Captives, Colonists and Craftspeople: Material Culture and Institutional Power in Malta, 1600–1900 9781789207798

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
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

Citation preview

CAPTIVES, COLONISTS AND CRAFTSPEOPLE

CAPTIVES, COLONISTS AND CRAFTSPEOPLE Material Culture and Institutional Power in Malta, 1600–1900 Russell Palmer

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2021 Russell Palmer

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Palmer, Russell, (Archaeologist) author. Title: Captives, colonists and craftspeople : material culture and institutional power in Malta, 1600–1900 / [Russell Palmer]. Other titles: Material culture and institutional power in Malta, 1600–1900 Description: New York : Berghahn, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020016098 (print) | LCCN 2020016099 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789207781 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789207798 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Malta—History. | Material culture—Malta—History. Classification: LCC DG990 .P35 2020 (print) | LCC DG990 (ebook) | DDC 945.8/502—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016098 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016099

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-778-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-779-8 ebook

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction

vi viii 1

Chapter 1 Institutional Agents

24

Chapter 2 Institutional Spaces

50

Chapter 3 Productive Labour

92

Chapter 4 Foodways

129

Chapter 5 Material Routines

178

Chapter 6 Global Intersections

210

Conclusion

234

Bibliography Index

242 267

Illustrations Figures 0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2

2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Maps of Malta in the Mediterranean (top left), the Maltese archipelago (top right) and the island of Malta Map of harbour areas Population of Malta and Gozo Proportions of harbour area, countryside and Gozo inhabitants in 1823, 1851 and 1891 The British army garrison of Malta The Inquisitor’s Palace, ca. 1609 Phased plan of the surviving ground-floor (L0) prisons, plus the position of the four smaller Pannellini cells now destroyed, Inquisitor’s Palace Plans of the female prison ward at the Ospizio Corradino male prison (1854) with fourth wing added in 1861 Plan of Corradino male prison, 1872 Corradino female prison, 1895 ‘Galeien in de Middellandse Zee’ by Jan Luyken 1826 and 1830 plans of the messhouse at the Inquisitor’s Palace 1841 and late 1800s plans of the messhouse at the Inquisitor’s Palace Number of inhabitants employed in agriculture, manufactures and commerce in the nineteenth century Above: acres of cultivated and uncultivated land in Malta. Below: acres of cultivated land and population Maltese earthenware Decline in the number of ‘common earthenware makers’ with respect to population shown through decimalized ratios, excluding the anomalous result of 5.9676 x 10-5

3 5 25 26 35 53

57 60 62 63 64 74 78 81 94 99 105

Illustrations • vii

3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1

for 1861, which is lower than all other results and most likely a result of census recording methods Earnings in pounds sterling from inmate labour at Corradino civilian prison Maltese stoves Sicilian cooking vessels from Dockyard Creek Evidence of mending bowls from the Inquisitor’s prison Left: maiolica bowl with IHS monogram. Right: polychrome maiolica dish depicting part of a squarerigged sail Regimental wares of the (left) 53rd and (right) 44th Regiments Sundial high on the southwest wall of the prison courtyard, Inquisitor’s Palace, mid-eighteenth century Prison graffiti from the Inquisitor’s Palace Ship graffiti from the Inquisitor’s Palace Painted figures on northwest wall of cell M2 Pipes and dice Dining at the Inquisitor’s Palace Nonalcoholic beverage bottles

109 120 140 141 157

161 168 180 182 184 186 196 201 217

Tables 2.1

2.2 3.1 4.1 5.1

Summary of the relative asymmetry analysis of the Inquisitor’s Palace, ca. 1609, the female prisons at the Ospizio and Corradino, and the male civilian prison at Corradino Real relative asymmetry analysis of the officers’ quarters at the Inquisitor’s Palace, 1826 and 1880s Crops and livestock in nineteenth-century Malta A list of galley victuals and their places of procurement, with an attempt to distinguish who ate what Routine of Corradino civilian prison

55 82 100 148 191

Acknowledgements This book is the culmination of several years’ research, during which time I have received the help and guidance of many people. At Ghent University, I am grateful to Wim De Clercq for his direction, pushing me towards an ever-more detailed examination of material culture and space. I am indebted to Jürgen Pieters for his continued support. In Malta, my thanks go to all at the Archaeology Farmhouse, especially Nick Vella for his support and enthusiasm for the project. My thanks also go to Timmy Gambin, who has shared his excavation data and expertise with me, answering question a er question. Students from the undergraduate programme in archaeology assisted in recording some archaeological finds: I would like to thank Luke Brightwell, Dwayne Haber, Kay Mallia, Nicole Micallef, Nico Muscat and Pashala Yates. I conducted the majority of archaeological recording at the Inquisitor’s Palace Museum and the Malta Maritime Museum. My special thanks go to the respective curators Kenneth Cassar and Liam Gauci, who both went out of their way to accommodate long days of recording and endless requests. Heritage Malta has supported the project from the beginning and I would like to acknowledge the support of Kenneth Gambin and Godwin Vella. I am also grateful to Heritage Malta for the permission to reproduce several artworks in its collections, including the cover image of this book. Finally, Annabel and David Mallia provided support in many ways during my research stays in Malta. Michael Given has supported production of this book by reading dra s of several chapters and providing feedback, for which I will be eternally grateful. I would like to thank Tom Gallant for giving me the courage to turn an archaeology project into a book aimed at an audience of archaeologists and historians. Funding for various stages of the project on which this book is based was provided from the University Research Council (BOF) and the Faculty Research Council (CWO) at Ghent University, short-stay research grants from the Flemish Research Council (FWO), and through an Erasmus+ Internship based at the Department of Classics and Archaeology, University of Malta.

Acknowledgements • ix

Finally, my thanks go to the unyielding support of my family. My parents have always supported my endeavours, and without the emotional support and patience of Sandro Jung, this book would not have been wri en.

Introduction

On 3 April 1883, Jeane e gave birth to a son in her husband’s quarters in Malta.1 A shortage of accommodation catering specifically to married British officers meant that, aside from their private bedroom, Jeane e and her husband, Lieutenant Arthur Richard Cole-Hamilton, shared the facilities of the messhouse with other, mostly single, officers. The expectant couple had only recently arrived, having endured the twenty-two-day voyage from Egypt with the regiment. It was the couple’s first tour together, which had started in Arthur’s native Ireland a er their marriage a year ago.2 Now, a er a li le over a month, she lay in her bed in a foreign land far away from her family in Manchester with her newborn son. Motherhood was short-lived for Jeane e, as newspapers record that at the tender age of eighteen and only four days a er giving birth, she died.3 Her gravestone still stands in Ta’ Braxia cemetery. In the same building over two centuries earlier, another woman had lain in her bed in a weakened state. Together with her companion Sarah Cheevers, Quaker missionary Katherine Evans had intended Malta only to be a stopover in their voyage from England to Alexandria; when the pair arrived on 21 December 1658, neither of them expected to spend the next few years incarcerated by the Roman Inquisition.4 Through their evangelizing and distribution of Protestant pamphlets, the women had aroused the suspicions of the Inquisitor. Uniquely for prisoners of the Inquisition in Malta, the women published a description of their ordeals through their friend, Daniel Baker.5 In their account, mostly penned by Katherine, she describes overhearing torture, repeatedly undergoing interrogation and becoming weak from fasting. Delirious and ill, it is only with the help of her ‘yoke friend’ Sarah that she survives to return to England.6 What connects the experiences of Jeane e Cole-Hamilton and Katherine Evans? They are both women, yet this book is not specifically about women or, for that ma er, men. Centuries apart, the experiences recounted above occurred in the same building: the once Inquisitor’s

2 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Palace that contained prisons and subsequently became a British army officers’ messhouse. While frequently grounded in certain locations and paying special a ention to the social significance of particular types of architectural forms, this book is also not specifically about the history of buildings. The women were both English, and though this book dedicates much space to the experiences and activities of ruling British colonists in the nineteenth century, space is given equally to exploring the Maltese islanders and foreign ruling knights, as well as their North African and O oman slaves. Rather, the two women both experienced the ways in which everyday material culture facilitated the operation of power through institutions; the subject of which this book aims to investigate. Systems of unequal power distribution and the history of institutions are major areas of study in archaeology and history, but are rarely wri en with reference to each other or viewed as co-dependent. By bringing together the study of unequal power relationships and institutions, this book offers an understanding of institutional power based on material culture. Furthermore, the case studies for this exploration come from a group of Mediterranean islands with a unique history of consecutive foreign rule. Throughout modern times, Malta’s position in the Mediterranean and its harbours have made it strategically important in terms of trade and conflict. Its connections with southern Europe to the north and North Africa to the south, and its Catholic faith and Semitic language cross the divides between East and West, making the islands intrinsically important to Mediterranean and European history.7 During the seventeenth century, Malta was the ‘capital par excellence of Catholic piracy’ and in the eighteenth century essential for the French Levantine trade.8 In the nineteenth century, its location on the route from Britain to India made Malta a crucial coaling station and, along with Gibraltar, Port Said, Perim and Aden, it featured as one of Monier MonierWilliams’ ‘five gates of India’.9 This volume joins previous ventures investigating foreign rule and colonialism in the region,10 though its contribution comes primarily from the new perspective it provides on power and material culture in an important Mediterranean location through the prism of institutions.

The Maltese Islands The Maltese archipelago principally comprises Malta (245 km2), Gozo (67 km2) and Comino (2.8 km2), which lie in the centre of the Mediterranean Sea, approximately 88 km south of Sicily and 333 km north of Libya

Introduction • 3

(Figure 0.1).11 The climate is semi-arid and the islands are devoid of any permanently running waterways. Summers are dominated by high pressure conditions, resulting in temperatures that frequently exceed 35°C, whereas winter temperatures may reach lows of 10°C. Almost all of Malta’s annual precipitation falls between November and February, although the islands experience high levels of humidity throughout the year that make the summer months stifling and the winters deceptively cold. Throughout the islands’ history, a lack of natural resources has been a major contributing factor to the creation of a marginal landscape. Fertile soil deposits are thin, sparsely sca ered and subject to erosion.

Figure 0.1. Maps of Malta in the Mediterranean (top le ), the Maltese archipelago (top right) and the island of Malta. Image by the author.

4 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

The underlying geology consists of a series of limestones – Lower Coralline, Globigerina and Upper Coralline – covered in most places with deposits of Blue Clay (marl). On top of this layer is o en found a Greensand layer.12 Masons and stone cu ers have worked the so er Globigerina sandstone for millennia, building megalithic temples and Baroque cathedrals. Similarly, po ers have harvested marl layers that outcrop along the coast as the islands’ only native source of clay. Though poor in natural resources, its position in the Mediterranean and deep natural harbours have made Malta a desirable and strategically important maritime base. Prehistoric, Greek, Phoenician, Punic and Roman invaders all colonized the islands in antiquity. The onset of Christianity is frequently a ributed to the fabled shipwrecking of St Paul in Malta, but in 870 CE the islands were taken by Arabs. As part of Muslim Sicily, Islam dominated and Christianity was only reinstated as the chief religion a er the twel h-century Norman invasion. A er passing through Aragonese hands, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V offered the islands to the Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem (hereina er ‘the Order’), a er they had surrendered their base at Rhodes to O oman aggressors. Malta did not immediately entice them and they thought a be er offer would come. With nothing else forthcoming, they accepted the islands and took control in 1530. A er successfully defending Malta against the Great Siege of the O omans in 1565, the Order’s place in Maltese and European history as a bastion of Christendom was sealed.13 The Siege can be viewed as a turning point in Maltese history. The Order started to invest in the islands, defending them with miles of fortified walls that protected islanders from O omans and Barbary corsairs, and building the urban landscape anew. Its original base in Birgu, also known as Vi oriosa, became ever more maritime in orientation, as the knights moved to their newly built capital, Valle a. The new capital replaced the medieval capital, the inland Mdina. Consequently, the majority of the Order’s activities became concentrated around the Grand and Marsamxe Harbours (Figure 0.2). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Order’s religious origins slowly gave way to the ‘development of the Order as an independent sovereign state’.14 Despite their engagement with the major Catholic powers, there was no ‘clear relationship of alliance between the Maltese and any one European power, not even the Vatican’,15 and the knights were not alone in ruling over the islands and their inhabitants. The Roman Inquisition and the Church both represented powerful stakeholders, the former of which was directly supported from Rome and greatly overshadowed episcopal authority in Malta.16 It was, however, incumbent on the Order to protect the islands,

Introduction • 5

Figure 0.2. Map of harbour areas. Image by the author.

and its navy did just that for the next two hundred years, while simultaneously a acking and pillaging O oman and other Muslim vessels in the Mediterranean. By the end of the late eighteenth century, revolutions and reformations had cut off lines of revenue derived from the Order’s estates in mainland Europe, and its navy had greatly reduced in size. When Napoleon and his forces entered the Grand Harbour in 1798, the Order capitulated. French rule was unpopular and resulted in a Maltese–British–Portuguese alliance that forced the French garrison to leave the islands a er only 18 months. In 1800, an unofficial British occupation of the islands began. Unsure initially whether or not it wanted the islands, Malta’s fate was sealed when the Treaty of Paris officially bestowed them to Great Britain in 1814, independence coming only in 1964. During the nine-

6 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

teenth century, Malta became a fortress colony that provided Britain with a military base for imperial concerns in the Mediterranean, joining Gibraltar, which had been taken in the War of Spanish Succession and ceded officially in 1713, between 1816 and 1864 the Ionian Islands, and from 1878 Cyprus. While Gibraltar remained an important colony, Malta’s centrality and harbours eclipsed the usefulness of the Ionian Islands in terms of trade, although all three were important in military terms. By the time latecomer Cyprus had come under British rule, Malta’s harbour and harbour-side infrastructures had already developed. The strategic significance of Malta as a permanent military base, coaling station for steam-shipping and control point for imperial trade intensified a er the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which put Malta on the maritime route between Britain and India. The increase in trade and inflow of capital to the islands did not benefit all, but nevertheless, over the course of the nineteenth century, the population of Malta and Gozo swelled.

