Maltese merchants in XVIII century Spain

Abstract

In 1982 two different historians, writing thousands of miles apart and for two quite different situations, put forward more or less the same message. Concerning Malta, which had only three years previously seen the departure of the last foreign troops, Anthony Luttrell said, that it "needs a public which has a correct consciousness of its past as a point of reference for its modern problems" (1). Concerning the Catalan nation on the other hand, Eva Serra viewed the role of its historians as being that of posing "unes preguntes arriscades en el cami de forjar-nos unes respostes historiques que ens serveixin per avancar en la nostra consciencia nacional" (2). Two very different situations facing a common problem, the definition of national identity. In order to understand its identity, namely its present, a society must know about how its identity came about, in other words its past, so as to be able to determine where it wants to go, that is its future. In this context the only legitimate social role for the historian must be that of describing and explaining the past, in order to be able to appreciate that the present did not just happen out of the blue but is the consequence of specific events, social forces and environments and that human beings can act, with other beings, for the creation of a better tomorrow. More specifically this study seeks to redress what the author considered to be a severe limitation in much of Maltese historiography, namely, its overwhelming concentration on what Braudel and Vilar have referred to as the history of events. Only rarely has it looked at the history of groups and groupings, or social history and hardly, if at all, at the history of people in their relationship with the environment. In fact, the notion of looking at history at various levels in the context of an underlying, unifying whole has not yet had wide acceptance in Malta. Despite living, in what Luttrell has referred to as, "an age when social and economic rather than political, religious or cultural topics are at the centre of the historian's concern" (3), it is exactly the social and the economic which has been most neglected. Exceptions, such as historians Victor Mallia-Milanes and John Debona for the modern era, only serve to prove the rule. [...]