiveness and encouragement. Peter Cary, Jade
Moulds, Molly Beck, and Oliver Dyer at Palgrave Macmillan have been
fantastic in shepherding this project. The reviewers have offered helpful
feedback. I suspect I’ve been spoilt in this first manuscript.
I would like to thank my doctoral supervisors, Cathie Carmichael and
Camilla Schofield, for their generosity of time, encouragement, support,
and insight and for introducing some culture to my research. I would also
like to thank my former supervisor, Larry Butler, for all of the above as
well as for writing the book which introduced me to imperial history. He
is missed.
Several friends have generously offered their expert pedantry and
insights along the way. For this—as well as for their advice, their humour,
and their friendships—I would like to thank Christopher Bonfield, Grace
Chou, Jennifer Davey, Mark Hampton, Geoff Hicks, Matthew Mesley,
Richard Mills, Jennifer Reeve, Tim Smith, and Andy Willimott.
While I have been blessed with an (all too rare) education enriched by
a great number of excellent teachers and facilities, I would like to thank
especially Mrs Leslie Clark, my high school history teacher, for her pas-
sion, compassion, and chalkboard-filled notes on Abraham Lincoln. This
book is her fault.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my transatlantic friends and family—both through

biology and in law—for everything they have done to support me. I am
grateful especially for the sanctuary in which and support through which
I completed much of this work provided by my parents-in-law, Raymond
and Susan Reeve. I want to thank my parents for their love and support
and for nurturing the curiosity of a curious little boy.
Most of all, I would like to thank my wife Jennifer for, well, everything.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction 1

Part I From Enemy to Ally to Enemy 15

2 Origins and the First Cold War, 1917–1945 17

3 ‘A World of Grey Men’: The Rise of the CCP, 1938–1946 33

4 Moderate, Irreproachable, and Organized: The Rise

of AKEL, 1941–1946 47

5 British Anti-Communism: From Enemy to Ally to Enemy 65

Part II Containment Through Reform 69

6 The Breakdown of Allied Cooperation

and the Resumption of the Cold War 71

7 A Failed New Deal in Hong Kong: From Constitution

to Repression, 1946–1949 83

vii
viii CONTENTS

8 A Failed New Deal in Cyprus: From Constitution

to Repression, 1946–1949 105

9 British Anti-Communism: Containment

Through Reform 131

Part III Containment Through Repression 135

10 The Decline of the British World System 137

11 Hong Kong, the Fall of China and ‘Pax’ Americana,

1949–1952 151

12 ‘Too Much or Too Little Repression’: The Fall

of AKEL, 1949–1955 173

13 British Anti-Communism: Containment

Through Repression 193

14 Conclusion: Britain, the Empire, and the Cold War 197

Bibliography 215

Index 229
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACJ Arthur Creech Jones [papers]

AKEL Progressive Party of Working People
AON Progressive Organization of Youth
BBC British Broadcasting Company
CCP Chinese Communist Party
Cominform Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties
Comintern Communist International
COS Chiefs of Staff
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
DSO Defence Security Officer
EOKA National Organization of Cypriot Fighters
IRD Information Research Department
IUS International Union of Students
JIC(FE) Joint Intelligence Committee (Far East)
KKE Communist Party of Greece
KKK Communist Party of Cyprus
KMT Kuomintang [Nationalist Party of China]
MBE Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
MP Member of Parliament
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NGO non-governmental organization
OBE Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
PEO Pancyprian Federation of Labour
PEON Pancyprian National Youth Organization
PRC People’s Republic of China
PSE Pancyprian Trades Union Committee
PSR political situation report

ix
x LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ROC Republic of China

SIFE Security Intelligence Far East
SIME Security Intelligence Middle East
TNA The National Archives [of the United Kingdom]
UK United Kingdom
UN United Nations
US(A) United States (of America)
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
VOKS All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries
WAY World Assembly of Youth
WFDY World Federation of Democratic Youth
WFTU World Federation of Trade Unions
WIDF Women’s International Democratic Federation
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

On 21 March 1946, the British Colonial Office received a message sent

on behalf of the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Ernest Bevin. The
letter was brief:

Sir,
I am directed by Mr. Secretary Bevin to state that in view of the Soviet
Government’s present policy of representing itself as the champion of colo-
nial peoples throughout the world, and in view of the many criticisms of this
country and the British Empire now being made in the Soviet press and in
foreign language broadcasts from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
he would like to be kept informed of the extent to which such Soviet propa-
ganda lines are reproduced in the press of the Colonies and of the reactions
which such statements provoke.
I am therefore to enquire whether the Secretary of State for the Colonies
could provide him with periodical surveys of the available information on
the subject.
I am, Sir, Your obedient Servant,
R. M. A. Hankey1

Less than two months later, a similar letter was sent from the Colonial
Office to fifty-six colonies, protectorates, and mandated territories of the
British Empire.
From South America, the British Guiana government responded that
‘George Padmore, negro communist’ was spreading ‘extremely anti-British

