Recent correspondence about poverty in the early years of British Malta brings out the usual claims of how terrible British colonialism was compared to the long Crusader period and the very brief and violent French interlude.
The British obviously acquired Malta not because they fell in love with Maltese eyes, but primarily because it suited imperial and trade prerogatives – to expect any different underlying reason and strategy is naive.
When discussing poverty, one needs to compare levels of poverty with other nearby or faraway regions, as we do today within the EU. In the period under discussion, there was poverty in most of Europe, and particularly in the Iberian peninsula and southern Italy. Neither must we forget the background to the French revolution and the pitiful state of the poor in London which Dickens recorded so vividly.
Yes, many Maltese emigrated to Tunisia, including one of my grandfathers, but he returned after some years to open an office in Valletta - so he must have thought that Malta was not such a bad place after all. Many Europeans emigrated to North and South America. Many southern Italians emigrated to Malta in the early British period to work on the Grand Harbour’s breakwater and the docks – one of my wife’s grandfathers came from Naples to join the Royal Navy. Detractors of British Malta seem to have this fanciful dream that we would have been far better off if we had remained Italian Malta or Crusader Malta.
Our minute country has turned out to be a very lucky melting pot of Arab, Latin and Anglo-Saxon influences and, for that very reason, is a unique location. The Crusaders initiated our ‘independence’ (for all practical purposes) from Italy and this was completed with British colonialism.
Some may rant and rave to the contrary, but overall the British influence on Maltese administrative and academic institutions, and on our political and parliamentary system (the latter being better organised than Italy’s) has been definitely positive.
It has ‘transferred’ us from a miniscule nation, further south than the North African coast and with a predominantly Arabic mother tongue, to the ‘English-speaking world’ which, I believe, has had a lot to do with our current prosperity. British Malta contributed significantly to what is now Maltese Malta – totally distinct from all other Italian islands.