LANG, Robert Hamilton. Cyprus: Its History, Its Present Resources and Future Prospects. London, Macmillan, 1878.
8vo. Original cloth, spine lettered in gilt, gilt-stamped outline of the island on front cover, ruled in black; pp. x, [2], 370, [2, publisher's list], 36 (publisher's catalogue), four maps with hand-colouring (one large and folding, one with tissue guard, wood-engraved plate, wood-engraving in the text; cloth a little marked, inner hinges strengthened, first map minimally spotted, otherwise a very good copy, contemporary ownership inscription to half-title.
Rare first edition. 'In 1856 Lang got a position as a clerk for a merchant firm - the company's name is not mentioned in any accounts seen by the author - with Levantine trading connections and was sent to Beirut. He was posted to Cyprus by the same firm in 1861; his success in promoting his company's madder-root business there led to his appointment as the manager of the Imperial Ottoman Bank (IOB) which established a branch at Larnaca in 1863. He held this position for the next nine years, after which he moved to Cairo to run the bank's office there. During his time on Cyprus, he served as Acting Vice-Consul of Cyprus on three occasions and as Consul in his own right from 1871-2 and was one of the most important members of the foreign community on the island. His later career was meteoric, with subsequent postings to Romania and Constantinople, where he later became a Director General of the 'Caisse de la Dette', the body managing the Ottoman Empire's foreign loans. Between 1887 and 1897, he was instrumental in reforming the parlous finances of the Daira Sanieh, the highly lucrative but poorly managed and indebted estates of the Khedive (the title of the Egyptian ruler) which had effectively been annexed by Egypt's creditors (mainly Anglo-French debt bond-holders). Lang's final major position was the Governorship of the IOB in Constantinople in 1897' (Britsh Museum, online). Lang remained interested in Cyprus for all his life and is the first modern archaeologist to be involved in diggings and publishing archaeological reports on the island.
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