© The Author(s) 2017 1

C. Sutton, Britain’s Cold War in Cyprus and Hong Kong,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33491-2_1
2 C. SUTTON

and racial articles from London’.2 From the Middle East, the high com-
missioner of Palestine noted increasing interest in Soviet propaganda,
which labelled British policy ‘double-faced’ and ‘divide and rule’.3 From
South Asia, ‘[h]ot headed students’ and ‘ignorant followers’, the gover-
nor of Ceylon reported, ‘find in the [Trotskyite Lanka] Sama Samajist
Party the most violent expression of anti-British, anti-Imperialist, and
anti-Capitalist views’.4 From an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, some
570 miles from the nearest land (North Carolina) and 3,300 miles from
the United Kingdom (UK), the governor of Bermuda quoted a recent
newspaper article which read: ‘Russia’s great military strength lies in the
“secret” of indestructible friendship and fraternal co-operation among all
the 178 different races and peoples inhabiting the U.S.S.R. [Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics]’. This was juxtaposed with the headline that
‘Natives made to Wear Dog Collars’ in certain British territories.5
Of all Britain’s colonies, perhaps the two which experienced the most
action in Britain’s early Cold War (aside from the well-studied hot war in
Malaya)—the two with the most cause to reply to the Colonial Office’s
request for information on communist propaganda and activities—were
Cyprus and Hong Kong. From an island in the eastern Mediterranean Sea,
which was considered to be crucial for airstrikes against the soft underbelly
of the Soviet Union as well as for the maintenance of British influence
in the Middle East, the governor of Cyprus responded to the Colonial
Office’s 1946 despatch that, in addition to a left-wing press ‘impregnated
with ideas of the communist faith’, Soviet films and newsreels were selling
out theatres.6 The tenacious Cypriot communist party, the Progressive
Party of Working People (AKEL)—one of the best organized and most
effective communist parties of the British Empire—sold Soviet literature,
marched with Soviet flags, and held public meetings under images of
Joseph Stalin. While their support for enosis (a Greek–Cypriot national-
ist movement calling for the ‘union’ of Cyprus with Greece) was more
political than genuinely nationalistic—especially when they believed the
Greek Civil War was going to swing in their comrades’ favour—their most
consistent message was ‘down with British imperialism’.
Hong Kong, meanwhile, became the home not only of the Chinese
Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda machine for the outside world,
but also of the China branch of the Soviets’ All-Union Society for Cultural
Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), which was responsible for
producing and distributing Soviet propaganda and coordinating cultural
exchanges between the USSR and foreign countries.7 From Hong Kong,
 INTRODUCTION 3

VOKS produced or imported Chinese- and English-language literature,

including Pravda, Moscow News, World Student News, and works by and
on Stalin, Lenin, and other Soviet leaders.8 Along with printed material,
Soviet films were also common in Hong Kong, often screened to working-
class audiences, whose supposed susceptibility to such indoctrination
was widely recognized. The governor warned that the Soviet films ‘are
extremely good technically, and are skilful propaganda for the U.S.S.R.’.9
This concern was echoed in the British Foreign Office, rather ironically,
by the now infamous Guy Burgess, an intelligence expert and Soviet spy.10
Ultimately, however, for British policy-makers, it was the constant (albeit
overstated) threat of war with the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—
including the United States (US) antagonistic activities in and around the
colony—that made Hong Kong the ‘Berlin of the East’.11
These accounts were not simply examples of the Cold War intrud-
ing into imperial spaces, nor were they merely individual cases of colo-
nial nationalists taking advantage of global politics to further their cause
for independence. Rather, they were integral parts of a global Cold War
that, I argue, is more helpfully understood, in John Kent’s words, as a
‘clash between rival imperialisms’. In this contest, the Soviet Union’s own
brand of imperialism—a neo-colonialism which, outside its borders, was
non-political in its control, transnational in its reach, and anti-colonial in
its message—challenged and often bewildered those resisting communist
expansionism, especially those administering formal colonial empires.12
The Cold War, which has traditionally been reduced to Soviet–American
nuclear arms and space races and proxy wars, was in reality much more
ubiquitous and far-reaching. With the breakdown of Allied cooperation in
1945–1946 marking the return and escalation of Cold War tensions with
the Soviet Union, significant fighting took place across the British Empire,
especially in Cyprus and Hong Kong, over relatively benign cultural pro-
cesses, such as high school geography lessons, the British monarch’s birthday
celebrations, and one’s cigarette brand of choice. In comparison with the
Vietnam War and mutual assured destruction, such things paled into insig-
nificance; however, when we define the Cold War by its most extreme mani-
festations and between (what eventually became) its two largest rivals, we
actually lose sight of the pervasiveness as well as the complexity of the conflict.
Britain’s empire—from its political administration to its cultural pro-
jections—was deeply interconnected to British policy-makers’ long-stand-
ing resistance against Soviet territorial and ideological expansionism. By
identifying British colonial policies as not simply a case study of British
4 C. SUTTON

