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Joan Abela, Emanuel Buttigieg, Krystle Farrugia (Eds.) Malta Historical Society Proceedings of History Week 2011. Midsea books, 2013. 157 pp.

This 30th anniversary publication of the Malta Historical Society’s proceedings of history week may not live up to expectations. Anyone hoping to have to wrestle through pages of dry facts, dates, accords and declarations would be sorely disappointed.

The facts are there, and so are the dates; however, when explored at a conceptual level, this publication offers so much more than that.

The anthology of papers opens a window onto power dynamics, struggles for symbolic and cultural capital, descriptions of individuals’ ambitions, pride, and entrepreneurial spirit; shifting concepts of nationhood, and tensions between emergent cultural identities.

This is clearly one of the key attractions of this publication; the way it builds a multi-perspective, temporally-layered representation of the social environments and political challenges of our antecedents.

The individual papers presented are refreshingly diverse in style, length and focus, yet they hang together comfortably, one complementing the other, often raising questions that are echoed in the next. This is clear testament of editorial acumen and warrants flagging at the start.

The first two papers concentrate on the Order of St John – primarily, with the built environment as the focus, however offering much more in the way of nuanced insights into the importance of symbolic architectural statements and the social realities within which they existed.

Roger Vella Bonavita’s well-crafted piece on Capitano Francesco Laparelli and Valletta offers an in-depth account of the genesis of our capital city.

There is delicious detail in Bonavita’s account, which hints at the intricate power conflicts and internal machinations within the order’s council that surrounded this new project.

David Mallia’s paper, The Survival of the Knights’ Church in Tripoli, focuses on the Ottoman campaign to establish dominance over Christendom in the Mediterranean, highlighting the way this impacted on the Hospitaller knights, their territory and influence.

After these magnificent accounts of power and control just beyond our shores, Valentina Lupo brings us back into familiar artefacts with her paper on the wooden statue of St John the Baptist.

One character who may well have seen the statue in its polychromatic splendour is the personality at the focus of the next paper.

It builds a multi-perspective, temporally-layered representation of the social environments and political challenges of our antecedents

The title of Paul Catania’s piece sets the scene for the paradox that runs through the core of the account. Don Juliano: parish priest, money lender and land owner. The man Catania brings to life was clearly irreverent, ruthless and, eventually, immensely rich and powerful.

The editors choose at this point to follow on from the personal and idiosyncratic by focusing on the higher order debate of relevance and change. This is elegantly done through the papers of AleksFarrugia and Adrian Scerri.

With his pithy piece, An Order in Decline? An Alternative Perspective, Farrugia tackles the issue of relevance of the order by focusing on its ability to adapt to the changing economic, social and political environment it operated in.

Scerri’s piece Of Briefs and Privileges expands on this theme, as it explores the paradoxical relationship of identity and relevance of the Order of the Knights.

It does so by focusing on events in the career of Fra Marcello Sacchetti to highlight how conserving the Order’s privileges hinged on carefully titrating this conceptual dialectic.

The editors then take us into the 18th century with Carmel Vassallo’s paper, which focuses on the Maltese business community in Spain at the time when the Maltese occupied a particular niche in the trade of cotton and cloth.

Liam Gauci’s paper Shipwreck, Enslavement and an Angry Wife offers the perfect segue to this as he focuses on the particular story of an individual the likes of whom there must have been many. The editors chose to follow this intimate detail by cutting to the broader perspective – calling on the reader to consider the power dynamics that constrain, inform or potentiate individuals’ power to act within the social and political environment in late 19th and early 20th-century Malta.

Michael Refalo offers his succinct and dense paper to explore how these power dynamics are rooted in the tension between the two major areas of social control: the British colonial administration, and the local Roman Catholic Church.

He uses Gramsci’s concept of the integral state to explore empirical historical data of the era, highlighting the contrast in the quality of power associated with these two social structures.

The final paper in this publication takes us 50 years down the line, into the uncertainty of the 1930s.

The British colonial authorities are still firmly in control of their strategic foothold in the Mediterranean, though local political dynamics are now more complex as there is a new entity in the equation – the Maltese elected ministers in government.

Dominic Fenech’s paper, How Malta Lost Self-Government 1930-1933, offers a nuanced exploration of the political and cultural environment in Malta that led to the suspension of self-government in 1933. Using his clear and direct writing style, Fenech gives a blow by blow account of the events. In doing so, he also offers a critical interpretation of the ideological underpinning and political motivations that drove the dynamics.

The contagion of local tensions into the field of delicate international negotiations at that time created a threat to diplomatic relations that Britain could not tolerate. Quite simply, to quote Fenech: “If Malta were to keep falling like the proverbial fly in the ointment of Anglo-Italian relations, then it must be swotted and removed.”

A quotable quote if there ever was one: deceivingly simplistic, however loaded with ideological tension and conflicting power dynamics.

It connotes much more than the facts described and attenuates the impact of the historical account in focus – a quality echoed through many of the papers presented here, turning this edited anthology into much more than a collection of events, dates, accords and declarations.

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