Foreign Rule Not colonized by the Venetians, with whom the Order frequently had a long-running rivalry,17 the islands comprised territories controlled by the Aragonese, the Byzantines, the Holy Roman Empire, the Normans, the North African Arabs and the Spanish in the time elapsing between antiquity and the arrival of the knights. During their rule of Malta, the Order held colonies in the Caribbean, albeit briefly, victualling outposts in Sicily, and contributed to Mediterranean and international wars and treaties. The ‘foreign-born but Malta-based’ knights constituted much more than feudal overlords.18 Their tenure in Malta saw drastic changes in power and trade dynamics within the Mediterranean and the rise of a globalized, transatlantic world that impacted on the fortunes of all in the Western world. Furthermore, the period has been popularly romanticized, with its artistic and architectural legacy viewed and presented as Malta’s ‘golden age’.19 While archaeologists and historians now criticize such idealizing and nationalistic appropriations of the past,20 it can be detected in much of Malta’s less-recent post-independence history writing. Contrasting the ‘autocratically benevolent’ rule of the Order with the disparities between Maltese and British military inhabitants oversimplifies both periods and glosses over of the poverty and subjugation endured by many communities under the Order’s rule.21 Such distorting generalizations have resulted in intensive historical study of the Order’s period and a relative neglect of the nineteenth century that is becoming widely recognized. In the last half-decade, food historian Noel Bu igieg

Introduction • 7

has opined that ‘the culinary practices of Knights enjoy an over-rated element of sensationalism’ due to a contemporary Maltese identification with the Mediterranean, and in the introduction to the first major volume of essays on British colonialism in Malta since the 1980s, John Chircop has demanded that ‘whole areas of Maltese social history during the “British Colonial era” have been ignored for too long’.22 Building on these recent impulses, I conceive of this book as covering aspects of two distinct periods of political rule in which, despite many differences, both operated through unequal power relationships – a starting premise that each chapter will substantiate. However, I do not denote all power to the Order or British imperialists. Rather, when one resists conceptions of power as something to be possessed, but instead as constantly negotiated yet unequal relationships, many more actors become visible. In the period ruled by the Order, disputes over areas of jurisdiction between the Grand Master, the Bishop and the Inquisitor created an o en changing and always unbalanced power triad that Carmel Cassar has described as ‘close to a theocracy’ in which the three authorities ‘all considered the Pope as their ultimate earthly head’.23 But while the Order owed its existence to papal privilege, the Vatican was not blind to the Order’s usefulness in creating the ideal of a unified Catholic Christendom against Islam and in the face of growing Protestantism.24 The islanders continued to engage in unequal power relationships when the British imposed colonial rule, sparking a range of complicated relationships: migrants from other colonies moved to Malta and started businesses, and British army officers became subject to the same kinds of relationships with their governmental superiors. In the whole of the period under discussion, no one is u erly powerless.

Power, Material Culture and Institutions A empts to understand through material culture the power relationships at stake in situations of foreign rule prevail in many disciplines. Archaeologists have long assumed the centrality of material culture, but in the last twenty years greater engagement with social anthropology and postcolonial studies has enabled them to recognize the material essence of colonialism, with some claiming that colonialism is ultimately a material process.25 While focusing on colonial contexts, many of these studies shed light on the operation of unequal power relationships more generally. Nicholas Thomas’ highly influential anthropological work has encouraged a refocusing of discussions from ma ers of trade

8 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

and exchange to highlight the agency of indigenous populations involved in trade, the assimilation of specific material forms for local ends and the effects on those engaged in colonial acts.26 Thomas’ concept of ‘entanglement’ has spawned a series of applications and reinterpretations. Within historical archaeology, entanglement is applied as much to exchanges and relationships as it is objects,27 although others have moved on to define entanglement very specifically in ways that focus on the interdependency of things and people, producing ‘tanglegrams’.28 My usage refers to the social interactions between cultures and individuals in which ‘mutual influence is unavoidable’, and in se ings where power relationships are ambiguous and not predefined.29 Alongside entanglements, the decentring and ‘ground-up’ perspective sought for by those working in subaltern studies has also appealed,30 resulting in a shi towards models in which hybridization and resistance play dominant roles.31 The la er highlights the agency not only of those in power but also of those who seemingly have very li le or none, which is vital in the consideration of the Maltese situation, although some have criticized the ‘seemingly unbounded and universal agency’ a ributed to social actors through frequent applications of practice theory.32 The concept of power is central to any discussion of agency and though Marxist approaches centring on domination and resistance have given way to more nuanced models, Marxism still cuts across other political standpoints.33 Another school of scholarship, including the present research, has found greater potential in the writings of Michel Foucault, which reveal power to be manifest in all situations, not just those of domination.34 Refusing to reduce power to ‘the negative control of the will of others through prohibition’,35 he opened up further possibilities. Rather than identifying the dominator, dominated or resister, researchers now frequently discuss power also in terms of acceptance, acquiescence and indifference. Although Foucauldian approaches have received criticism for generalizing and thus obscuring individuals and difference, archaeologists have equally insisted that a focus on bodily, material and spatial experiences helps avoid such oversimplifications of society and its actors.36 Similarly, while many studies now highlight the power of the ‘weak’, others have cautioned against oversimplifying situations of asymmetrical power relationships to those of straightforward resistance, heeding Michael Brown’s caution of ‘resisting resistance’.37 In seeking more subtle arguments, archaeologists instead now frequently search for ‘hidden transcripts’ among material culture, the small-scale, everyday acts of subversion carried out by the seemingly powerless.38

Introduction • 9

Understanding asymmetrical power relationships requires fluid and dynamic frameworks in which it is no longer possible to conceive of the interaction between two homogeneous groups, simply denoting either one as colonizer and the other as colonized, or one as feudal overlord and the other as vassal.39 Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has demonstrated that once the dichotomy is removed, hegemonies previously hidden by undue focus on colonizer–colonized interactions can be made visible.40 With fixed notions of ruler and ruled removed, foreign rule can be envisioned in terms of ongoing power processes in which ‘the sliding and contested scales of differential access and rights’ are always in flux41 and are experienced both locally and temporally.42 The breakdown of binary conceptions and the injection of multiscalar dynamics – through time and place – are both significant for this study. This book not only investigates foreign rule over a long period of time, but also from the perspective of multiple groups, most whom lived lives governed at least partially by institutional frameworks. Recognizing that institutions frequently constituted material practices, as much as any other kind of practice, they offer great potential to the investigation of power relationships through material culture. Those conducting individual studies of institutions have through publication and themed conference sessions come together to create a constructive dialogue termed ‘the archaeology of institutions’.43 Unlike many historians, who o en track financial and legal institutions, archaeologists tend to locate institutions in specific places, sites or exchanges, defining institutions as ‘places where material culture – architecture and landscape, furnishings, tool, dress, art, texts, food, all of it – is consciously as well as unconsciously planned to play a proactive role in accomplishing the institution’s goals and purposes’.44 In many ways the definition provides a solid basis for categorization, but it also presupposes that an institution correlates to a building. My broader conception includes institutions that need not necessarily be architecturally defined or contained. Not all institutions have such a standardized physical presence as asylums, hospitals or schools, and a narrow emphasis on institutions with recognizable architectural forms conceals institutions that lack specific architectural forms or unique material cultures, yet are still investigable through buildings and objects. The three broad types of institution considered in this book are social and economic institutions, such as those that influence foodways, in addition to prisons and military establishments. The sort of economic institutions envisioned are not banks or major financial institutions of the modern world, but include socioculturally defined, smaller units of economic activity such as the kin-based house-

10 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

hold and local systems of trade control. Less typically studied under the rubric of the ‘archaeology of institutions’, archaeologists have nonetheless explored such institutions.45 Conversely, the archaeology of prisons has become a broad area of research, covering a range of colonial and military prison sites, though rarely those before 1800.46 The archaeological study of armies and navies is similarly biased towards more recent conflicts, especially the World Wars and the American Civil War, with investigations generally limited to ba lefields, prisoner of war camps and colonial frontier forts.47 However, military institutions raise important questions – not only were armies and navies at times subject to conscription and press gangs, but desertion or a empted escape frequently meant death. Therefore, they represent highly regulated institutions with limited options for returning to free civilian life, demonstrating a measure of confinement without the need for walls or fences. The relationship between broader systems of foreign rule, unequal power distribution and institutions is in many studies not explicit, with the institution o en foregrounded and the broader context taken for granted.48 Throughout this book I present situations in which institutions played important roles in structuring daily life and gave rise to spaces of control and resistance, acceptance and purposeful assimilation. They provided arenas in which polices of Malta’s rulers and daily material practices of subversion and acquiescence became entangled. The institutions considered all advanced or maintained unequal power relationships to the advantage of the foreign rulers. Therefore, institutional power provides a strong analytical window through which one can view past processes and experiences.

A Material Approach Archaeologists, anthropologists and historians have long considered the Mediterranean an important area of study. Connecting three continents, the region was home to many empires, witnessed numerous iconic ba les and wars, and comprises the homeland of three major world religions. From deepest prehistory to Classical Antiquity, the region’s past has provided a source of archaeological enquiry and a search for the roots of Western civilization and modernity. Yet the region’s more recent past has largely remained the domain of historians using textual sources. Notably, neither of the two most influential recent surveys that draw on material culture evidence – Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea and Cyprian Broodbank’s The Making of the Middle Sea – a empts to deal with the modern world, despite the growing archaeological literature pertaining to the

Introduction • 11

post-1500 Mediterranean. Similarly, as archaeologists are exploring traditionally ‘historical’ periods, historians are discovering the potential of integrating nontextual evidence into their research agendas. While archaeologists have long regarded material culture – artefacts and buildings – as their primary evidence, many historians now explicitly utilize methodologies that focus on material culture.49 Historians of Mediterranean slavery have noted that while the subject of Christian slaves in Muslim lands constitutes a large body of literature both then and now, the experiences of Muslim slaves in Christian lands are much harder to reconstruct through texts alone.50 Within Malta, historians are also starting to advocate material culture approaches. Chircop sees the potential of material culture studies in recovering the experiences of economically disadvantaged and illiterate communities that made up the majority of islanders, and Emanuel Bu igieg has argued for the importance of nonwri en sources for an age in which it became more common and desirable to possess things, noting that ‘material objects complement in a crucial way the findings’ of historical textual methodologies.51 With my approach, I a empt to turn the tables on Bu igieg’s reflection by including textual sources within a material culture study that draws primarily on methodologies employed in historical archaeology.52 One of the inherent strengths of historical archaeology as practised in the twenty-first century derives from what Charles Orser has described as the ‘presence of multiple lines of evidence’.53 Of course, the ‘presence’ of evidence is not on its own enough; rather, it is the combination and integration of different kinds of evidence and the application of diverse skillsets in their analysis that strengthens any study of the past. Not all evidence is appropriate to answer all questions and in some cases multiple forms of evidence may provide contrasting or conflicting pictures of the past. The use of multiple sorts of evidence can therefore increase the prospects of producing multivocal and multifaceted accounts of the past that studies of a single type of evidence, be it ceramics or court records, may not always enable. In the following chapters, I bring together multiple kinds of evidence in order to thematically explore institutions and the actors that constituted them. Primarily, they constitute archaeological assemblages of artefacts, prison graffiti, architectural plans and wri en sources. No pretention is made to the inclusiveness of the study with regard to the use of evidence types, nor do I consider this study to approach paradigms such as annalist ‘total history’. Rather, my study started with archaeological assemblages and opportunistically expanded to include other sources to the extent that I have, within the limitations of resources and time, moved away from traditional historical archaeological studies.

12 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

The artefact assemblages I investigate come from two excavated sites, plus a field-walking survey. In the early 2000s, archaeological excavations took place at the Inquisitor’s Palace Museum, Birgu, and at the bo om of Dockyard Creek, which yielded assemblages that had hitherto remained unstudied (Figure 0.2).54 At the Inquisitor’s Palace, the finds relate to two major phases of occupation: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century incarnations of the Inquisitor’s prisons and the mid-nineteenth- to early twentiethcentury British officers’ messhouse. The finds from Dockyard Creek originate from galleys harboured in the creek, where they were also maintained, careened and occasionally capsized by storms. The final assemblage comes from the Malta Survey Project (MSP), a field-walking survey carried out in the northwest of the island, on the outskirts of the village of Bidnija and deep in the hinterlands of rural Malta, between 2008 and 2010 by a team of archaeologists from the University of Malta, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage and Ghent University, Belgium (Figure 0.1).55 Through my sample of 51 tracts, I explored the absence and presence of key indicators, such as Italian maiolica and mass-produced British ceramics. Together, the assemblages represent almost all the available archaeologically recovered finds for post-1500 Malta at the time of study,56 each of which I recorded using standard archaeological procedures.57 In addition, the laboratory of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Catania chemically and mineralogically analysed twenty-two po ery samples from the Inquisitor’s Palace and Dockyard Creek sites.58 The study of graffiti made by inmates incarcerated in an array of institutions forms the subject an increasing body of work. Whether graphical or textual, graffiti have been recognized ‘not only as a mode of communication, but also as a performative and dialogic undertaking’.59 By locating the communicative practices within their social and historical contexts, archaeologists and others have brought to light the materiality of such acts in diverse environments.60 In Malta, the majority of published graffiti-related studies have been conducted by Joseph Muscat, who has recorded graffiti on church walls and in the prison at Rabat, Gozo.61 The graffiti investigated here survives on the walls of the former prison cells and courtyards at the Inquisitor’s Palace site. It covers primarily the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and thus provides a further avenue of investigation into the lives of inmates, alongside the archaeological assemblages. To record and catalogue the graffiti, I designed a methodology based on 2D photographic images, along with additional in situ examinations of individual graffiti.62 Digitally superimposing a one-metre grid onto each wall enabled me to locate and catalogue each graffito. The methodology abides by the ad-

Introduction • 13

vice given by Historic England in its dra guidance notes on historic graffiti recording63 and involved building up a typology or classification system that assisted in my analysis and highlighted any recurring pa erns. My sample walls included two seventeenth- and two eighteenth-century cells and the prison courtyard, which also contains a carved pillar (see the numbered cells in Figure 2.2). The significance of architecturally created space and the ways in which it materially orders movement and embodies social concepts of access, privacy and power are now well-established ideas in the historical and the social sciences,64 with space frequently considered to be generative and constitutive of ‘processes, identities and actions’.65 The spaces explored in this book all derive from careful planning and construction that together resulted in physical structures. Local limestone blocks bound together with lime mortar provide the building materials for all but one.66 The Maltese war galley is the only example not constructed of stone, yet its wooden structure possess an internal spatial structure externally delineated by its boundaries with the sea in much the same way as a terrestrial building may forge a separateness from without. Following Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, I argue that the spatial ordering contained within each ‘architecture’ is a ‘domain of knowledge’ that contributed to the production and maintenance of social categories, inequalities and control.67 While interpretations based exclusively on formal and quantitative approaches to space, including space syntax analysis, can reduce human activity to overgeneralized trends and fail to take into account cultural and contextual factors,68 the spatial analysis presented in this chapter is but one approach among many that I employ in subsequent chapters to examine the past lives and experiences of those who lived and worked at the sites, thereby mitigating the major pitfalls associated with decontextualized examinations of space. My analysis builds on Thomas A. Markus’ seminal study of institutional space and power, focusing on access analysis alongside real relative asymmetry.69 The first provides a method for understanding the hierarchical nature of space and power relationships related to the depth of spaces within a building from the outside.70 Each room receives a depth value equivalent to the number of delineate spaces (or rooms) one must past through to reach it from the outside (value zero); for instance, in a hotel the lobby receives a value of one because it is directly accessible from the street, but the elevator might receive a value of two, because one must pass through the lobby in order to reach it from the street. If a space has multiple ‘control points’ or a room has multiple doorways, multiple routes exist between two spaces, though I am typically concerned with the shortest. In order to understand the

14 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

spatial relationship of each space (room) in a building to every other, I employ relative asymmetry analysis (RRA), in which each space receives a value that suggests how integrated it is within the whole building, indicating potential traffic and use. Put simply, it expresses through a numeric value the accessibility of a given space.71 A er normalization, which renders the values for one building comparable with others,72 values express the degree of integration or segregation of a given space from the rest of the complex, with lower values indicating greater degrees of segregation. I have digitally redrawn each architectural plan used in my analysis. The plans and other documentary evidence have come from a range of archives, online repositories and published sources. Historical archaeologists have traditionally made a division between documentary evidence – taken to mean anything printed, wri en or drawn on paper – and archaeologically recorded ‘material’ evidence. Mary Beaudry once noted that the questions asked of documentary evidence by historical archaeologists differ greatly from those asked by historians, and therefore archaeologists needed to find ‘an approach towards documentary analysis that is uniquely their own’.73 However, many now acknowledge that it is the spaces between textual and material evidence that should be investigated, exploring people and processes that have hitherto been made invisible in interpretations of the past.74 While my coverage of documentary evidence has been limited by time, resources and linguistic ability, I have endeavoured to integrate the available documentary evidence at each stage of analysis and interpretation. In particular, I draw on the Inquisition records reproduced in Frans Ciappara’s Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, British Parliamentary Papers and the colonial Blue Books for Malta that ran from 1821 to 1938, all of which were themselves part of what Peter Burroughs describes as foreign powers’ a empts at ‘effective intelligencegathering’.75 In addition, a range of newspaper reports, articles and advertisements further elucidate events and have proved invaluable in the identification of many objects.