imperialism but also as a clear example of the Cold War in action, this
book seeks to expand on Kent’s ‘clash between rival imperialisms’, spe-
cifically by identifying the interconnections between local colonial poli-
cies and how the British attempted to fight the Cold War.13 I use ‘fight’
in a ‘cold’ sense; fighting this particular war was less about conventional
warfare with soldiers and bombs (although this was certainly part of it)
than it was about mostly bloodless battles over transformative ideologies,
personal identities, and national prestige.
Fighting the Cold War meant undermining the enemy’s form of impe-
rialism and ideology while projecting the superiority of, in this case,
Britain’s social democracy and by extension, its ‘progressive’ colonialism.
British propaganda through the British Broadcasting Company’s (BBC)
Russia Service or the Foreign Office generally sought to illustrate the want
and repression of living under communism to East Germans, Eastern
Europeans, and Chinese citizens, by comparing them to the freedoms and
liberties enjoyed by British subjects. For Britain, however, the possession
of a formal colonial empire, which was inherently undemocratic, racist,
and repressive, posed perhaps the greatest threat to its assertion of great
power in a Cold War of rival imperialisms. As we will see in the examples
of Cyprus and Hong Kong, British policy-makers sought to reform their
colonial rule, as one official put it, in order to offer ‘something more
dynamic, more appealing and better than Communism itself’.14 Colonial
failures, however, such as racist laws, suppression of dissent, and violent
resistance, were therefore also Cold War failures.
This, then, is a book about one (under-studied) side in this multi-
faceted conflict, with its focus on British official perceptions and policy-
making. The roles of and impact on colonial populations—let alone the
US, Soviet Union, and PRC—are considered mostly through this British
official lens (although to what extent this reflected reality is an area in
need of further study). Specifically, this book compares two case studies
of how British officials in Whitehall, Hong Kong, Cyprus, and elsewhere
imagined, planned, and executed their (cold) war efforts.
Many of these British policy-makers believed that they were defending
Britain’s imperial process and great power prestige from the perceived
communist threat on a number of imperial/cultural battlefields, from
trade unionism to education to public rituals. Such cultural warfare is not
new for Cold War historians; however, the structure and implicit nature of
the British colonial system grants us unprecedented access to it, while also
serving to de-centre further the Cold War from its traditional US-centric
focus.
 INTRODUCTION 5

Across the empire, the British perceived communist threats, both real
and imagined, of local and foreign origins, and from ardent ideologues to
so-called fellow travellers. The aim of this book is not to extrapolate British
policies and their outcomes from two colonial examples, but instead to
identify and compare key themes and recurrent questions in British colo-
nial policy-making during the Cold War, specifically of who was the enemy
and how to defeat them. Along with Malaya, Hong Kong and Cyprus
faced the largest, best-organized communist movements operating in
the British Empire; unlike Malaya, the communists in Hong Kong and
Cyprus did not take up arms against the colonial state. British tactics in
the hot war in Malaya have received considerable scholarly attention; this
book is instead interested in Britain’s cold wars and soft (and not so soft)
approaches to fighting rival imperialisms and communist challengers in
and regarding colonial territories.

BRITAIN’S COLD WAR

Expanding the definition of the Cold War, particularly as a multifarious
imperial contest which began with the Russian Revolution, has met firm
resistance from the resilient general consensus of Western scholars that ‘the
cold war is a post-World War II phenomenon, beginning at some point
between 1945 and 1947’ when ‘an essentially bipolar world’ emerged, ‘in
which the United States and the Soviet Union confronted one another
more or less right around the Eurasian land mass’.15 Even scholars who
have widened the geographic scope to the ‘global Cold War’ have still
focused on ‘how the mightiest powers of the late twentieth century—the
United States and the Soviet Union—repeatedly intervened in processes
of change in Africa, Asia, and Latin America’.16
While the likes of Odd Arne Westad, Niall Ferguson, and others have
de-centred the narrative from Washington and Moscow, the US remains
a defining parameter of the Cold War. Thus while The Oxford Handbook
of the Cold War, published in 2013, includes a chapter on Britain, one of
its main assertions is that Britain was ‘an active’ but certainly secondary
‘participant’ and ‘an important, albeit waning, cold war power’.17 This
US-centric-plus-Britain interpretation thrives despite the fact that, as
Anne Deighton has observed, ‘the protection of a favourable balance of
power and the containment of the Soviet Union’—the two central factors
of this traditional understanding of the Cold War—‘were initially British
phenomena’.18
6 C. SUTTON

Deighton as well as Michael L. Dockrill, John Kent, Peter Weiler,

and John W. Young were the originators of the still burgeoning move-
ment of British revisionism. They have asserted that Britain’s Cold War
diplomacy, whether in terms of a ‘Western union’ with or a ‘third way’
apart from the US, was meant to secure Britain’s great power status, not
replace it.19 A number of scholars have identified British (let alone later
Anglo-American) Cold War propaganda efforts in the Soviet bloc, in the
form of the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department, Cultural
Relations Department, Russia Committee, and the BBC Russia Service.20
Frank Heinlein has subsequently described ‘liberal colonial policy’
and decolonization as London’s response to the Soviets ‘courting “dis-
appointed nationalism”’.21 Antony Best has identified an Anglo-Soviet
‘“cold war” of sorts’ over imperial ambitions in China and East Asia dur-
ing the interwar years, which in part drew ‘the Cold War battle-lines that
would mar the Third World after 1945’.22 British revisionists have thus
demonstrated that Britain’s imperialism and imperial interests in large part
defined British foreign and domestic policy and profoundly affected Cold
War geopolitics.
British revisionism has focused on high politics, that is, on how having
and defending an empire featured in Cold War foreign policy at the very
highest levels of policy-making. This book looks to expand this revisionist
approach, by taking a closer look at the empire side of the equation, spe-
cifically how British policy-makers conceptualized and attempted to fight
the Cold War in and regarding the colonies. In Cyprus and Hong Kong,
policy-makers’ determination and efforts to resist communists’ political
and social advances while fostering local support for British colonial rule
revealed the pervasiveness of the Cold War conflict as well as its social, cul-
tural, economic, political, and military interconnections with imperialism.
Imperialism in its broadest sense is ‘the attempt to impose one state’s
predominance over other societies by assimilating them to its political,
cultural and[/or] economic system’. Its structure and function has histori-
cally varied between and within empires, depending on a great number of
factors. One mechanism of imperialism is colonialism, which this book will
define as direct and formal political control over another society. However,
crucial to our broader understanding of the Cold War, there are other
mechanisms of imperialism, including economic dependence, political and
defence entanglements, cultural homogenization, and ideological imposi-
tion.23 Such modes of imperialism seldom operated in isolation; they inter-
acted (not to mention with other social and economic forces), depending
on the interests, actions, and interactions of the colonizer and colonized.
 INTRODUCTION 7

