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Over the course of four centuries, the island of Malta underwent several significant political transformations, including its roles as a Catholic bastion under the Knights of St. John between 1530 and 1798, and as a British maritime hub in the nineteenth century. This innovative study draws on both archival evidence and archeological findings to compare slavery and coerced labor, resource control, globalization, and other historical phenomena in Malta under the two regimes: one feudal, the other colonial. Spanning conventional divides between the early and late modern eras, Russell Palmer offers here a rich analysis of a Mediterranean island against a background of immense European and global change.
“Palmer delivers a major contribution to our understanding of the entangled relationships between institutional built spaces, portable material culture, and human agents. Contrasting the policies and cultures of the Order of St John and the British in Malta adds fresh comparative insights into institutions, and the investigation of slave agency provides a Mediterranean dimension to historical studies of slavery.” • Harold Mytum, University of Liverpool
Russell Palmer is a Research Fellow in the School of Foreign Studies, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and an affiliated researcher at the Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. He holds a doctorate in archaeology from Ghent University.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Institutional Agents
Chapter 2. Institutional Spaces
Chapter 3. Productive Labour
Chapter 4. Foodways
Chapter 5. Material Routines
Chapter 6. Global Intersections
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index