The Aims and Structure of the Book The focus of this book on institutions permits the investigation of power and material culture across two discrete historical contexts: the Order’s regime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and nineteenthcentury British rule. The two regimes offer contrasting perspectives and a diachronic study of particular aspects of Maltese social and eco-

Introduction • 15

nomic life, including cra production and foodways.76 Furthermore, the research on which it is based forms the first serious investigation of Maltese material culture derived from post-medieval archaeological contexts.77 By crossing the traditional division that frequently separates the study of early modern Malta from the nineteenth century, it elucidates pa erns of continuity in addition to those of change and adaptation. It also contributes to our knowledge of nineteenth-century Malta, especially the history of the specific sites investigated, remedying a curator’s lament that ‘very li le is yet known of what actually went on in the Inquisitor’s Palace during the 19th century’.78 The availability of archaeological evidence largely dictated the institutions examined, as is o en the case in archaeology, and they include penal and military establishments, and slavery, alongside those affecting the daily lives of inhabitants on the islands, such as those that impact foodways or work. Rather than discussing each institution in turn, the following chapters take a thematic focus and cut across the primary groups of people and institutions explored, with each chapter divided approximated equally in terms of temporal cover. Chapter 1 introduces institutional agents. Through acquiescence or subversion, each person on the islands is considered an agent because they were, willingly or unwillingly, partaking in power relationships o en enacted through the rulers’ institutions. The principal groups are the non-elite Maltese that comprised the bulk of the population, alongside foreigners who came to trade or migrated. Two other important groups are the Order’s knights and officials, and British army officers, both of whom are o en portrayed in traditional scholarship as purveyors of authority rather than themselves bound up in institutional power relationships. The final group comprises ‘captives’, those imprisoned for wrongdoing or enslaved at sea. From people to places, Chapter 2 examines the use of space in institutions. By applying space syntax analysis, each of the main ‘sites’ investigated throughout the subsequent chapters receives a consideration of how actors occupied and demarcated internal space in ways that not only facilitated the successful running of an institution, but also afforded inhabitants differing places in power relationships. Divided into two sections, the first deals with the prisons of the Inquisition before moving on to civilian and military prisons. The second section follows on with investigations of military environments, in particular a galley and an army officers’ messhouse. The former is the only nonterrestrial environment examined and, given the restrictions of space, discussion focuses on the unique human make-up of the environment. The la er provides an example in which ‘institutions may

16 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

appropriate and then re-order physical space in order to meet their institutional needs as pursued through ritual practices’, 79 as the later chapters show. In our case, it involves converting the Inquisitor’s palace and prison into an officers’ messhouse. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the impact of foreign rule, colonialism and institutions on labour and foodways. Agriculture forms both a major employment industry and a source of food for the islanders. Conversely, the production of po ery vessels by local earthenware manufacturers provided work for few, yet underpinned Maltese food culture for generations. Agriculture also provided cash-crops that each ruling regime impacted and steered. Once the harbours had developed sufficiently, wage labour set in and Malta became part of the burgeoning industrial world with the arrival of factories. The era also witnessed an increase in productive labour as part of the prison system, with convicts encouraged to participate in trades that put them in direct competition with their free counterparts. Picking up on the previous chapter’s discussion of galley slaves, Chapter 3 closes by considering the Order’s use of slaves in other types of work. Diets have long been recognized as important for understanding issues of identity and I extend such notions to examine local foodways under the Order and the British.80 While slaves and convicts have particularly circumscribed (though not uniform) diets, at the other end of the social and economic scale, those eating at the galley captain’s table and in the British army messhouse engaged ever more widely with goods emanating from outside the Mediterranean and European spheres. The final section in Chapter 4 considers the place of beverages, which together with the previous examples demonstrate the ways in which foodways play a crucial role in the negotiation of power. The everyday and mundane are central themes in the evidence examined throughout this book, a point that Chapter 5 explicates more fully. By focusing on routines and material culture, it examines how everyday materials engendered mechanisms for coping, classification, compliance and distraction within institutional contexts. Commencing with graffiti-carving inmates in the Inquisitor’s prisons, the chapter explores some of the visual and sensory aspects of institutional history, answering Victor Morgan’s complaint that ‘sentiment, emotion and even bodily sensation lie at one end of the spectrum, and that the history of institutions lies at the other’.81 My analyses show how in the modern prison routines materialized policies of classification with varying degrees of success and how on board galleys slaves escaped their awful lives through smoking and dice play. Finally, the ritual of an officers’ messhouse reveals not only how officers made anywhere home, but that they were also subject to the unequal power relationships of British colonialism.

Introduction • 17

The penultimate chapter broadens the scope of analysis by considering in which ways institutions intersected with wider developments, colonialism and the onset of globalization. First focusing on the flows of things through trade and production, it hones in on glass as an archetypical container of many nineteenth-century products and on the global business relationships that developed in Malta. From things to people, mobility and communication not only ‘contributed to, but were also a product of, the colonisation of the Mediterranean’,82 and as a waypoint and coaling station, Malta played a significant role in nineteenthcentury global travel. The final section of the chapter considers power and a empts at subversion that highlight the cross-currents of religious and national loyalties. The book closes with a brief concluding chapter that draws together the major issues and themes addressed throughout.

Notes 1. Jeane e ‘Jeannie’ (nee Moore) Cole-Hamilton in ‘Births’, Leamington Spa Courier (7 April 1883), 5. 2. ‘Station of Regiments’, TNA WO/379/11, 273. Arthur Richard Cole Hamilton served in during this time with the 53rd (Shropshire Light Infantry) Regiment and hailed from Beltrim in Country Tyrone (London Gaze e (22 June 1880), 3589). 3. ‘Deaths’, Morning Post (7 April 1883), 1. No reason is given for Jeane e’s death, although complications arising from childbirth seem likely. 4. Stefano Villani, A True Account of the Great Tryals and Cruel Sufferings Undergone By Those Two Faithful Servants of God Katherine Evens and Sarah Cheevers: Le vicenda di due quacchere prigioniere dell’inquisizione di Malta. Pisa: Sucola Normale Superiore, 2003, 23–26. For an account of the women’s time in the prison and their material surroundings, see Russell Palmer, ‘Contextualizing the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers: A Historical Materialist Perspective’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 31(1) (2017), 11–17. 5. Their account edited by Baker was first published when they were still imprisoned as Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, This is a Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, in the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta. London: Printed for Robert Wilson, 1662. 6. Evans and Cheevers, Short Relation, 38. 7. Bernard Clarke Weber, ‘The History of Malta, 1500–1798: Some Opportunities for Research and Writing’, Melita Historica 2(3) (1958), 145. 8. Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, 3; Alison Hoppen, The Fortification of Malta by the Order of St. John, 1530–1798. Edinburgh: Sco ish Academic Press, 1979, 157. 9. Monier Monier-Williams, Modern India and the Indians; being a series of impressions, notes, and essays. London: Trübner and Co., 1879, 1.

18 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

10. See, for example, Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000; Thomas A. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002; and Andrekos Varnava, British Imperialism in Cyprus, 1878–1915: The Inconsequential Possession. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. 11. Malta is frequently used interchangeably to refer to the whole archipelago, the modern nation state and the principal island. Unless otherwise stated, I refer to Malta the island. 12. Claudia Sagona, The Archaeology of Malta: From the Neolithic through the Roman Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 3. 13. Brian W. Blouet, The Story of Malta. London: Faber & Faber, 1967, 68. 14. Hoppen, Fortification of Malta, 8. 15. Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants, 6. 16. Anne Brogini, Malte, frontière de chrétienté (1530–1670). Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome, 2005, 399–481. 17. For a detailed examination of the exchanges between the Order and the Venetian Republic, see Victor Mallia-Milanes, Venice and Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798: Aspects of a Relationship. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 1992. 18. Stefan Goodwin, ‘National Identity, and Selected Issues of Race in Malta’, in John Chircop (ed.), Colonial Encounters: Maltese Experiences of British Rule, 1800–1970s (Malta: Horizons, 2015), 67. 19. Jon P. Mitchell, Ambivalent Europeans: Ritual, Memory and the Public Sphere in Malta. London: Routledge, 2002, 8. 20. See Reuben Grima’s investigation of popular inventions of a nationalistic Maltese heritage in ‘Archaeology, Nationhood and Identity’, Melita Historica 16(3) (2014), 101–20. 21. For examples, see the comparisons made by Godfrey We inger in ‘The Nature of Maltese Politics, c. 870–1964’, in Victor Mallia-Millanes (ed.), The British Colonial Experience 1800–1964: The Impact on Maltese Society (Malta: Mireva Publications, 1988), 20–22. 22. Noel Bu igieg, ‘Towards a Maltese Culinary Identity: Some Considerations’, Melita Historica 16(3) (2014), 78–79; John Chircop, ‘Introduction. Colonial Encounters in Multiple Dimensions: Collaboration, Defiance, Resistance and Hybridity in the Making of Maltese History’, in John Chircop (ed.), Colonial Encounters: Maltese Experiences of British Rule, 1800–1970s (Malta: Horizons, 2015), 49. 23. Carmel Cassar, ‘Popular Perceptions and Values in Hospitaller Malta’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta 1530–1798: Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St John of Jerusalem (Malta: Mireva Publications, 1993), 436. 24. Emanuel Bu igieg, Nobility, Faith and Masculinity: The Hospitaller Knights of Malta, c.1580–c.1700. London: Continuum, 2011, 100. 25. Chris Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 153. 26. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, 184. 27. Kenneth Kelly, ‘Indigenous Responses to Colonial Encounters on the West African Coast: Hueda and Dahomey from the Seventeenth through Nineteenth Century’, in Claire L. Lyons and John K. Papadopoulos (eds), The Archaeology of Colonialism (Los Angeles: Ge y Research Institute, 2002), 97.

Introduction • 19

28. Ian Hodder and Angus J. Mol, ‘Network Analysis and Entanglement’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 23 (2016), 1067. 29. Kurt A. Jordan, ‘Colonies, Colonialism, and Cultural Entanglement: The Archaeology of Postcolumbian Intercultural Relations’, in Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster (eds), International Handbook of Historical Archaeology (New York: Springer, 2009), 32. 30. Especially Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. For an archaeological argument drawing on subaltern studies, see Sarah K. Croucher and Lindsay Weiss, ‘The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts, an Introduction: Provincializing Historical Archaeology’, in Sarah K. Croucher and Lindsay Weiss (eds), The Archaeology of Capitalism in Colonial Contexts: Postcolonial Historical Archaeologies (New York: Springer, 2011), 1–37. 31. Jeff Oliver, ‘Reflections on Resistance: Agency, Identity and Being Indigenous in Colonial British Columbia’, in James Symonds, Anna Badcock and Jeff Oliver (eds), Archaeologies of Cognition: Explorations into Faith, Hope, and Charity (Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd, 2013), 98–114. 32. James Symonds, ‘Colonial Encounters of the Nordic Kind’, in Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (eds), Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena (New York: Springer, 2013), 311. 33. For a classic Marxist-informed approach, see Daniel Miller, Michael Rowlands and Christopher Tilley, ‘Introduction’, in Daniel Miller, Michael Rowlands and Christopher Tilley (eds), Domination and Resistance (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–27. For more recent takes on Marxist power, see James A. Delle, The Colonial Caribbean: Landscapes of Power in the Plantation System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 3–7; and Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, ‘Feminist Theorizing of Patriarchal Colonialism, Power Dynamics, and Social Agency Materialized in Colonial Institutions’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20(3) (2016), 481. 34. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–7. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, 187–88; Wendy Brown, ‘Power a er Foucault’, in John S. Dryzek, Bonnie Hoing and Anne Phillips (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 68. 35. John Gledhill, Power and Its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Politics. London: Pluto Press, 1994, 129. 36. Lu Ann De Cunzo and Julie H. Ernstein, ‘Landscapes, Ideology and Experience in Historical Archaeology’, in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 268. 37. Michael Given, The Archaeology of the Colonized. London: Routledge, 2004, 11; Michael F. Brown, ‘On Resisting Resistance’, American Anthropologist 98(4) (1996), 729. 38. These works draw on James C. Sco ’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Examples include Martin Hall’s Archaeology and the Modern World: Colonial Transcripts in South Africa and the Chesapeake. London: Routledge, 2000; and Given, The Archaeology of the Colonized. 39. Peter van Dommelen, ‘Colonial Constructs: Colonialism and Archaeology in the Mediterranean’, World Archaeology 28(3) (1997), 308. 40. Michael Herzfeld, ‘The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-colonialism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 101(4) (2002), 292.