With their various forms, methods, and players, empires tended to be

‘fractured, informal, and indirect’.24 The realities of policy-making are
often oversimplified in Cold War literature by a reliance on high policy
and a ‘great men’ approach, which ignores the ways in which Cold War
fears, imperial goals, colonial populations, and the everyday interacted. In
the British example, imperial policy was debated, developed, and imple-
mented by a wide array of colonial personnel (from the secretary of state
in London to the district commissioner in the colony), with very few
issues reaching the Cabinet, and with input from (and sometimes con-
flict with) other government departments (e.g. the Foreign Office and
the Treasury), the diplomatic corps, and non-governmental organizations
(e.g. the British Trades Union Congress).25
This complicated system of policy-makers, civil servants, private indi-
viduals, and colonial governments produced copious amounts of debate
and paperwork, much of which has only recently become available at the
National Archives of the United Kingdom. While including Cabinet,
personal, and colonial government papers, this book primarily utilizes
Colonial Office files. These documents have not yet been examined within
the framework of British revisionism and offer new sources of informa-
tion on how the British fought the Cold War. Moreover, Colonial Office
files offer a near-complete picture of the decision-making process. It is
not uncommon for a Colonial Office file to contain: correspondence
between it and the colonial governments; documentary evidence, such
as seized communist documents, correspondence from colonial leaders,
and local newspaper clippings, forwarded by the colonial governments;
related correspondence between it, the Foreign Office, British consulates
overseas, and British security and intelligence agencies; information on
Cabinet deliberations; references for other files which Colonial Office offi-
cials considered to be relevant, such as on lessons learned in the Malayan
Emergency; and extensive minutes from relevant civil servants of every
rank as well as government ministers attached to the Colonial Office,
including the secretary of state.
These files therefore reveal the meeting place of the Cabinet’s high
politics, the Colonial Office’s high imperial politics, and the colonial gov-
ernment’s local colonial politics. These files also provide insights into
the motivations, perceptions, priorities, and intentions of British policy-
makers, as they discussed, justified, and disagreed about the appropriate
course of action. However, as this book argues, while there was often
considerable variance between and within the colonial governments and
London—not to mention between Hong Kong and Cyprus—there were
8 C. SUTTON

some important consistencies, particularly regarding the interrelationship

between ‘the politics of force’ and the politics of culture.26 These consis-
tencies, despite such contextual differences and despite varied outcomes,
reveal a coherent understanding in the British official mind of who the
enemy was, what constituted the battlefields, and the necessity, for the
sake of British interests however defined, of winning those battles.
Cultural politics formed a significant portion of British Cold War colonial
policy. As Susan Carruthers has observed, the British government during the
Cold War was convinced that the Soviets had initiated an expansionist cam-
paign, especially regarding the British Empire, ‘competing not only for physi-
cal but also for psychological territory—“men’s minds”’.27 ‘Men’s minds’—or
‘hearts and minds’, to put it in its imperial terminology—were essential to
British colonial strategies, especially in the attempt to redirect colonial nation-
alist energies and to guide (slowly) the state formation of colonies into inde-
pendent countries willing to enter the Commonwealth of Nations, thereby
retaining some British influence. Thus British colonial strategies and policy-
making in Hong Kong and Cyprus, where two powerful communist parties
were hard at work, aimed to meet the communists on psychological, social,
and cultural battlegrounds, such as trade unionism and education. Ultimately,
while successful in avoiding communist takeovers, British colonial policy-mak-
ers struggled to find a constructive response to Soviet cultural imperialism.
The British tended to rely on repressive legislation, police monitoring, and
violence, while communists, especially pro-communist non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), offered an attractive vision of pro-nationalism and
anti-colonialism to the colonies’ nationalists, youth, workers, and women.

HONG KONG AND CYPRUS

This clash between British and communist imperialisms was pervasive in
both Hong Kong and Cyprus, where by the early 1940s, there operated
two of what policy-makers considered to be the British Empire’s most dan-
gerous communist threats: the CCP and AKEL, respectively. In addition
to Anglo-Soviet tensions regarding their imperial peripheries which existed
from the 1920s, there had been a communist presence in Hong Kong from
as early as 1920. In Cyprus, AKEL’s predecessor, the Communist Party of
Cyprus (KKK), which was founded in 1926, had caused the British authori-
ties there so much concern that the latter proscribed the KKK in 1933.28 By
the end of the Second World War, the perceived Soviet threat to the British
Empire took on greater urgency, particularly given the gradual breakdown
 INTRODUCTION 9

of Allied cooperation, Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe, increasing

