Dr Emanuel Buttigieg, of the Department of History, Faculty of Arts, was one of a small group of international researchers invited to deliver lectures at the prestigious Collège de France in Paris, on 26 March 2018.
The Collège de France is a public higher education institution, which is unique in France and has no equivalent abroad. Since the 16th century, the Collège de France has had a two-fold mission: to be a forum for cutting-edge research and teaching.
Dr Buttigieg was invited to deliver a paper on ‘The Island Order State on Malta: The early modern Maltese archipelago and the Order of St John’, as part of a one-day symposium entitled Historia insularum: les îles dans l’histoire globale à l’époque modern. The convenor of this symposium is Professor Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Distinguished Professor & Irving and Jean Stone Endowed Chair in Social Sciences at UCLA, and Chair in Early Modern Global History at the Collège de France in Paris.
In his lecture Dr Buttigieg explored levels of interaction between two historical phenomena: islands and military-religious orders. The core theme explored was the notion of an ‘Island Order State’. This included an analysis of aspects such as quasi-islands or as Fernand Braudel said “islands that the sea does not surround”, the mainland-island relationship, and islands as potential laboratories for ideas to be tested. In the final part of the presentation, he looked at the importance of the notion of ‘island ports’, emphasising the harbour dimension of the island order state, which was arguably its most important characteristic.