20 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

41. Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Introduction. “The Rot Remains”: From Ruins to Ruination’, in Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 8. 42. Michael Dietler, Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, 55; Stephan A. Mrozowski, D. Rae Gould and Heather Law Pezzarossi, ‘Rethinking Colonialism: Indigenous Innovation and Colonial Inevitability’, in Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howle Hayes (eds), Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015), 121. 43. The ‘archaeology of institutions’ started to emerge a er the publication of Lu Ann De Cunzo’s seminal study of the Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, ‘Reform, Respite, Ritual: An Archaeology of Institutions. The Magdalen Society of Philadelphia, 1800–1850’, Historical Archaeology 29(3) (1995), i–168; and continued with, among many other publications, a double special issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology in 2001, ‘Almshouses and Asylums’; and a 2009 collection of essays edited by April M. Beisaw James G. Gibb, The Archaeology of Institutional Life; followed more recently in 2016 by another special issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, ‘Colonial Institutions: Uses, Subversions, and Material A erlives’, edited by Laura McAtackney and Russell Palmer. 44. Lu Ann De Cunzo, ‘The Future of the Archaeology of Institutions’, in April M. Beisaw and James G. Gibb (eds), The Archaeology of Institutional Life (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 208. Gadi Algazi has noted that ‘Institutions have no generally accepted definition across disciplines and theoretical orientations’, while not denying the vast literature wri en by historians on institutions of various kinds, I therefore confine myself to archaeological definitions (‘Comparing Medieval Institutions: A Few Introductory Remarks’, in John Hudson and Ana Rodríguez (eds), Diverging Paths? The Shapes of Power and Institutions in Medieval Christendom and Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 5–6). 45. Michael Given unravels the materiality of taxation and tax evasion in Scotland and the Mediterranean in The Archaeology of the Colonized and ‘Mining Landscapes and Colonial Rule in Early-Twentieth-Century Cyprus’, Historical Archaeology 39(3) (2005), 49–60. Many plantation studies involve, or revolve around, the economics made manifest in the landscape and through material culture, for example, Delle, The Colonial Caribbean; and Sarah K. Croucher, Capitalism and Cloves: An Archaeology of Plantation Life on Nineteenth-Century Zanzibar. New York: Springer, 2015. 46. Research ranges from investigations of the ‘modern prison’, colonial prisons and military prisons. Significant works include Eleanor Conlin Casella, ‘To Watch or Restrain: Female Convict Prison in 19th-Century Tasmania’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5(1) (2001), 45–72 and The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007; Wazi Apoh, ‘The Archaeology of German and British Colonial Entanglements in Kpando-Ghana’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 17 (2013), 351–75; David R. Bush, ‘Johnson’s Island US Civil War Military Prison’, in Harold Mytum and Gilly Carr (eds), Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory, and Heritage of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Mass Internment (New York: Springer, 2013), 59–74. 47. On ba lefields, see Tony Pollard and Iain Banks, Scorched Earth: Studies in the Archaeology of Conflict. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008; on POW camps, see Mytum and Carr (eds), Prisoners of War; and on colonial frontier forts, see Michael Nassaney and José Antonió Brandão, ‘The Materiality of Individuality at Fort St. Joseph: An Eighteenth-Century Mission-Garrison-Trading Post Complex on the

Introduction • 21

48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

Edge of Empire’, in Carolyn L. White (ed.), The Materiality of Individuality: Archaeological Studies of Individual Lives (New York: Springer, 2009), 19–36. See the contributions to McAtackney and Palmer (eds), ‘Colonial Institutions: Colonial Institutions: Uses, Subversions, and Material A erlives’ for recent exceptions. Anne e C. Cremer, ‘Zum Stand der Materiellen Kulturforschung in Deutschland’, in Anne e C. Cremer and Martin Mulsow (eds), Objekte als Quellen der historischen Kulturwissenscha en: Stand und Perspectiven der Forschung (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2017), 12. See also the interdisciplinary contributions to Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds), Writing Material Culture History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014; and Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello (eds), The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Wolfgang Kaiser, ‘Sprechende Ware. Gefangenenfreikauf und Sklavenhandel im frühneuzeitli en Mi elmeerraum’, Zeitschri für Ideengeschichte 3(2) (2009), 29. Chircop, ‘Introduction’, 13, 49; Emanuel Bu igieg, ‘Growing up in Hospitaller Malta (1530–1798): Sources and Methodologies for the History of Childhood and Adolescence’, in Joaquim Carvalho (ed.), Bridging the Gaps: Sources, Methodology and Approaches to Religion in History (Pisa: Plus-Pisa University Press, 2008), 139. Following commonly used definitions in transatlantic scholarship, I define historical archaeology as the archaeological study of the modern or post-1500 world. Charles E. Orser, Jr. ‘Twenty-First-Century Historical Archaeology’, Journal of Archaeological Research 18 (2010), 116. The Inquisitor’s Palace excavations were overseen by Kenneth Gambin and Nathaniel Catajar, and Timmy Gambin led the excavations at Dockyard Creek. Full reports of assemblages are ongoing and will be published in due course. Roald F. Docter, Nicholas C. Vella, Nathaniel Cutajar, Anthony Bonanno and Anthony Pace, ‘Rural Malta: First Results of the Joint Belgo-Maltese Survey Project’, BABESCH 87 (2012), 109. My study took place between 2012 and 2016, during which time the stores of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage were inaccessible to external researchers. For a description of the recording methodology, see Palmer, ‘An Archaeology of Comparative Colonialism’, 24–34. For a report of the archaeometrical analysis, see Russell Palmer, Simona Raneri, Paolo Mazzoleni, Nicholas C. Vella, Germana Barone and Wim De Clercq, ‘Neighbourly Ties: Characterizing Local and Sicilian Po ery in Post-medieval Malta’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 19 (2018), 575–87. Ursula K. Frederick and Anne Clarke, ‘Signs of the Times: Archaeological Approaches to Historical and Contemporary Graffiti’, Australian Archaeology 78 (2014), 54. For a cross-section of the environments investigated, see Hector A. Orengo and David W. Robinson, ‘Contemporary Engagements within Corridors of the Past: Temporal Elasticity, Graffiti and the Materiality of St. Rock Street, Barcelona’, Journal of Material Culture 13 (2008), 267–286; Kate Giles and Melanie Giles, ‘The Writing on the Wall: The Concealed Communities of the East Yorkshire Horselads’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11 (2007), 336–57; Eleanor Conlin Casella, ‘Enmeshed Inscriptions: Reading the Graffiti of Australia’s Convict Past’, Australian Archaeology 78 (2014), 108–12; Laura McAtackney, ‘Graffiti Revelations and the Changing Meanings of Kilmainham Gaol in (Post)Colonial Ireland’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20(3) (2016), 492–505; Anne Clarke and Ursula K. Frederick, ‘“Born to Be a Stoway”: Inscriptions, Graffiti, and the Rupture

22 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

61.

62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74.

75.

of Space at the North Head Quarantine Station, Sydney’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20(3) (2016), 521–35. Joseph Muscat, ‘Graffiti on the Exterior Walls of St. Paul’s Shipwreck Church, Wied il-Qliegha, Mosta’, Melita Historica 12(2) (1997), 179–94; Joseph Muscat and Joanne Cassar, ‘The Gozo Prisons Graffiti’, Melita Historica 11(3) (1994), 241–74. The majority of images were taken by Jeroen De Reu in October 2013 as part of a collaborative digitalization project that has been postponed due to funding considerations. Historic England. ‘Recording Historic Graffiti: Advice and Guidance’. Dra document available at: h ps://content.historicengland.org.uk/content/docs/guidance/ dra -historic-graffiti-guidelines.pdf (accessed 15 January 2015). Peter Burke, What is Cultural History? Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, 71. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001 [1974], 94; Emma Blake, ‘Space, Spatiality and Archaeology’, in Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel (eds), A Companion to Social Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 234. Hoppen, Fortification of Malta, 139. Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, 146. Blake, ‘Space, Spatiality and Archaeology’, 232; Hanna Stöger, ‘Roman Neighbourhoods by the Numbers: A Space Syntax View on Ancient City Quarters and Their Social Life’, Journal of Space Syntax 6(1) (2015), 64. Thomas A. Markus, Buildings & Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types. London: Routledge, 1993. The starting point, or ‘carrier’, can in fact be any space. I have chosen the outside because I concern myself with relative access to interior spaces from without the building. A more technical and detailed presentation of the results of my space syntax analysis is available in Palmer, An Archaeology of Comparative Colonialism’, chapters 4–5. Kevin D. Fisher, ‘Placing Social Interaction: An Integrative Approach to Analysing Past Built Environments’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28(4) (2009), 441. Calculating relative asymmetry involves several stages (i) calculating the mean depth (MD) for each space, by selecting a space and assigning it the value of zero, then counting the number of spaces between it and every other space, producing a sequence of values for that space. Repeat the process for each space in the building. Total each sequence (Σvalues) and divide it by the number of spaces (k), minus the space acting as the starting point (value zero): MD=Σvaluesk−1. Relative asymmetry is then calculated by the following formula, which gives a value between zero and one for each space. RA=2(MD−1)−2. Each value is normalized by dividing it by the D-value for the number of spaces within the building (see Hillier and Hanson, The Social Logic of Space, Table 3). Mary C. Beaudry, ‘Introduction’, in Mary C. Beaudry (ed.), Documentary Archaeology in the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 1. Patricia Galloway, ‘Material Culture and Text: Exploring the Spaces within and between’, in Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman (eds), Historical Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 42. Peter Burroughs, ‘Imperial Institutions and the Government of Empire’, in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume III: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 184.

Introduction • 23

76. Compared to archaeological studies, historical studies of colonialism in Europe proliferate. Archaeological studies of post-1500 colonialism primarily focus on the ‘New World’. Rare exceptions include: Given, ‘Mining Landscapes and Colonial Rule’; Magdalena Naum and Jonas M. Nordin (eds), Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena. New York: Springer, 2013; Audrey Horning, ‘Comparative Colonialism: Scales of Analysis and Contemporary Resonances’, in Craig N. Cipolla and Katherine Howle Hayes (eds), Rethinking Colonialism: Comparative Archaeological Approaches (Gainsville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015), 234–46; McAtackney, ‘Graffiti Revelations’; Dimitri C. Papadopoulos, ‘Ecologies of Ruin: (Re)Bordering, Ruination, and Internal Colonialism in Greek Macedonia, 1913–2013’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20(3) (2016), 627–40. 77. Historical archaeology in Malta is in its extreme infancy, although some relevant published studies exist besides my own, including: John Wood, ‘Pipes from Malta: A Short Account of the Tobacco Pipes Found in Dockyard Creek, Birgu’, International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 27(4) (1998), 313–30; John Wood, ‘A Study of Clay Tobacco Pipes in Tunis: Were They Traded to Gozo?’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 33(1) (1999), 233–41; Ayse D. Atauz, ‘Survey of the Valle a Harbors in Malta 1999’, INA Quarterly 27(1) (2000), 6–10; Ayse D. Atauz and John H. McManamon. ‘Underwater Survey of Malta: The Reconnaissance Season of 2000’, INA Quarterly 28(2) (2001), 22–28; Timmy Gambin, ‘A Window on History from the Seabed’, Treasures of Malta 10(1) (2003), 71–76; Chris Hunt and Nicholas C. Vella, ‘A View from the Countryside: Pollen from a Field at Mistra Valley, Malta’, Malta Archaeological Review 7 (2008), 61–69; Nicholas C. Vella and Mevrick Spiteri, ‘Documentary Sources for the Study of the Maltese Landscape’, Storja 30 (2008), 16–29; John Wood, ‘Tobacco Pipes from Dockyard Creek, Birgu, Malta’, Clay Pipe Research 3 (2008), 7–18; Docter et al., ‘Rural Malta’; Paul C. Saliba, Joseph M. Conti and Claude Borg, A Study of Landscape and Irrigation Systems at Is-Simblija limits of Dingli, Malta and Conservation Project. Rome: Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, 2002; Keith Buhagiar, Malta and Water (AD 900 to 1900): Irrigating a Semi-arid Landscape. Oxford: Bar Publishing, 2016; Ernest Vella, ‘A Stratigraphic Study of the Giren at Ix-Xagħra l-Ħamra, Limits of Mellieħa, Malta’, Malta Archaeological Review 11 (2016), 68–78. 78. Kenneth Gambin, ‘The Inquisitor in Parliament: An Insight into British Colonial Policy’, in Maroma Camilleri and Theresa Vella (eds), Celebratio Amicitiae: Essays in Honour of Giovanni Bonello (Malta: Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, 2006), 160. 79. Victor Morgan, ‘A Ceremonious Society: An Aspect of Institutional Power in Early Modern Norwich’, in Anne Godgar and Robert I. Frost (eds), Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 134. 80. Michael Dietler, ‘Culinary Encounters: Food, Identity and Colonialism’, in Kathryn Twiss (ed.), The Archaeology of Food and Identity (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), 218–42. 81. Morgan, ‘A Ceremonious Society’, 135. 82. Sakis Gekis, ‘Colonial Migrants and the Making of a British Mediterranean’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 19(1) (2012), 75.

c1 INSTITUTIONAL AGENTS

The Maltese archipelago was relatively sparsely populated when the knights arrived.1 Excluding the Order and its retinue of soldiers, servants and slaves, Malta was in 1535 home to around 22,000 inhabitants and Gozo a further 6,500.2 The islands’ population was vulnerable to disease and a acks from Barbary and O oman raiders. In July 1551, Barbary slavers Sinan Pasha and Dargut Rais took some 5,500 Gozitans, practically depopulating Gozo.3 Under the growing protection afforded by the presence of the Order’s navy, the population of Gozo began to recover, reaching 2,655 in 1614. In the same year, the population of Malta grew to 38,429. In 1676, bubonic plague led to many fatalities and presented another setback to population growth, but by the end of the century, the number of islanders had reached over 60,000.4 Malta’s high population density was recognized in the courts of Europe: the Gothaischer Hof Kalender for 1797 reported that Malta had a population density five times in excess of that of England or Holland.5 The population continued to grow during the eighteenth century and when Napoleon arrived in 1798, he faced a total of 114,000 inhabitants. Famine and disease during the ensuing blockade and its a ermath once again reduced the number of inhabitants, to 93,054 in 1807.6 More reliable population statistics start to appear in the nineteenth century, with a decennial census taken from 1842.7 From the 114,499 inhabitants initially recorded, the population grew steadily, decade on decade, until it reached 149,782 in 1881. In subsequent decades the population swelled from 165,037 in 1891 to 184,742 in 1901, reaching 211,564 by 1911.8 In a li le over half a century, the population had increased by 185 per cent. All major dips in population growth observable in Figure 1.1 can be explained by disease epidemics. Cholera, smallpox and other diseases broke out periodically in the islands, but bubonic plague was the ‘epidemic scourge’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, continuing to infest the islands with a major outbreak in 1813.9 During the nineteenth century, the islands became ‘notorious for epidemic outbreaks’

Institutional Agents • 25

Figure 1.1. Population of Malta and Gozo. Sources: Carmel Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Malta. Malta: Mireva Publications, 2000, 121–25; Charles Savona-Ventura, ‘War and Population Change in the Maltese Context’, Malta Medical Journal 18(2) (2006), 35–36; Government of Malta, Census 1931, 4. Image by the author.

of cholera a er the episode of 1837, in which 4,252 civilians lost their lives. Further outbreaks occurred in 1848, 1850, 1856, 1867, 1887 and 1911.10 At the turn of the twentieth century, the colonial authorities counted bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, typhoid, typhus, smallpox and brucellosis (Malta fever) among the reportable contagious diseases of the islands.11 During epidemics, disease claimed many lives across all social, gender and age divides, but the young, especially newborn babies and infants, were particularly vulnerable. In the eighteenth century, infant deaths accounted for up to 28 per cent of all baptized children.12 The harbour communities did not grow substantially until the early seventeenth century, by which time they constituted a quarter of Malta’s residents.13 From the eighteenth century onwards, the number residing in the harbour area broadly matched that living in rural areas. The proportions of harbour and countryside residents during the nineteenth century is striking and demonstrates an almost equal distribution of urban and rural dwellers (Figure 1.2): ‘British’ or ‘foreign’ residents never accounted for more than three per cent14 and together with most military personnel clustered in the harbour districts, their numbers therefore barely impacted on the overall relative proportions of town and country dwellers. However, it would be wrong to imagine two disconnected populations with, on the one hand, an outward-facing, dynamic harbour-orientated group and, on the other hand, inward-looking, insular,

26 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Figure 1.2. Proportions of harbour area, countryside and Gozo inhabitants in 1823, 1851 and 1891. Sources: Blue Book 1823, 175; Blue Book 1851, n.p.; Blue Book 1891, L2–L3. Image by the author.

