Henry Frendo,Europe and Empire: Culture,Politics and Identity in Malta and the Mediterranean (1912–1946)

Reviewed by: Iliya Marovich-Old, Flinders University, Australia

Europe and Empire is primarily about Malta, and, although spanning a period including the two world wars, it focuses mainly on the 1920s and 1930s. At times the book brings in some comparisons, most notably with Cyprus, another British island colony in the Mediterranean. As the sub-heading suggests the aim of the text is to consider questions of culture and identity during this tumultuous period and how they played out politically. Frendo’s comprehensive work is a sensitive and insightful look at themes central to Maltese culture, but its ‘anthology’ format limits the conclusion to the final chapter rather than its being present as a strong driving argument running through the text.

This is a large volume. It consists mainly of previous writings and is the result of a project which began in 1986. Many chapters come with an explanation of when they were originally written and in what context. Nearly all chapters have been previously published in some form or another but they are relatively difficult to obtain. Frendo begins by looking at the rise of the British in the Mediterranean. Among other topics he examines two well-known political figures, Sir Gerald Strickland, an ‘Anglo’ Constitutionalist, and Enrico Mizzi, an ‘italianita’ Nationalist, and two dissident figures, Manwell Dimech, who was deported and died in exile, and Borg Pisani, who was caught during wartime and executed. Frendo then compares the breakdown of government in Malta and Cyprus, particularly focusing on the vexed language question, which was, in essence, a British push to displace Italian by championing Maltese, a move strongly resisted by the educated and professional elites. Frendo also considers the extensive surveillance and paranoia of the 1930s and studies the wartime and post-war years before moving on to the concluding chapter.

Frendo has made extensive use of archives in Britain and Italy and the book contains extensive copies of original documents throughout and in the appendices. This greater than usual reproduction ties in Frendo’s work with its primary sources, and allows the reader to gain an insight into the look and feel of the documents from which this sort of history is derived. The nature of this work means that, almost inescapably, there is not the same narrative flow one might normally find in a monograph – the book is perhaps best used in the same way as an edited volume. Some sections might have benefited from some tighter editing. The volume is written in English but contains passages in Maltese and Italian. English-speaking readers would have benefited from translations of these. Frendo has, however, written from an avowedly post-colonial perspective; he is trying to write (or reclaim) Maltese history for the Maltese. The period chosen represents a time of rapid cultural change, during which there was a determined programme by the British to substitute an Italo-Maltese identity with an Anglo-Maltese one. It was a time when that identity was still being contested, before the dichotomous alignments of war resulted in Italy bombing Malta and creating strong opposition to the idea of loyalty to Italy and its language and culture.

Frendo’s examination of this pre-war identity seeks to inform current debates in Malta. As he says he hopes that the book will ‘provoke a better-instructed self-questioning as to who the Maltese were and what they became, or at any rate what became of them as they struggled to match self with nation, and nation with freedom or survival or both’ (772). His work fills the brief it sets itself; it is a nuanced and comprehensive look at Malta in the first half of the twentieth century and it engages strongly with themes of language, culture, colonialism and italianita. In an episodic way it covers much ground, and represents a type of reference work for the modern Maltese, allowing them to reconsider their own autochthonous cultural underpinnings and to appreciate the Anglo-Italian cultural contestation of the inter-war period.