pressure from colonial nationalist movements across the empire, and fears
of Britain’s declining world power.
Both Hong Kong and Cyprus were subjected to internal communist
and nationalist agitation as well as external claims of sovereignty, eco-
nomically devastated by the Second World War, and threatened, it was
believed, by Soviet-directed communist movements. Attempts at consti-
tutional advancement (as part of a wider colonial strategy to justify the
continuation of the British Empire and to contain nationalist agitation and
communist imperialism) failed in both Cyprus and Hong Kong. Instead,
policy-makers sought to maintain British sovereignty over these two geo-
strategic islands (i.e. on the frontline of Soviet and Chinese communist
expansionism) and thus engaged in a (mostly) cold war against the local,
regional, and international communist forces which were active, or at least
perceived to be active, in these two colonies.
Hong Kong and Cyprus therefore offer important insights into the
process by which British policy-makers attempted to adapt their approach
to imperialism in order to compete with those of the Soviets and, eventu-
ally, the US and PRC in the Cold War. This might be surprising, as Hong
Kong’s and Cyprus’s respective historiographies have, in different ways,
overlooked the Cold War battles within the territories. This book thus
presents alternative narratives to the nationalist-focused history of Cyprus
and the neutrality myth of Hong Kong history. In both cases, the colonial
governments identified local communism (as well as its links, both real and
imagined, to external communist movements and organizations) as the
most dangerous threat to their respective colony’s stability and ‘proper’
development and took action against it.
Historical studies of Cyprus have generally been inward-focused, evi-
dent in the historiographical domination of the Greek-Cypriot nationalist
revolt for enosis (1955–1959) and Cyprus’s subsequent turning points,
including independence (1960), the Greek coup and Turkish interven-
tion (1974), and partition (1983). Until the 2000s, Cyprus’s communists
have been generally ignored. When they did receive scholarly attention,
AKEL was blamed, as Robert Holland has argued, for being but one fac-
tor in the radicalization of the Greek-Cypriot nationalists, while also serv-
ing as, in Nancy Crawshaw’s words, a ‘preoccupation’ which distracted
the British from recognizing ‘that in the long term the greatest threat to
British interests in Cyprus came from the right wing’.29 As such, the ways
in which Cyprus influenced and was influenced by the Cold War have been
obscured.
10 C. SUTTON

Since 1999, there has been a boom in the number of studies of AKEL’s
importance to Cypriot history and politics, but these have yet to move the
discussion into wider Cold War or imperial narratives.30 In 2006, Andreas
Panayiotou examined AKEL’s sociopolitical influence within his broader
thesis that ‘the communist alternative was also particularly attractive to
non-western societies’, especially in colonial territories where communism
‘represented a radical/revolutionary alternative to ineffective middle-class
liberalism, nationalism […] and traditional/conservative movements’.31
This is an important observation, one which British colonial administra-
tors had recognized not only in Cyprus but across the empire and in the
metropole. How the British imagined and responded to this ‘communist
alternative’ is at the heart of this study.
The historiographical recognition of Hong Kong’s position in the Cold
War has been facilitated by its regional context and physical proximity
to communist China. In Asia, the number of Cold War proxy wars in,
for example, China, Korea, French Indochina, and Malaya as well as the
geopolitical upheaval caused by the formation of the PRC have made the
connections between colonies and the Cold War much more obvious than
elsewhere in the British Empire.32 Nevertheless, there is a general consen-
sus in the historiography of Hong Kong that, as Steve Tsang has put it,
‘the authorities in Hong Kong adhered as far as possible to a policy of strict
neutrality in Chinese politics, supported by an attitude of non-provocative
firmness towards the two Chinese regimes’.33 The list of important works
on Hong Kong which contain similar statements is a long one.34
However, while this was indeed the public face of policy and while non-
provocation was an important consideration, British officials in London
and Hong Kong, including the supposedly neutral governor, Sir Alexander
Grantham, were in fact explicitly anti-communist in their motivations and
intentions for policy-formation beginning in mid-1948, if not earlier.35 By
comparing this preoccupation with that in Cyprus, this book further elu-
cidates the predominance of a Cold War mentality underpinning British
colonial policy-making more generally as well as how the Cold War was
fought in the colonies.
***
This book is divided into three sections, each of which contains an
introduction to the wider imperial and Cold War context, a chapter on
Hong Kong, a chapter on Cyprus, and a concluding comparative chap-
ter. The first section details the origins of Cold War imperial tensions
between Britain and the Soviet Union and compares the formation and
rise of the CCP and AKEL therein. The second section covers the general
 INTRODUCTION 11