Institutional Agents • 27

countryside dwellers. Living in a continuum stretching from land-based agricultural labourers to dockworkers, non-elite Maltese living in the towns shared multiple facets of daily life with those in the country (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of shared foodways). In this chapter, we meet the principal groups of people who dwelled in Malta long enough to leave a material impact and whose generalized lives each subsequent chapter explores further. The title of the chapter reflects my conviction that the social, economic and political regimes of the Order and the British Empire le no one untouched, and that inhabitants and visitors found themselves necessarily entangled in the power relationships enacted through institutions in the islands, whether they were rural inhabitants reliant on Sicilian grain brokered by the Order or visitors buying trinkets in Valle a. Under the umbrella term of ‘institutional agents’, I refer to all those involved in institutional and institutionalized relationships of power. Counteracting notions of neutral or overly simplified one-way power relationships and the characterization of any one group as ‘colonizer’ or ‘colonized’, or ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’, I understand power in terms of unequal and unstable relationships, in which all actors presented are agents. The term highlights the agency of all actors and the multiple social, economic and political spheres in which they interacted, some of which may be classifiable as colonial or possibly even feudal and all of which involved power inequalities under foreign rulers. Starting with non-elite Maltese, the largest group and that most frequently conceptualized as powerless – as ‘colonized’ subjects under the British or in a state of vassalage under the Order – the discussion moves on to more transient groups. From merchants and others who came to Malta to prosper, we transfer our a ention to equally diverse groups of elite military populations; those frequently portrayed as possessing power. The chapter ends with an introduction to captives in Malta and to those typically viewed as powerless: slaves and convicts.

Islanders Colonial medical officer John Hennen described the Maltese as ‘a very industrious people, [who] ... present a striking contrast to the Ionian Islands, and even to the natives of Sicily and the adjoining continent’.15 Maltese ‘industriousness’ recurs in accounts of the islands, yet for visitors and foreign ruling forces, the Maltese language marked the islanders from other populations. Maltese is a Semitic language, wri en today in a form of the Latin alphabet, but until the late eighteenth century it was largely unwri en.16 The Arabic base of the language set the

28 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

people apart from the speakers of romance languages on the northern Mediterranean shores, while their Christianity separated them from those speaking cognate languages in North Africa. In the countryside, most spoke only their native tongue, with the more socially and economically mobile also conversant in Italian. Jean du Mont observed in the late seventeenth century: There are Three Languages spoken in the City; the French, Spanish, and Italian. The last of these is authoriz’d by the Government, and us’d in publick writings. The Peasants in the Country speak a corrupt Dialect of the Arabic: and ’twou’d not be an easie Task to make ’em leave it.17

A century later, another eyewitness noticed that while the country people spoke a ‘corrupted Arabic’, the townspeople frequently spoke Italian.18 Lady Acland’s fictional character Mr Huish sums up colonial sentiments towards the indigenous language when he asserts that he had ‘never heard of anyone taking the trouble to learn Maltese’.19 Language became a central leverage point for opposing political parties, with pro-British factions supporting the uptake of English and proto-anticolonial groups encouraging the use of Italian for official proceedings.20 Regardless of the language ba les between the Maltese elite and the colonial authorities, literacy remained limited in Malta. The Census of the British Empire 1901 shows that out of 158,767 (‘native’) Maltese, 33,103 could read and write English or Italian, 9,673 could read only and 115,991 were unable to read or write.21 Limited literacy meant that the overwhelming majority of non-elite Maltese were unable to break free from the subsistence-level employment offered by working the land and later at the docks (see Chapter 3). Arable, particularly co on, cultivation featured in the daily activities of families eking out a living from cash-crop faming, whereas co on provided the raw material for many more spinners and weavers. The family plot ideally provided fruit and vegetables, which reduced the need to buy provisions. Despite successive generations working the same plots, few owned the soil they toiled: landownership was the privilege of the ruling political powers, the Church and a small minority of landowning Maltese elite,22 the la er of whom at their peak in the late nineteenth century amounted to only 1.5 per cent of the population.23 The Order and the Church operated a system of land lease that tied families to a parcel of land, issuing renewable leases for ninety-nine years that normally passed from father to son. Effectively perpetual leases, they hindered the physical and occupational mobility necessary to exploit new employment opportunities developing in and around

Institutional Agents • 29

the harbours.24 The system continued into the nineteenth century, although in 1822, the British a empted to stem the Church’s authority by passing a law prohibiting it from acquiring any more land, owning as it did about a third of the islands.25 However, the law did not result in more people owning their home or farmland. As an island made from limestone, cave- and subterranean-dwellings frequently provided basic shelter for a small minority of Malta’s poor, a practice abandoned as late as the early twentieth-century.26 In his Encyclopédie (1765), Denis Diderot singles out Maltese troglodytes as living in ‘une vaste caverne’ near the Grand Masters’ country residence.27 But throughout our period, the majority of rural inhabitants lived in houses and increasingly in nucleated villages, although these populated the countryside unevenly.28 Until the mid-nineteenth century, when new se lements developed in response to the British colonial infrastructure, the northwestern part of Malta was only sparsely peopled.29 In the rest of the island, older villages lie inland, a safe distance from the sea; only in the nineteenth century did fishermen feel safe enough to se le along the coastline. A er 1565, the threat of O oman a acks diminished, but Barbary corsairs continued to menace Maltese inhabitants for the next two and a half centuries.30 Away from the coast, nucleated villages developed round newly built parish churches, thanks to the stability and protection offered by the Order’s and, subsequently, the British navies. Bouts of relative prosperity, growing populations and village networks of neighbourly identification shaped rural communities.31 Conversely, in urban centres the rich and poor lived cheek by jowl, which despite generating strong community feelings also resulted in rivalries between quarters and parishes, in addition to overcrowding.32 The unsanitary nature of urban dwellings caused concern among colonial officials. An investigation into housing conditions commissioned in the 1870s and carried out by two Maltese doctors concluded that it was not just the dwellings of the poor that were unhealthy, but also those of many middle-class households. The Manderaggio in Valle a – a sunken area originally quarried out as an ‘inland galley pen’, but that later evolved into an area containing narrow lanes and stairways between tenement slums – was notorious for its unhealthy dwellings.33 A physicians’ report singled out Valle a, Floriana and the Three Cities as containing many dwellings with ‘damp, dark and unventilated’ ground floors. Typical of nineteenth-century sanitation reports, it focused on poor air quality, blaming untrapped sinks and privies.34 A wave of sanitation initiatives followed, including constructing new public sewers and drains in the harbour towns.

30 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

While major sanitation developments had to wait until the nineteenth century, the Order had already improved water supplies to the capital and Three Cities through a system of viaducts, and they instituted an important quarantine station, or lazzare o, that served the central Mediterranean for centuries. Situated on Manoel Island in the Marsamxe Harbour, it detained people and fumigated objects in an effort to protect the island from disease, especially plague. The Order’s hospitaller activities and its institutions, alongside those supported directly from Rome, provided succour to the poor and vulnerable. The Church continued to operate charitable institutions throughout the nineteenth century, although many of its institutions were eclipsed by the interventions of the nominally protestant colonial government. However, practical British colonialists did not flinch from asking Catholic institutions to take on duties, for instance, in running the female prison ward at the Ospizio (see Chapter 2). As under the Order, religion continued to permeate many aspects of personal life. Marriage united families and constituted the major social connections within and between villages. Finding a spouse was not a particular problem; throughout the centuries, Malta and Gozo never experienced any great imbalance between the number of males and females. Conservative in nature, in the town and country matches took into consideration the wealth of both parties and most frequently occurred between social and economic equals within their home parish community. The family also formed the primary economic institution, the household. Unable to lawfully run an economic enterprise in her own name, a widowed woman normally remarried or faced destitution.35 Nevertheless, the temporary yet recurring absence of many adult men from the domestic environment – through participation in corsairing, fishing or other seafaring activities – has led some to conclude that Maltese society was ‘highly matriarchal’ and that both women and children ‘played prominent roles within their communities’.36 At times of need, the Order was not above employing gangs of children to clear fortification ditches and its choice of workforce would seem to have been plentiful.37 The number of children present in early modern Malta and Gozo appears considerable, with 14 per cent of the population under five years of age in 1632.38 By 1851, the census indicates that over half (57.6 per cent) of Maltese were under the age of thirty, with 32.4 per cent under fifteen. More than half (57.3 per cent) of the population were in their prime working ages of between fi een and sixty years, while the over-sixties represent 10.3 per cent. Significantly, 4.5 per cent were over seventy

Institutional Agents • 31

years old and octogenarians were not uncommon (1.2 per cent). The oldest recorded islanders were between ninety and a hundred years old.39 Whether in the town or village, the central plot allo ed the parish church symbolized the Church’s importance in structuring many aspects of public and family life. The official religion in Malta was Roman Catholicism, the teachings of which parish priests disseminated from the pulpit. Clergymen accounted for around 1 per cent of the population and did not marry, but continued to live with their families and worked within the parishes in which they had grown up. Only the parish priest was an outsider.40 As the head of the parish, the priest was in a powerful position that he could manipulate in order to amass his own wealth.41 Each parish had – and still has – its own patron saint and an accompanying annual festival, which, together with the ceremonies associated with major life-stages, punctuated the calendar. Daily and monthly cycles of strict religious observance recorded in the recent past and still memorable to many have perhaps induced an assumption that Catholicism was all-consuming in Malta’s past.42 However, the traditional view that religion constituted the only form of community organization or that it dominated every sphere of social interaction is now questioned by some Maltese historians. Emanuel Bu igieg cautions that historians have in the past taken ‘too much for granted the notion that religion pervaded every layer of society and sphere of life’ in early modern Malta.43 Connections formed through living among each other bound villagers together and against each other, just as a sense of belonging was forged within urban quarters and in contradistinction to others. Moreover, the role of the secular state, particularly in the form of legal institutions, played an increasingly active role in organizing Maltese society from the seventeenth century onwards.44

Merchants and Migrants During British occupation, Catholicism endured as the religion of most inhabitants, with newly built Protestant chapels catering almost exclusively to a range of colonial incomers. Of the 1,510 persons recorded in the 1901 census as Christian but not Roman Catholic, Protestants of unspecified denominations (985) greatly outnumber those belonging to the Church of England, who were numerically followed by a sma ering of Presbyterians and Methodists. Around 150 Greek Orthodox complete the list of Christians. People of other religions number 109, among

32 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

whom resided fi y-eight Jews, twenty-nine Hindus, twelve Muslims, ten Buddhists and four with no declared religion. Greek merchants and migrants had a long history of engagement with Malta, both as subjects of the O oman Empire and the Kingdom of Greece. Under the O omans, their Greek Orthodoxy singled them out as having a special place as traders in the Mediterranean. As Christians, they were not technically targets of Catholic corsairs and the Order; sailing under an O oman flag protected them from Barbary pirates and at various times the French navy.45 Many plied trade with Malta, though some arrived as captives, having had their cargoes confiscated by corsairs and knights, turning subsequently to the pope or French officials to intercede on their behalf with the Order.46 Together with Frenchmen and Italians, Greeks made up the bulk of merchant visitors found in Malta’s harbours until the arrival of the British.47 Once part of the empire, Greek ships continued to ferry Balkan grain to Malta’s shores,48 though British ‘protection’ of the Ionian Islands until 1864 encouraged a more intense transfer of people and goods between the two archipelagos.49 However, nothing compares to the interaction between Malta and Sicily. Under the Order, Sicily’s markets provided convenient access to goods from around the Mediterranean and, a erwards, Malta became a conduit for the flow of imperial manufactures. Consequently, the traffic between the two islands was near-constant and with it came sailors and merchants, many of them local Sicilians. The Order recruited for its navy in Sicily, and Malta nearly became a haven for Sicilian criminals ‘on the run’ in the nineteenth century.50 By the turn of the twentieth century, Italians constituted 45 per cent of 4,566 se led foreigners from outside of the British Empire, followed by Africans (27 per cent), Egyptians (10 per cent), Greeks (8 per cent) and Turks (5 per cent). Se lers from other European countries barely numbered 200 together, Russians and the Americas fi y-three, and East Asians comprised two each of Chinese and Japanese.51 Together with ‘foreigners’, ‘British’ citizens se led in Malta from around the empire and made up the 14.4 per cent non-Maltese population. Apart from the army garrison and their families, Royal Navy personnel and merchant sailors, colonial se lers numbered only 2,182. Three-quarters came from England, Scotland or Wales, and a further 8 per cent from Ireland. Britain’s other Mediterranean colonies contributed unevenly to the population, with Gibraltarians amounting to 5 per cent and Cypriots less than 1 per cent. Farther afield, the American colonies and Australia each contributed 1 per cent, while the number

