to the authority of
the State',(5) however increasingly
inflexible Hospitaller Government was allowed to develop. The
riots or upheavals in the form of public protests that occasionally
occurred at remote intervals during the Hospitaller period on
Malta were not loud manifestations against the complex affiliations
with the 'alien' world outside and of which economic and social
life on the island was the direct beneficiary; they were invariably
expressions of anger and resentment provoked by the autocratic
style of Hospitaller government.
At its most simple, the islanders' 'acceptance'
of this new Hospitaller experience - whether through what gradually
grew into a 'positive sense of common interest with the ...
State, or through inability to conceive of a [better] alternative'
- made durability of the process possible.(6)
The consequence of succumbing to the novel lure of lucrative
adventure dramatically unsettled, indeed uprooted, one way of
life, in all its cultural, social, economic, and institutional
dimensions, to have it gradually substituted by what was thought
to have been a more promising one. And if the historian is allowed
to interpret the often indecipherable hidden motives behind
the actions of the common man, then I would not hesitate to
read in this flow of people a perhaps unconscious sense of discontent,
conveniently and resoundingly challenging the archaism and insecurity
of their late medieval insular confinement, indeed their traditional
sacred reverence to the soil - an expression of dissatisfaction
with the past. It was a response to pressing Hospitaller demands
for necessities and luxuries in a land of poverty, a response
initially inspired by the islanders' basic requirements - first
to eat and then to eat better, first to work and then to get
paid regularly, until higher and nobler aspirations began to
dwarf material ends.
In the long perspective of Malta's historical
development, the Hospitallers constituted an irresistible force
of 'integrative reality', Europeanizing Malta not only by their
long presence on the island, but by unwittingly releasing 'liberating
energies' within all sectors of society. The stream of 'nomadic
freedom', of people moving from as far North as the Baltic Sea
'to the shores and harbours' of Malta for the exchange
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of merchandise and other trade purposes,
and vice versa, struck the attention of Mgr Angelo Durini, Inquisitor
and Apostolic Delegate, who in 1760 described the island as
a prosperous meeting-place 'not of one people, but of several
nations.' The number of foreign consulates set up on the island
was a clear indication of the trend. In the course of the seventeenth
century, at least fifteen foreign States, kingdoms, cities,
or ports had a consular representative resident on Malta to
look after the needs of his fellow countrymen. It was an international
conglomeration of sea-faring folk, hailing from England, Belgium,
France, and Spain; others from Venice, Tuscany, Genoa, Naples,
and Sicily; and others still from Armenia, the Greek islands,
Syria, Dalmatia, and Egypt. New consulates were again set up
in the eighteenth century for Dutch, Ragusan, Sardinian, Corsican,
Hungarian, and American traders conducting business with or
through the central Mediterranean island. Added to these were
other centres (like the Barbary Regencies and Constantinople)
whose merchandise was directed to the Grand Harbour under the
protection of a foreign flag, very often French. Moreover, significant
numbers of foreign merchants in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries sought 'naturalization' in Malta to be able to set
up business concerns on the island, requesting the privilegio
nazionale to qualify for preferential treatment. The same may
be said of Maltese consuls settled in foreign ports.
Without denying 'the persistent continuities
of long traditions',(7) this silent
forgotten revolution, as Braudel would call it, constituted
in itself a movement away from most of what late medieval Malta
stood for. During their long sojourn on the island, the Hospitallers
had provided the more daring and adventurous sectors of the
population with ample opportunity of transcending the restraints
of insular limits. Indeed, this 'optimistic mobility', ironically
generated by one of the most conservative monastic orders of
the Church, marked a more radical transformation which may well
be defined, to use Dirk Hoerder's expression, (8)
as the 'secularization of hope', which the same historian explains
as the islanders' general 'aspiration for improvement in this
life rather than in the next'.(9) |
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[5] Ibid., 395.
[6] D.K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative
Survey from the Eighteenth Century (1965; rept. Houndmills, Macmillan
1991), 103.
[7] See, for example, L. Butler, 'The Maltese People and
the Order of St John', Annales de l'Ordre Souverain Militaire de
Malte, xxiii-xxiv (1965-66).
[8] D. Hoerder, 'Migration in the Atlantic Economies: Regional
European Origins and Worldwide Expansion', in European Migrants:
Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page
Moch (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 1996), 21-51.
[9] Ibid.
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