shift in British imperial strategy of moving certain colonies towards greater

self-government as, partly, a response to the Soviet imperial challenge.
In Hong Kong and Cyprus, policy-makers reformed their colonial rule,
rescinding some particularly repressive and/or racist laws, and tried to
introduce limited internal self-government. In both cases, they failed for a
number of local and geopolitical reasons; in both cases, Britain’s attempt
to transform its approach to imperialism was challenged and undermined,
at least in the minds of policy-makers, by communist movements. The
third section examines the decline of the British imperial system and the
British government’s shifting priorities from empire to Europe. In Hong
Kong and Cyprus, while acknowledging the benefits of providing a posi-
tive pro-British alternative to communism, policy-makers reverted to the
repressive tactics of pre-war colonialism in order to counter the perceived
threats posed by the CCP, AKEL, their respective front organizations, and
their international affiliations, including the Soviet Union and the PRC.
Finally, the book concludes by expanding on several key themes in
Britain’s Cold War battles in Hong Kong and Cyprus, including youth
and education, labour and trade unionism, population control, and the
interrelationship of imperial ideologies and the Cold War. What is clear
from this study is that the threat of communism, while perhaps presented
publicly in ideological terms and certainly fought through ideological
and cultural warfare, was almost always within the British imperial system
described by policy-makers as a threat of material, territorial, and/or psy-
chological expansionism. The Cold War was indeed a conflict of empires.
British domestic, foreign, and colonial policy-makers believed that
they were resisting aggressive Soviet imperialism bent on destroying the
British Empire via the propagation of a neo-colonial ideology and the
manipulation of its proponents across the world. From this official percep-
tion (regardless of real Soviet intentions or capabilities), policy-makers in
Hong Kong, Cyprus, and London sought to meet this perceived imperial
threat on the local cultural and ideological battlefields of the Cold War.

NOTES
1. Hankey to Creech Jones, 21 March 1946, CO537/1900, the National
Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA).
2. Officer administering the government, British Guiana to Hall, 4 June
1946, CO537/1900, TNA.
3. Cunningham to Hall, 10 September 1946, CO537/1900, TNA.
4. Moore to Hall, 24 June 1946, CO537/1900, TNA.
12 C. SUTTON

5. Leatham to Creech Jones, 3 October 1946, CO537/1900, TNA.

6. Woolley to Hall, 9 August 1946, CO537/1900, TNA.
7. David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy dur-
ing the Cold War (Oxford, 2002), p. 29; Michael Share, Where Empires
Collided: Russian and Soviet Relations with Hong Kong, Taiwan, and
Macao (Hong Kong, 2007), p. 111.
8. Grantham, ‘Report on Communist and Soviet Activities for the six months
ending 30th June 1948’, undated [pages missing], enclosed in: Grantham
to Creech Jones, 13 August 1948, CO537/3718, TNA; Share, Where
Empires Collided, pp. 111–112.
9. Grantham to Creech Jones, 12 March 1948, CO537/3718, TNA.
10. Share, Where Empires Collided, p. 112.
11. John M. Carroll, A Concise History of Hong Kong (Lanham, 2007), p. 142.
12. John Kent, British Imperial Strategy and the Origins of the Cold War,
1944–49 (Leicester, 1993), p. xi; Walter L. Hixson, The Myth of American
Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT,
2008), p. 224.
13. Ibid.
14. Crozier, report on the Hong Kong Special Bureau, Education Department,
31 August 1949, CO537/3721, TNA.
15. Alexei Filitov, ‘Victory in the Postwar Era: Despite the Cold War or
Because of It?’, in: Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its
Meaning and Implications (Cambridge, 1997), p. 79.
16. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the
Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005), p. 1. See also: Niall Ferguson,
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the
West (London, 2006), p. lxxi.
17. Klaus Larres, ‘Britain and the Cold War, 1945–1990’, in: Richard
H. Immerman and Petra Goedde (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Cold
War (Oxford, 2013), p. 141.
18. Anne Deighton, ‘Introduction’, in: Anne Deighton (ed.), Britain and the
First Cold War (London, 1990), p. 4.
19. Anne Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany,
and the Origins of the Cold War (Oxford, 1990); Michael L. Dockrill and
John W. Young, British Foreign Policy, 1945–1956 (Basingstoke, 1989);
John Kent and John W. Young, ‘The “Western Union” Concept and
British Defence Policy, 1947–1948’, in: Richard Aldrich (ed.), British
Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War (London, 1992); Peter Weiler,
‘British Labour and the Cold War: The Foreign Policy of the Labour
Governments, 1945–1951’, The Journal of British Studies, 26/1 (1987);
John W. Young, ‘Cold War and Detente with Moscow’, in: John W. Young
(ed.), The Foreign Policy of Churchill’s Peacetime Administration 1951–1955
(Leicester, 1988).
 INTRODUCTION 13