Institutional Agents • 33

coming from the jewel of the empire equalled Gibraltar.52 Although the majority will have concentrated in the urban areas radiating out from Valle a and the harbours,53 their numbers are not comparable to ‘settler’ colonies. Similarly to the Order, which drew on Catholic European states to replenish its numbers, the British maintained a dominating presence but did not overwhelm the islands in numbers; rather, the everexpanding population was down to the Maltese themselves. The same imperial avenues that led immigrants to Malta at the same time provided routes of migration for the Maltese and while this book is predominantly focused on action in Malta, it would be remiss to not briefly mention Maltese emigration (see also Chapter 6 under the heading ‘Mobility and Communication’). By the end of the nineteenth century, 6,440 Maltese lived in other British colonies, although gender divides the emigrants unevenly across their global end-destinations. The Australian states a racted many more men than women, accounting for 68.1 per cent of the 270 emigrants. Maltese men similarly dominated emigration to Gibraltar, Mauritius and Orange River Colony (South Africa). Overall, however, more women emigrated (51 per cent). Instead of the colonies, Maltese women se led in the imperial heartlands, with 2,915 women compared to 2,276 men se ling in the British Isles.54 Work provides the reason for dipartites – Britain and her colonies offered ‘male’ dockyard work, but an abundance of middle-class families requiring an expanding number of domestic servants resided only in Britain, predominantly England. Clearly, nearby Gibraltar had provided opportunities for some Maltese since the early 1800s, as had the Ionian Islands when under British control,55 yet numbers were never high. The automatic rights of entry and residence Maltese had as British subjects could have enticed far greater numbers to emigrate, but such a ractions competed with the long-standing cultural and linguistic links to Sicily and North Africa.56 Carmel Cassar has observed that Sicily’s relative abundance of food and work opportunities frequently enticed early modern Maltese and that ‘the varied and brisk atmosphere created in the harbour area made it easy for a Maltese person to decide to leave Malta and se le in Sicily as the change was not all that great’.57 In North Africa, British consuls bore the obligation of funding return journeys for Maltese when they had had enough.58 As in virtually all cases of Maltese emigration, though, immigrants and returnees more than compensated for those leaving. As Sir Adolphus Slade wrote, ‘the Maltese are great emigrants’, but ‘they do not colonise’; instead, ‘they return to their beloved rock, to marry and multiply’.59

34 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Military Men The military institutions of the Order’s and British regimes played roles in imposing rule over the islands, but their members were far from independent of the power processes at play. Rather than autonomous promoters of political administrations, military personnel represented complex figures, who were both constitutive of and susceptible to unequal power relationships. In this section, the backgrounds and lifeways of knights and officials related to the Order’s navy are set against those of British army officers and their families. Superficially, early modern knights shared many characteristics with Victorian army officers. Almost without exception, they came from groups considered by their contemporaries to be socially and economically successful, if not always elite, and many were of noble or privileged birth. Until towards the end of our period, entering into the Order or the British army and undertaking their respective training regimes was tantamount to choosing a lifeway, not merely a career path, in which individuals gave up civilian rights and pledged their obedience to superiors within a strict power hierarchy. Both lifeways entailed periods of great mobility, even greater danger and personal sacrifice. Likewise, both groups represented relative minorities compared to the vast numbers of subservients they commanded. The number of knights based in Malta was always low compared to more numerous officials, chaplains, servants and slaves. At the end of the sixteenth century, their community numbered around 3,500.60 Knights of the Order totalled between 1,400 and 1,500, but those living in Malta only around 600.61 Approximately thirty years later, the numbers had changed li le, with the 1632 census informing us that 3,080 people, from Hospitallers and sailors to soldiers and slaves, worked on the Order’s galleys.62 A similar number of British army personnel resided in Malta during the first half of the nineteenth century. Compared to other British garrisons, it was never large, but neither did it have to regulate a hostile indigenous population; nevertheless, the garrison was not reduced in line with others a er the reforms of the 1890s.63 In 1821 it totalled only 1,248,64 but soon a er hovered around 3,000 until the extreme conditions of the 1850s: during the Crimean War (1853–56), Malta served as the launchpad for British forces and as a fallback position for the sick and wounded before being routed back to Britain. The second half of the century saw an enlarged garrison, averaging around 7,000. The number of wives and children increased slightly over time, but remained small compared to that of fighting men (see Figure 1.3). The bulk comprised noncommissioned officers and privates: in 1870, commissioned officers of infantry regiments and their families consti-

Institutional Agents • 35

Figure 1.3. The British army garrison of Malta. Sources: Blue Books 1823–81. Image by the author.

tuted only 4 per cent of the garrison, a typical proportion throughout the nineteenth century.65 However, it was the influential and relatively wealthy officer class who would most forcefully promote the values of British imperial culture in Malta.66 Differences between knights of the Order and British army officers are marked by ideas prevalent at the times in which they lived and their institutions’ organizational structures. Most obviously, knights had taken holy orders that denoted their lives as religious men.67 The three principal vows included obedience, poverty and chastity. Each had its specific meanings that were understood in the context of a religious community, although the vow of obedience had direct correlates in the Order’s military activities. A Grand Master headed the Order, who was elected for life by the Chapter-General (council). Internally, the Order organized itself into langues, or houses, based on a mixture of mother tongue and origin. Within the hierarchical structure, the heads of the langues answered directly to the Grand Master.68 At sea and within the navy, knights took all the senior vacancies, captaining each galley and commanding the fleet as the Captain-General of the Galleys. He in turn answered to the Admiral of the Fleet, who commanded both the navy’s galley squadron and the eighteenth-century sailing fleet.69 Junior members of the Order frequently served on the galleys as trainee knights or novices. The Chapter-General granted admission to the Order ordinarily only on evidence of a noble bloodline. Exceptionally, a knight of Grace could be awarded on the recommendation of the Chapter-General or the Grand Master, which provided a way for the Vatican and European rulers to ‘force their favourites on the Convent’.70 A novice’s training required mental fitness and physical

36 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

strength, which meant that physique also played a role in choosing future knights.71 Each trainee completed three caravans (sailing seasons) in order to progress to full knighthood, during which time he would acquire the requisite knowledge for managing a galley. The rigorous apprenticeship meant that knights of the Order were in high demand as captains in the navies of Catholic Europe, occupying captaincies on half of France’s galleys in the seventeenth century.72 Although the Order was a ‘supranational organization’, France provided in the region of two-thirds of all knights and, as such, the Order ‘functioned as a kind of school of naval warfare for French officers’.73 The British army also organized itself into smaller internal groups. Broad categories of artillery, cavalry and infantry each comprised a number of regiments. Malta’s garrison consisted almost entirely of infantry regiments, including various incarnations of the Royal Malta Fencible Regiment,74 plus specialist corps, such as artillery and engineers, who arrived in small detachments when required.75 Unlike the Order’s garrison, but similar to their navy, British regiments were not permanently resident on the islands and were instead part of a very mobile institution (see Chapter 6 under the heading ‘Mobility and Communication’). A regiment was a family of sorts, a ‘self-contained social institution’ in which everyone knew their place.76 Many saw long service, especially abroad, and an inability to compete with urban rates of pay as reasons for the army’s unpopularity and poor recruitment during most of the nineteenth century, enticing only ‘inadequates, misfits and rascals’.77 The socioeconomic divisions of Victorian society were o en reproduced in army life, with officers recruited only from the nobility, old military families and the offspring of ‘rich parvenus of commerce and industry’.78 Before Edward Cardwell’s army reforms (1871), an officer purchased his commission and subsequent promotions through to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, which maintained the prerequisite of wealth to membership of the officer class.79 A er Cardwell abolished the purchase system, officers could no longer sell their commissions to fund their retirements, which resulted in officers achieving promotion more slowly and serving for longer.80 Further reforms only a decade later introduced graded compulsory retirement ages and service pensions, along with a general increase in field officers, designed to minimize pension costs by ensuring that fewer officers retired as captains. Before 1881, the ratio of field officers to subalterns had been 1:8.6, a er which it became 1:2.6. Officers were now promoted on the basis of their seniority within regimental lists, unless they failed qualifying examinations or their commanding officer deemed them unworthy of further promotion.81 Despite reforms, the high costs of an officer’s life prohibited any great democratization

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of rank. Many had a ended one of the increasing number of public schools and were in receipt of an o en-necessary private income: it was common for an officer’s outlays to exceed his pay, due to the costliness of luxury uniforms and messhouse activities, plus a busy social life.82 Knights did not have the same direct relationship with money and worldly goods. Taking a vow of poverty prohibited them from owning personal possessions or amassing private wealth, but they were not poor in the same sense as many of their subjected islanders; rather, they managed ‘assets held communally by the Order’.83 In fact, many Hospitallers led very comfortable, even luxurious, lives, causing one seventeenth-century visitor to comment that ‘their Poverty wou’d satisfie my largest Desires’.84 The Order’s wealth is evident in the diets of knights explored in Chapter 4 and in their accommodation. Before being expelled from Rhodes by O oman forces, they had lived apart in a partially segregated community, which, although initially attempted, soon disappeared in Malta. Building Valle a included constructing a series of purpose-built inns, or auberges, to accommodate knights. Built around internal courtyards in lavish baroque architecture, the inns reflected the status of the langue it represented and its inhabitants. Knights lived with other members of their langues, just as British officers lived with other members of their regiments, although when on duty, the many miles of fortified curtain walls also provided temporary accommodation. The British also constructed many new buildings to accommodate their military forces, yet unlike the Order, they occupied an island containing ready-built fortifications and military buildings. They updated and extended the Order’s forts and fortlets to barrack troops, and reused many auberges and palaces to accommodate army officers or administration, although, as I will show in the next chapter, they radically altered the organization of internal spaces. The many rituals and social engagements centred round the officers’ messhouse are the subject of Chapter 5, but the cultural life of a British officer frequently extended beyond its confines. An active sporting life was crucial to the ideologies underlying not only the British armed forces, but also a transplantation of ‘Englishness’. Physical training in the army continued on from school sports and fed into Victorian beliefs connecting physical and moral fitness.85 Field sports and athletic pursuits occupied a central place in army life and it was suggested that Superintendents of Gymnasia be appointed at all imperial stations, including Malta. From the 1870s, the military also used sport to build bridges between officers and their men.86 Cricket, polo, ‘rackets’ and racing made common events, pitching regiment against regiment or army against navy, the results appearing locally in the Malta Chronicle and Garrison Gaze e and London-based newspapers, such as The Field. Army

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authorities explicitly encouraged a paternalistic a itude of officers towards their men and sports matches provided an excellent opportunity to build esprit de corps within the regiments, while also providing social occasions for military families and other members of imperial society.87 A er visiting Malta in the early 1830s, Benjamin Disraeli declared in a private correspondence: ‘By heavens! I believe these fellows are boys till they are majors, and sometimes do not even stop there’.88 The officerclass enjoyed frequent garrison balls, golf, hunting and picnics, the latter for which food, drink, crockery and glasses could all be rented in Valle a.89 In 1826 a bastion of imperial culture, the gentleman’s club, opened in Valle a under the name of the Union Club.90 Military bands provided a range of music and a li le later, Maltese folk musicians began to integrate instruments associated with military bands, demonstrating the cultural pervasiveness of British army traditions.91 For the knights, sacred music abounded in the cathedrals of Valle a and Mdina, and the Order maintained its own capppella di musica. From 1631, opera joined the myriad of secular music forms on offer.92 The great halls of their auberges hosted plays and a er the 1730s, Manoel Theatre provided the principal venue for performances by touring players and musicians.93 While Malta provided a base for both knights and officers, it would be wrong to assume that either group lived out their lives on the island. For regimental officers, Malta was but one in a line of stations in a tour of duty that could take them all over the globe. The mobility of knights, while geographically more limited, spanned Europe, the Mediterranean and, for some, expanded across Atlantic to the Order’s shortlived sugar colonies.94 Similarly, as much as the explicitly transnational composition of the Order united under Catholicism, the ‘British’ officer corps comprised Irish, Sco ish and Welsh as well as Englishmen, many of whom were born in colonial locations or ‘on tour’ with their military families. Whether serving in the British army in Hong Kong or captaining a vessel in the French navy in the West Indies, the mobility of these military careerists and the experiences of elsewhere they brought to the islands brings to the fore the interconnectedness of Malta.95

Captives Mobility was not the only facet of life that connected Malta with the outside world. Slavery was a well-established institution in the early modern Mediterranean, and in Malta the Order ran a slave market rivalled only by Livorno for the selling on non-Christians,96 with religion

Institutional Agents • 39

and ethnicity, rather than race, determining who enslaved whom.97 The majority of slaves who ended up in Malta were captured by the Order’s navy or licenced Maltese corsairs sailing under the Order’s flag. As well as selling slaves, ransoming them also provided a healthy profit,98 but the majority became galley rowers, who in 1690 Jean du Mont described as ‘the most miserable Wretches in the World’.99 Although entitled to one in ten slaves landed in the islands, the Order’s naval fleet required hundreds of rowers to propel its galleys and there were never enough. In such cases, procuring slaves from the Levant usually sufficed, although shortages in 1687 moved the Grand Master to implore the Holy Roman Emperor for more slaves.100 In 1632, the Order occupied 1,284 in galley service; at the end of the Order’s rule in Malta, Napoleon found 2,000 slaves on the islands.101 Others slaves served as valets to the knights or assistants to galley cooks, as well as in a range of domestic and dockyard capacities.102 Slaves included Jews, but were overwhelmingly Muslim and kept in special prisons (bagni) when on land.103 The Order captured numerous Greek Orthodox merchants during their raids (see above), and while many may have outwardly appeared to be Muslims, they commonly appealed to the Inquisitor of Malta, claiming that they had been forced to convert to Islam, but were in fact Christians, making their enslavement unlawful.104 The Muslim majority worshiped in their own mosque and ran small-scale businesses from their prisons, manufacturing goods or offering services.105 On his visit to the slave prison in Valle a, prison reformer John Howard noted some of the ‘unhappy objects’ carried on a woollen manufactory.106 At sea, galleys had to stop frequently to pick up fresh supplies and captains sometimes used slaves as brokers on Muslim islands, where they could also conduct their own business and negotiate deals.107 Furthermore, the potential for slaves to find freedom from recapture at sea or manumission has enticed some to conceive of situations in which slavery might offer a potentially be er life. In their pioneering reassessment of the Mediterranean region, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell argue that ‘in our antipathy, we should not overlook the fact that enslavement was o en the best available mechanism of escape, the most effective way of realizing potential mobility, for desperate people in hard times’.108 The fact that some freemen signed up to row on the Order’s galleys demonstrates that, regardless of how unforgiving an environment it represented, the case for welcoming enslavement cannot be u erly ruled out in early modern Malta. However, given the harsh treatment of slaves over freemen on board, I will proceed with caution and will assume that slaves were not rowing through choice.

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Galley rowing service occupied two further groups, both of which Simon Mercieca has described as living in a ‘semi-state of bondage’: buonavoglie and forzati.109 The la er comprised prisoners sentenced to rowing by civilian and religious courts. Sentences could be harsh, especially for the . The Order’s court, the Castellania, sentenced Francesco Lia from Sicily ‘to a public flogging and to row on the galleys for ten years with his feet bound in chains’ for stealing a silver candlestick from a chapel inside St John’s Conventual Church in 1640.110 The Order needed galley rowers and it made sense for them to use convicts as an available resource. The Roman Inquisition, however, made use of imprisonment as a punishment (ad poenam), as opposed to simply custody during a trial (ad custodiam), believing in the punitive and the corrective potential of imprisonment.111 As a favourite punishment of inquisitions around Europe,112 incarceration was the most common sentence applied by the Maltese tribunal in the late eighteenth century.113 Those imprisoned as punishment served typically between one and six months, much shorter than prison sentences issued by other Inquisition tribunals.114 Those detained under investigation and trial faced between one day and thirteen months, with an average of 4.4 months.115 The Catholic Church established the Roman Inquisition (hereinafter ‘the Inquisition’), also referred to as the Sacra Congregazione del Sant’Officio and Holy Office, a er the Council of Trent and it formed part of the Counter-Reformation. Pope Pius IV founded the Maltese tribunal in 1562 to counter Lutheran sympathies in some knights and perceived heresies spread by Greek Orthodox followers from Rhodes.116 At first, the role of Inquisitor fell to the Bishop of Malta, but in 1574 Pope Pius V invested his Apostolic Delegate Mgr Pietro Dusina as Inquisitor of Malta. The move importantly separated forever the roles of Bishop and Inquisitor, ensuring that the Vatican chose future incumbents – unlike the Bishop, who the Order selected – and it integrated the functions of Apostolic Delegate and Inquisitor, establishing the permanent presence of a papal representative on the island.117 The Maltese Tribunal grew to become the ‘most efficient institution on the island’118 and as much a political as a religious institution, serving a governmental function in a papal bid to centralize its authority. It held precedence over all other courts on the island and the Inquisitor could arrest any of the Order. As the most powerful resident in Co onera, he held sway over many local ma ers outside of his official jurisdiction.119 The Inquisition’s primary objective was to investigate cases of heresy and deviation from Catholic doctrine, so it did not, in theory, target Jews and Muslims.120 However, reality blurred Catholicism with popular religion, local politics and conversions both to and from the faith. Crimes investigated by the Maltese tribunal included apostasy, blas-

Institutional Agents • 41

phemy, freemasonry, immoral life, polygamy, possessing or reading prohibited books, and sorcery or witchcra . Out of the 3,049 denunciations recorded between 1744 and 1798, 1,030 (33.8 per cent) related to blasphemy and a further 883 (29 per cent) to witchcra .121 In the second half of the eighteenth century, 34.7 per cent of the 147 prisoners were arrested for sorcery (52 per cent ‘Turks’, 25 per cent ‘women’) and a further 32 per cent for blasphemy. Many of the Order endured accusations, which numbered 360 and involved over 320 knights, resulting in 262 investigations between 1564 and 1696.122 Denunciations formed the most common starting point for an investigation and although trial records record a populace generally unwilling to denounce each other, an unofficial network of famigliari and those with grievances against the accused served the Inquisition.123 Moreover, the fear of denunciation induced many to denounce themselves in the hope of receiving only salutary penances as punishment.124 Trials could last many months or longer, during which the majority of accused would find themselves held in custody in one of the Inquisitor’s prison cells, in between periodic questioning. Inquisition trials have a lurid reputation in the popular imagination, most of which is based on the witch hunting of medieval inquisitions or the mass torture of the Spanish Inquisition. The Roman Inquisition was by no means a mild and innocuous institution, but when appreciated in the broader context of trials and punishments enacted by contemporaneous civil and religious authorities, neither was it extreme. Trial by torture (rigorso esamine) required compelling evidence and regulations prescribed its duration.125 The mechanism of torture was also regulated and although the corda was the sole method used in most Roman Inquisitions,126 the Maltese tribunal employed at least the corda and the stanghe a.127 Those found guilty faced a variety of sentences that reflected not only the severity of the infringement but also the nature of the confession and apparent repentance. In comparison to its secular counterparts, the Roman Inquisition seldom employed the death sentence,128 the Maltese tribunal issuing only four capital punishments during its tenure, all conducted in effigy.129 More frequent punishments included galley service, shaming, whipping in Valle a and exiling foreigners back to their homelands, although a great number of prisoners were released with only salutary penances 130 In 1798, Napoleon abolished slavery and the Inquisition in Malta, and although slavery remained legal in the British Empire until 1833 and Catholicism prevailed as the predominant Maltese religion, neither institution was re-established.131 Similarly, once the British took control of the courts, capital punishments became relatively rare and reserved for serious crimes such as murder, as in the case of Giuseppa

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Bu igieg, who threw her infant daughter into a well.132 In the period between 1840 and 1860, forty-eight persons were accused with charges relating to murder or manslaughter, of whom three were executed, twenty-seven condemned to hard labour, six to imprisonment and twelve acqui ed. Maltese comprised the highest number at thirty-five, alongside eight foreigners and five English. Serious crime appears to have run along demographic lines: most cases related to a acks by Maltese upon other Maltese; all the of cases involving ‘English’ defendants related to crimes alleged against other English and five of the eight cases involving a foreign defendant were for a acks upon other foreigners.133 What did change a er the opening of Corradino civilian prison in 1850 (see Chapter 2) is that the judiciary issued more and more prison sentences, even for murder: Private Charles Andrews was sentenced to life imprisonment for his ‘dastardly crime’ of killing two Maltese boatmen in 1889.134 The number of male prisoners for 1850 is recorded at 481, which by 1860 had doubled and by 1870 had tripled. In the next ten years, admi ances swelled to around 2,300, but had reduced to 1,170 by 1885, climbing again to around 1,500 until 1895. The turn of the century witnessed an explosion of admi ances, which surged to nearly 7,000 in 1910. A er 1895, figures include female prisoners, whose numbers were always substantially lower. In 1847 only 23 female prisoners were recorded, a number that stayed fairly static until the mid-1860s. Between 1875 and the 1890s, the number of female inmates hovered between 220 and 320.135 By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the number of women sent to prison had risen dramatically to 1,109 in 1911–12, with the overwhelming majority serving short sentences and being serial offenders.136 Around the same time, the military prison typically housed an additional 100 army and navy inmates.137 The increases are significant and reflect the number of, and colonial government’s reaction to, increasing pe y crime, with ‘drunkenness, prostitution and gambling’ in Valle a jeopardizing ‘military and political ambitions’.138 In the 1850s, most male prisoners were incarcerated for felonies, in the 1860s and 1870s the , and from the 1880s pe y crime. Most male inmates were Catholic, Maltese, single, young (late teens to mid-twenties), from the inner-harbour area (1850: 46 per cent, 1860: 34 per cent, 1870: 52 per cent)139 and could not read or write (1870: 93 per cent).140 The majority of the Protestant inmates served short sentences for brawling and consisted principally of soldiers and sailors.141 The figures demonstrate an increasing trend for incarcerating those sentenced for decreasingly severe crimes and, as such, the general increase of imprisonment in society.

Institutional Agents • 43

With an increase of inmates came a reduction in the length of sentences. The overwhelming majority of women served short terms of less than three months and over 90 per cent of male prisoners served three months or less from 1885.142 Short, sharp sentencing did nothing to alleviate the image created by the surge in pe y crime in urban areas. Repeat and serial offending morphed into habit, with rates of recidivism accounting for approximately two-thirds of admissions from the mid-1880s onwards. By 1901, overall recidivism for civilian prisoners had reached 96 per cent (58 per cent incarcerated once before, 16 per cent twice and 22 per cent three times or more),143 hi ing 100 per cent in 1895 and 1900.144 If one can believe the reported figures, they demonstrate astonishingly high levels of recidivism throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The governor of Corradino military prison lamented during this period that while imprisonment acted as a deterrent to army soldiers, the same could not be said of navy stokers, who were used to confinement, noting that ‘I have done all in my power to make prison life deterrent to this class of naval prisoner, and have not employed them in any of the ordinary services of the prison; but in spite of this the same men come here again and again’.145 Recidivism was not new to Malta and the Inquisition tried many repeat offenders. In the mid-eighteenth century, these included Agostino de Gignac, or de Gignach, and Aloisio (de) Castellana, or Castellare, tried twice for blasphemy, along with Cassem and Ibraimo, tried twice each for sorcery. All of them were slaves of the Order.146 Nevertheless, early modern levels of recidivism and incarceration do not compare to those witnessed in the later nineteenth century. Agents of all kinds engaged with Malta’s institutions, although some more obviously than others. Slaves, prisoners and military personnel found themselves living in extreme institutional se ings, which materialized not least in the form of the physical spaces that the next chapter explores.

Notes 1. For information regarding the demographics of early modern Malta, see Stanley Fiorini, ‘Demographic Growth and the Urbanization of the Maltese Countryside to 1798’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta 1530–1798: Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St John of Jerusalem (Malta: Mireva Publications, 1993), 297–310. 2. Carmel Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Malta. Malta: Mireva Publications, 2000, 122; Charles Savona-Ventura, ‘War and Population Change

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3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

in the Maltese Context’, Malta Medical Journal 18(2) (2006), 35. Cassar notes that these figures may have been exaggerated in order to obtain greater provisions of duty-free grain from Sicily (at 122). Stanley Fiorini, ‘The Rese lement of Gozo a er 1551’, Melita Historica 9(3) (1986), 206; Brian W. Blouet, The Story of Malta, London: Faber & Faber, 1967, 90. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 125. It reported that relative to land surface, for every person in Ireland, Europe’s least-populated state, there were 152 in England, 224 in Holland and 1,103 in Malta (Carl Wilhelm E inger, Gothaischer Hof Kalender zum Nutzen u. Vorgnügen auf das Jahr 1797. Gotha: C.W. E inger, 1796, 35). Savona-Ventura, ‘War and Population Change’, 36. The first British a empt to enumerate the population of the Maltese islands was in 1823. Although the first census was taken in 1842, subsequent enumerations were recorded in the first years of each decade: 1851, 1861, through to the end of our period. Government of Malta, Census of the Maltese Islands, Taken on Sunday, 26th April, 1931, under Ordinance XI of 1930. Malta: Government Printing Office, 1832, 4. Charles Savona-Ventura, Knight Hospitaller Medicine in Malta (1530–1798). Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2004, 220; W. Bonnici, ‘Inspector of Hospitals Ralph Green and the Plague in Malta of 1813’, Journal of the Royal Medical Corps 144 (1998), 40–41. Charles Savona-Ventura, Contemporary Medicine in Malta (1798–1979). Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2005, 563. Savona-Ventura, Contemporary Medicine in Malta, 539. Emanuel Bu igieg, ‘Family Life and Neighbourliness in Malta (c. 1640–c. 1760): Some Preliminary Observations Based on Evidence from the Magna Curia Castellaniae’, Arkivju 1 (2010), 48. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 124–25. Calculation based on population statistics in ‘Population’, Blue Books 1828–81. John Hennen, Sketches of the Medical Topography of the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and Malta. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830, 477. Emanuel Bu igieg, ‘Growing up in Hospitaller Malta (1530–1798): Sources and Methodologies for the History of Childhood and Adolescence’, in Joaquim Carvalho (ed.), Bridging the Gaps: Sources, Methodology and Approaches to Religion in History (Pisa: Plus-Pisa University Press, 2008), 137. Jean du Mont, A new voyage to the Levant containing an account of the most remarkable curiosities in Germany, France, Italy, Malta, and Turkey: with historical descriptions relating to the present and ancient state of these countries, by the Sieur de Mont. London: Printed for M. Gillyflower, T. Godwin, M. Wo on, J. Walthoes and R. Parker, 1696, 138–39. Anon., Beschreibung der Insel Malta und des Malteserri erordens. Nuremberg: bei Gustav Philipp Jakob Bieling, 1799, 5. Lady Acland, The Lost Key: An International Episode. London: John MacQueen, 1901, 75. See Henry J. Frendo, ‘Language and Nationality in an Island Colony: Malta’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 3(1) (1975/1976), 22–33; and, more recently, Joseph M. Brincat, ‘The Language Question and Education: A Political Controversy on a Linguistic Topic’, in Ronald G. Sultana (ed.), Yesterday’s Schools: Readings in Maltese Educational History (Malta: Xirocco Publishing, 2017), 161–82. Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905. Census of the British Empire. 1901. London: HMSO, 1906, 68.