20. For example, see: Ray Merrick, ‘The Russia Committee of the British
Foreign Office and the Cold War, 1946–47’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 20/3 (1985); Lowell H. Schwartz, Political Warfare against the
Kremlin: US and British Propaganda Policy at the Beginning of the Cold
War (Basingstoke, 2009); Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-
Communist Propaganda, 1945–53: The Information Research Department
(London, 2004); Richard Aldrich, ‘Putting Culture into the Cold War:
The Cultural Relations Department (CRD) and British Covert Information
Warfare’, Intelligence and National Security, 18/2 (2003).
21. Frank Heinlein, British Government Policy and Decolonisation 1945–1963
(London, 2002), p. 106.
22. Antony Best, ‘“We Are Virtually at War with Russia”: Britain and the Cold
War in East Asia, 1923–40’, Cold War History, 12/2 (2012), pp. 205–206.
23. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires,
1400–2000 (New York, 2008), p. 416.
24. Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching
British Imperialism (London, 2011), p. 286.
25. Ronald Hyam, ‘Introduction: Perspectives, Policies, and People’, in:
Ronald Hyam (ed.), Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge, 2010),
p. 37; Norman Miners, Hong Kong under Imperial Rule, 1912–1941
(Oxford, 1987), p. 29.
26. Frank Füredi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism
(London, 1998), p. 4.
27. Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the
Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–60 (Leicester, 1995), p. 11.
28. Christine Loh, Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong
Kong (Hong Kong, 2010), p. 43; Anastasia Yiangou, Cyprus in World War
II: Politics and Conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean (London, 2010),
p. 16.
29. Robert Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959 (Oxford,
1998), p. 11; Nancy Crawshaw, The Cyprus Revolt: An Account of the
Struggle for Union with Greece (London, 1978), p. 39. The one English-
language exception is T. W. Adams, AKEL: The Communist Party of Cyprus
(Stanford, CA, 1977). In Greek, pre-1999 studies of AKEL include Yiannis
Lefkis [AKEL party member], The Roots (Limassol, 1984) and Spyros
Papageorgiou [EOKA member], AKEL: The Duplicate of KKE (Athens,
1984).
30. Christophoros Christophorou, ‘The Emergence of Modern Politics in
Cyprus 1940–1959’, Nicos Peristianis, ‘The Rise of the Left and
of the Intra-Ethnic Cleavage’, and Vassilis Protopapas, ‘The Rise of a
Bi-Polar Party System, Municipal Elections 1940–1955’, all in: Hubert
Faustmann and Nicos Peristianis (eds), Britain in Cyprus: Colonialism and
14 C. SUTTON

Post-Colonialism 1878–2006 (Mannheim, 2006); Yiannos Katsourides, The

History of the Communist Party in Cyprus: Colonialism, Class and the
Cypriot Left (New York, 2014); Alexis Rappas, ‘The Labor Question in
Colonial Cyprus, 1936–1941. Political Stakes in a Battle of Denominations’,
International Labour and Working-Class History, 76 (2009); Ioannis
D. Stefanidis, Isle of Discord: Nationalism, Imperialism and the Making of
the Cyprus Problem (London, 1999); Anastasia Yiangou, Cyprus in World
War II: Politics and Conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean (London,
2010).
31. Andreas Panayiotou, ‘Lenin in the Coffee-Shop: The Communist
Alternative and Forms of Non-Western Modernity’, Postcolonial Studies,
9/3 (2006).
32. Examples include: Ming K. Chan (ed.), Precarious Balance: Hong Kong
between China and Britain (Hong Kong, 1994); David Clayton,
Imperialism Revisited: Political and Economic Relations between Britain
and China, 1950–54 (Basingstoke, 1997); Malcolm H. Murfett, Hostage
on the Yangtze: Britain, China, and the Amethyst Crisis of 1949 (Annapolis,
MD, 1991); Steve Tsang, Democracy Shelved: Great Britain, China, and
Attempts at Constitutional Reform in Hong Kong, 1945–1952 (Hong
Kong, 1988).
33. Steve Tsang, ‘Strategy for Survival: The Cold War and Hong Kong’s Policy
towards Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Activities in the 1950s’,
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 25/2 (1997), p. 311.
34. For example: Alan Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and
Colonial Rulers in Hong Kong, 1950–1963 (Hong Kong, 2006), p. 80;
Leo F. Goodstadt, Profits, Politics and Panics: Hong Kong’s Banks and the
Making of a Miracle Economy, 1935–1985 (Hong Kong, 2007), p. 76;
Grace Ai-ling Chou, Confucianism, Colonialism, and the Cold War: Chinese
Cultural Education at Hong Kong’s New Asia College, 1949–63 (Leiden,
2011), p. 132; Flora L. F. Kan, Hong Kong’s Chinese History Curriculum
from 1945: Politics and Identity (Hong Kong, 2007), p. 26; Chi-kwan
Mark, Hong Kong and the Cold War: Anglo-American Relations 1949–1957
(Oxford, 2004), pp. 15–16; Suzanne Pepper, Keeping Democracy at Bay:
Hong Kong and the Challenge of Chinese Political Reform (Plymouth,
2008), p. 109.
35. This has been recognized, although often as an aside, by a few notable
examples. See: David C. Wolf, ‘“To Secure a Convenience”: Britain
Recognizes China–1950’, Journal of Contemporary History, 18/2 (1983),
p. 304; Loh, Underground Front, p. 75.
 PART I

From Enemy to Ally to Enemy

 CHAPTER 2

Origins and the First Cold War, 1917–1945

Comparing British policy in and regarding Cyprus and Hong Kong sup-
ports the expansion of defining not only who fought the Cold War and
how but also when and why it was fought. British colonization of these
two islands was interconnected with the expansionist ambitions of Tsarist
Russia, which, once married with communism after 1917, defined the
frontlines of the subsequent Cold War contest. In what some have called
the First Cold War, from Britain’s intervention in the Russian Civil War in
1918 to its uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union against the Axis powers in
1941, British distrust of the revolutionary and regicidal Bolsheviks resulted
in domestic, foreign, and colonial policies aimed at resisting the spread
of communism.1 This conflict after 1945 took on new battlefields, new
weapons, new players, and a greater intensity, but it was still fundamentally
a conflict against Soviet imperialism (real and imagined). And Hong Kong
and Cyprus, as we will see, were central to its origins and development.

BRITAIN, TSARIST RUSSIA, AND QING CHINA

Russian expansionism first turned eastward after Britain’s success in the
First Opium War (1839–1842), in which the Qing dynasty ceded Hong
Kong to Britain ‘in perpetuity’. Hong Kong became ‘the British bridge-
head in China’.2 While the Russians feared that this bridgehead might
soon turn China into ‘another India, with the British gradually taking over
the entire country’, they also recognized the potential territorial and com-
mercial opportunities a weakened China offered Russia.3

© The Author(s) 2017 17

C. Sutton, Britain’s Cold War in Cyprus and Hong Kong,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33491-2_2
18 C. SUTTON

For China, however, this marked the beginning of what was considered
in Chinese collective memory to be a century of humiliation (1842–1943).
At the centre of this were the so-called ‘unequal treaties’, which dictated
the imposed unilateral rights of foreign countries without equal provi-
sions for China. The ‘unequal treaties’ played a central role in Chinese
politics thereafter, as both the CCP and Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese
Nationalist Party, later competed to redefine China and Chinese identity
as well as to entrench their respective party’s power.4 British policy-makers
were acutely aware of the fact that, by the end of the Second World War
and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Hong Kong was one of
the last remnants of the ‘unequal treaties’.
In addition to China and East Asia, British and Russian imperial com-
petition also played out through the cold conflict that British contempo-
raries called the ‘Great Game’, regarding the future of crumbling Islamic
Asia. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877 pushed the ‘Eastern Question’
further into the forefront of British foreign politics. The growing fear
of a disadvantageous end of the ailing Ottoman Empire (particularly to
Russia’s advantage) prompted the British government to consider previ-
ously unfeasible solutions with the intention of propping up the Turks
and/or securing British interests in the East, specifically India, through
strengthening its presence in the Mediterranean. In 1878, Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli proclaimed in the House of Lords that there was ‘room
enough for Russia and England in Asia. But the room we require we must
secure. […] In taking Cyprus the movement is not Mediterranean; it is
Indian.’5 This was the context in which Britain and Turkey entered into
a secret defensive agreement in 1878 which granted Britain permission
to occupy and administer Cyprus (while Cyprus remained under Turkish
sovereignty) as a material guarantee for Turkish reform, in return for
British military support in the event of further Russian aggression. Thus
Britain’s imperial rivalry with Russia was integral to the colonization of
Hong Kong and Cyprus.

BRITAIN AND THE SOVIET UNION

From the 1917 Russian Revolution, British policy-makers became increas-
ingly concerned about Bolshevik imperial ambitions in Central Asia, partic-
ularly Persia and India. That Soviet foreign policy until the late 1930s (and
perhaps beyond) was largely defensive was irrelevant in the British official
mind. Of overriding concern was its Marxist-Leninist underpinning, an
 ORIGINS AND THE FIRST COLD WAR, 1917–1945 19

ideology which transformed tsarist expansionism operating within (and

thereby upholding) Europe’s traditional balance of power politics into a
proponent for worldwide revolution, whose primary target, it was feared,
was the British Empire.6
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the world’s first communist country, the
Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, certainly did not allay British
fears, particularly with his ideological assertion that imperialism was ‘the
highest stage of capitalism’. For example, Lenin informed the Russian
Communist Party in 1918 that ‘international imperialism, with its capital’s
entire might […] could not under any circumstances, on any condition,
live side by side with the Soviet Republic’. Overthrowing capitalist impe-
rialism became a central tenet of Soviet communism that his eventual suc-
cessor Joseph Stalin would uphold.7 In 1922, the Comintern (Communist
International) committed itself not only to cooperate with but also to
unite and train national liberation movements around the world. One of
its resolutions proclaimed that ‘colonial revolutionary movements’ had
‘extreme importance […] for the international proletarian revolution’.8
British policy-makers were also aware of (but less worried about) the
Soviet agreement with Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the KMT in China. In
January 1923, after being refused assistance from Western powers, Sun
secured funding and equipment from the Soviet Union and the Comintern.
In 1924, the Soviets persuaded Sun to allow the CCP (and other political
factions) to join a united front to liberate China from Western imperial-
ism and the warlords. By mid-1925, a number of supposedly expansion-
ist moves—including a KMT-organized but Soviet/Comintern-directed
boycott of British goods, Soviet support of at least one Chinese warlord
in north China, and the dissemination of communist propaganda by the
KMT branch in Malaya—soon forced Whitehall to reassess Soviet imperial
ambitions in China.9 The Hong Kong government was also suspicious of
Chinese communists from the early 1920s, when they first became active in
the colony, and the Hong Kong police regularly suppressed their activities.10
After Sun died on 12 March 1925, his close ally, Chiang Kai-shek, became
the leader of the KMT and took command of the Nationalist Army. One
year later, Chiang initiated the Northern Expedition, a campaign to unite
and rule the whole of China. By 1928, Chiang had broken ties with the
Soviets and led a successful coup against the Chinese communists, purging
them from the KMT, the army, and the expedition. One British Foreign
Office official exclaimed, ‘Our prayers for a Russian downfall in China have
been answered beyond our wildest expectations’. By 1928, Chiang had
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated
equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly
important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws

regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of
the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform
and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many
fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not
solicit donations in locations where we have not received written
confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or
determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states

where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know
of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from
donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot

make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations
received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp
our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current

donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a
number of other ways including checks, online payments and
credit card donations. To donate, please visit:
www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project

Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could
be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose
network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several

printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by
copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus,
we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any
particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,

including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear
about new eBooks.