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22. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 32. 23. House of Commons Paper 330, 1879. ‘Return of Inhabitants of Malta, Showing Their Occupation and Profession, 1878–79’. 24. Salvino Busu il, ‘Agriculture in Malta: A Historical Note’, Cahiers Options Mediterranéennes Series B 7 (1993), 18. 25. Command Papers C.2032, 1878. Correspondence Respecting the Taxation and Expenditure of Malta. London: HMSO, 1878, 21. 26. Louis de Boisgelin singles out Ghar Kbir as ‘a spacious cave, serving, for a great length of time, for a dwelling for whole families of peasants’ in Ancient and Modern Malta: containing a full account of the present state of the islands of Malta and Gozo, the history of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, vol. 1. London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1805, 49. 27. Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des mérier, vol. 16 (TEA–VEN). Neuchaste: chez Samuel Faulche & Compagnie, 1765, 686. 28. Keith Buhagiar, ‘Caves in Context: The Late Medieval Maltese Scenario’, in Knut Andreas Bergsvik and Robin Skeates (eds), Caves in Context: The Cultural Significance of Caves and Rockshelters in Europe (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2012), 164. See George A. Said-Zammit, ‘The Development of Domestic Space in the Maltese Islands from the Late Middle Ages to the Second Half of Twentieth Century’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Leiden: Leiden University, 2016, 124–29 for a discussion of housing in early modern Malta. 29. Brian W. Blouet, ‘The Impact of Armed Conflict on the Rural Se lement Pa ern of Malta (A.D. 1400–1800)’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 3(3) (1978), 367–80. 30. Blouet, ‘The Impact of Armed Conflict’, 368, 376. The only major O oman a ack a er the sixteenth century was in 1614, when the area around Żejtun was invaded by 5,000 marauders (at 378). 31. Bu igieg, ‘Family Life and Neighbourliness in Malta’, 56; Blouet ‘The Impact of Armed Conflict’, 379. 32. Simon Mercieca, ‘Marriage Prospects in Early Modern Malta: The Integration of Venetian Subjects in an Alien Country’, Melita Historica 14(3) (2006), 310. 33. Fiorini, ‘Demographic Growth and the Urbanization of the Maltese Countryside to 1798’, 305. 34. NAM/GMR/195. A. Ghio and G. Gulia, Preliminary Reports of the Mortality and Sanitary Condition of Valle a and the Three Cities. Malta: Government Printing Office, 1875, 6–7. 35. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 140–49. 36. Bu igieg, ‘Family Life and Neighbourliness in Malta’, 52. 37. Alison Hoppen, The Fortification of Malta by the Order of St. John, 1530–1798. Edinburgh: Sco ish Academic Press, 1979, 407. 38. Bu igieg, ‘Growing up in Hospitaller Malta’, 131. 39. Percentages calculated from data in the ‘Statistical Abstract taken from Census of 31 March 1851’, appended to ‘Population’ in Malta Blue Books (1851): 0–15 years, 40,001; 15–60 years, 70,803; over 60s, 12,692; over 70s, 5,519, octogenarians, 1,374; total Maltese population, 123,496. 40. Jeremy Boissevain, Saints and Fireworks: Religion and Politics in Rural Malta. Malta: Progress Press Co. Ltd, 1993, 43. 41. In the extreme case of Don Julian Borg (ca. 1544–1610), the parish priest of Naxxar accumulated a fortune from money lending and buying-up and renting property. See Paul Catania, ‘Don Juliano Borg: Parish Priest of Naxxar, Money Lender and

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42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

Landowner (1570–1610)’, in Joan Abela, Emanuel Bu igieg and Krystle Farrugia (eds), Proceedings of History Week 2011 (Malta: Malta Historical Society and Midsea Books, 2013), 74–75. See Boissevain, Saints and Fireworks, 55–58 for the role of the Church in regulating time in the mid-twentieth century. Bu igieg, ‘Family Life and Neighbourliness in Malta’, 56. Bu igieg, ‘Family Life and Neighbourliness in Malta’, 56. Molly Greene covers the place of Greeks in the early modern Mediterranean in detail throughout her book, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants, 18. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 138–40. Anon., Memorial on Establishing a Permanent Depôt of Rice and Corn at Gibraltar or Malta. London: Printed by B. McMillan, 1812, 12–14. See Thomas A. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002; and Sakis Gekis, Xenocracy: State, Class, and Colonialism in the Ionian Islands, 1815–1864. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016 for detailed analyses of the Ionian Islands under British rule. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 106. Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 54–55. Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 54–55. Mercieca, ‘Marriage Prospects in Early Modern Malta’, 310. Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 54–63. A total of 184 men went to Australia, 44 men (81.5 per cent) to Orange River Colony and 10 (71.4 per cent) to Mauritius. Stephen Constantine, Community and Identity: The Making of Modern Gibraltar since 1704. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009, 112; Sakis Gekis, ‘Colonial Migrants and the Making of a British Mediterranean’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 19(1) (2012), 81–83. See Andrea L. Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Se lers in Algeria and France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006 for a detailed examination of Maltese se lers in North Africa. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 113–14. Paul Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta: From the Nineteenth to the TwentyFirst Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 91. Adolphus Slade, Turkey, Greece and Malta. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837, 117. Fiorini, ‘Demographic Growth and the Urbanization of the Maltese Countryside to 1798’, 299. Anne Brogini, Maltes, Frontière de Chrétienté (1530–1670). Rome: École Française de Rome, 2006, 88. Emanuel Bu igieg, Nobility, Faith and Masculinity: The Hospitaller Knights of Malta, c.1580–c.1700. London: Continuum, 2011, 6. Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, 275. House of Commons Papers 119, 1821. ‘Army. Return of the number of British troops stationed at Trinidad, Tobago, St. Lucia, Demerara, Essequibo, Berbice, Malta, the Ionian Islands, Ceylon, Mauritius, Cape of Good Hope, Sierra Leone and Van Diemen’s Land’, 119. Blue Book 1870, G2.

Institutional Agents • 47

66. Peter Burroughs, ‘Imperial Defence and the Victorian Army’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 15(1) (1986), 63. 67. Bu igieg, Nobility, Faith and Masculinity, 91, 83. 68. Anon., Beschreibung der Insel Malta, 8. 69. Castillo, The Maltese Cross, 87. 70. Ann Williams, ‘The Constitutional Development of the Order of St John in Malta, 1530–1798’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798: Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St John of Jerusalem (Malta: Mireva Publications, 1993), 291. 71. Bu igieg. Nobility, Faith and Masculinity, 131–40. 72. Paul W. Bamford, Fighting Ships and Prisons: The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973, 26, 155. 73. Hoppen, The Fortification of Malta, 8, 158; Phil McCluskey, ‘“Les ennemis du nom christien”: Echoes of the Crusade in Louis XIV’s France’, French History 29(1) (2015), 51. 74. A regiment of enlisted Maltese that was, under normal circumstances, permanently resident in the islands and not considered part of the regular imperial army, yet paid and supplied in a similar fashion. 75. Peter Burroughs, ‘An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868’, in David Chandler (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 164. 76. Hew Strachan, ‘The British Army, 1815–1856: Recent Writing Reviewed’, Journal of Army Historical Research 63 (1985), 78. 77. Burroughs, ‘An Unreformed Army?’, 168; Edward Spiers, ‘The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1914’, in David Chandler (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 193. 78. Frank Levray, ‘Etique e in the Mess-Rooms of the British Army’, The Lotus Magazine 10(3) (1919), 106. 79. Harold E. Raugh Jr., ‘Introduction’, in Harold E. Raugh Jr. (ed.), The British Army, 1815–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), xv. 80. David French, Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People, c. 1870–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 18–19. 81. French, Military Identities, 22. 82. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 190; Levray ‘Etique e in the Mess-Rooms’, 106. 83. Bu igieg, Nobility, Faith and Masculinity, 83. 84. du Mont, A new voyage to the Levant, 125. 85. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 97–99. 86. James D. Campbell, The Army Isn’t All Work: Physical Culture in the Evolution of the British Army, 1860–1920. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012, 10–41. 87. Frederick Farquharson, Standing Order and Regulations for the Royal Fusiliers. Malta: Government Press, 1834, 6. 88. Benjamin Disraeli, Home Le ers, wri en by the late Earl of Beaconsfield in 1830 and 1831. London: John Murray, 1885, 70. 89. Anon, ‘A “Go-Cart” Picnic in Malta’, The Graphic (27 November 1886), 557. 90. Joseph Bonnici and Michael Cassar, Malta and British Army Infantry Regiments. Malta: BDL Publishing, 2009, 58. 91. Anna Borg Cardona, ‘Musicians on the Maltese Islands Prior to the Establishment of the Mid-nineteenth-Century Bands’, in Anon. (ed.), Festi San Ġorġ (Il-Belt Victoria: Ghawdex, 2016), 65.

48 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

92. Joseph Vella Bondin, ‘The Music of the Knights’, Melita Historica 12(4) (1999), 382. 93. Victor F. Denaro, ‘The Manoel Theatre’, Melita Historica 3(1) (1960), 1. 94. See Thomas Freller and William Zammit, Knights, Buccaneers, and Sugar Cane: The Caribbean Colonies of the Order of Malta. Malta: Midsea Books, 2015. 95. Gekis, ‘Colonial Migrants and the Making of a British Mediterranean’, 78; David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–2. 96. Gerald E. Aylmer, ‘Slavery under Charles II: The Mediterranean and Tangier’, English Historical Review 114(459) (1998), 380. 97. Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 9. 98. Many scholars have explored Mediterranean slave ransoming. For a recent assessment, see Daniel Hershenzon, ‘The Political Economy of Ransom in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, Past & Present 231(1) (2016), 61–95. 99. du Mont, A new voyage to the Levant, 138. 100. Godfrey We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2002, 345–7. 101. Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970, 169; Hoppen, The Fortification of Malta, 138. 102. Anton Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2003, 135. 103. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 85–86. 104. Molly Greene, ‘Beyond the Northern Invasion: The Mediterranean in the Seventeenth Century’, Past & Present 174(1) (2002), 61. 105. Anon., Beschreibung der Insel Malta und des Malteserri erordens, 5. 106. John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazare os in Europe. London: Printed for J. Johnson, C. Dilly and T. Cadell, 1791, 58. 107. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 371. 108. Perigrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000, 388. 109. Mercieca, ‘Marriage Prospects in Early Modern Malta’, 232. 110. Bu igieg, ‘Family Life and Neighbourliness in Malta’, 51. 111. Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, 27. 112. James Given, ‘The Inquisitors of Languedoc and the Medieval Technology of Power’, American Historical Review 94 (1989), 343. 113. Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2001, 475–78. 114. Timothy D. Walker, Doctors, Folk Medicine and the Inquisition: The Repression of Magical Healing in Portugal during the Enlightenment. Leiden: Brill, 2005, 302. 115. Average calculated for the late eighteenth century from records reproduced in Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 518–38. 116. Carmel Cassar, ‘1564–1696: The Inquisition Index of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John’, Melita Historica 11(2) (1993), 159; Andrew P. Vella, The Tribunal of the Inquisition in Malta. Malta: Royal University of Malta, 1973, 13. 117. Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 326. 118. Cassar, ‘1564–1696: The Inquisition Index of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John’, 161.

Institutional Agents • 49

119. John Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law and the Witch’, in Brengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcra : Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 86–87; Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 351. 120. Kim Sibenhüner, ‘Conversion, Mobility and the Roman Inquisition in Italy around 1600’, Past and Present 200(1) (2008), 10. 121. Calculated from data reproduced in Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern, 90. 122. Cassar, ‘1564–1696: The Inquisition Index of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John’, 161. 123. Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 330, 434. 124. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law and the Witch’, 91. 125. Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law and the Witch’, 98. 126. Jonathan Seitz, Witchcra and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 41. 127. The corda involved hoisting the accused from a rope a ached to the victim’s hands, which were usually tied behind his or her back. The stanghe a comprised two pieces of wood that formed a brace used to slowly crush the victim’s ankle. 128. Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, 57–58; Seitz, Witchcra and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice, 39; Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law and the Witch’, 110. 129. Kenneth Gambin, The Prisoner Experience at the Inquisitor’s Palace, Vi oriosa. Malta: Heritage Books, 2004, 59. 130. Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 468. 131. While the slave trading was abolished in 1807, slavery was legal until the Slavery Abolition Act (1833). However, various controversies arose regarding the potential trafficking of O oman slaves from Tripoli passing through Malta on their way to Constantinople. See Michael Refalo, Slavery: Malta at the Crossroads: Transhipment of Slaves in a British Colony during the Nineteenth Century. Malta: BDL Publishing, 2015. 132. House of Commons Papers 535, 1861. Return of Trials for Murder and Manslaughter at Malta, 1840–60. London: HMSO, 1861, 8. 133. House of Commons Papers 535, 1861, 10. 134. ‘A Dastardly Crime’, Northern Whig (21 May 1889), 8. 135. NAM/GMR 56. Report of the Government Institutions, 1851; Blue Books 1860–1910/11. 136. Paul Knepper, ‘A Few Detectives Would Be Very Useful: Crime, Morality and Policing in Valle a, 1880–1914’, Journal of Social History 43(2) (2009), 394–95. 137. Command Papers C.8983, 1898. Report on the Discipline and Management of Military Prisons, 1897. London: HMSO, 1898, 51. 138. Knepper, ‘A Few Detectives Would Be Very Useful’, 385. 139. Sandra Scicluna, ‘The Prison in Malta: 1850–1870 and 1931–1951’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Leicester: University of Leicester, 2004, 67. 140. Blue Book 1870, AB4. 141. NAM/GMR/64. John Cleugh, ‘Report of Protestant Chaplain of Corradino Prison for 1850’, 1. 142. Blue Books 1875–1909. 143. Blue Book 1901, T2. 144. Blue Book 1895 T2; Blue Book 1900, T2. 145. Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 52. 146. Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 520–37.

c2 INSTITUTIONAL SPACES

From the mid-sixteenth century, institutional buildings in Malta ranged from churches and convents to schoolhouses, hospitals and customs offices. Whether primarily religious, charitable or administrative, they frequently shared many features in their internal spatial configurations, especially the wide range of buildings engaged in ‘containing’ groups of people from the rest of society. Besides prisons designed to detain law-breakers, asylums provided ‘care’ of vulnerable sections of the population through confinement. From 1574, the Sacra Infermeria in Valle a initially locked up the mentally ill, with female patients transferring to the Ospizio (asylum) in Floriana in the eighteenth century. Male patients joined them in the mid-nineteenth century until the construction of a new ‘British-style’ lunatic asylum in 1861.1 Malta’s many prostitutes frequently found themselves in various incarnations of lock hospitals: initially at the Case a della Donne (Valle a), from 1682 the Sacra Infermeria, at the Anglo-Bavarian auberge (Valle a) under the French and finally in a purpose-built ward next to the British-era Central Hospital in Floriana.2 A Magdalen asylum (1850–91) at the Ospizio, houses of industry, orphanages, destitute asylums and other ‘charitable’ institutions all restricted the movement and liberty of their inmates, as did Malta’s quarantine station, or lazzare o, on Manoel Island in the Marsamxe Harbour, which detained not only people but also cargoes and entire ships. The nature of incarceration in these institutions involved removing from society individuals conceived of as potentially dangerous or sick, thereby protecting the rest of the population. Rather than a empt to characterize the vast array of institutional architectures that have existed over the last five centuries, each of the built environments this book investigates relates to protagonists encountered in the preceding chapter.3 By garnering examples from penal and military architectures, I have chosen highly codified and deliberately planned examples of institutional space. Arguably the most extreme forms of institutional architecture, prisons have had many uses in

 Institutional Spaces • 51

Malta. The history of imprisonment in Europe tells a tale of gradual development until the birth of the ‘modern prison’ in the mid-eighteenth century, when incarceration became the chief form of punishment, but prisons had since the Middle Ages operated as places of punishment as much as detention, and this was also the case in Malta.4 The ensuing examination of three different kinds of prisons draws out differences in spatial organization, while tracking the chronological progression of prison architectures places carceral Malta within the broader punitive developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The boundaries between penal and military space blur through discussions of military imprisonment and the Order’s galleys. The final example of a Victorian officers’ messhouse demonstrates the regulatory nature of institutional spatial arrangement on even supposedly privileged and powerful men. Each physical environment made possible regimes in which power operated through spatial access and control, and while they each comprise detailed studies in their own right, as the primary ‘sites of action’, they also set the scene for subsequent chapters.

Penal Architectures The Order needed a constant supply of manpower for its galley fleet, so it made sense to condemn criminals to rowing instead of permanently imprisoning them. On land, it held slaves in purpose-built prisons (bagni), the first of which it constructed on the shores of Birgu next to its galley fleet in 1532.5 Yet the galley too became in a very real sense an extension of the carceral environment.6 For criminals considered too dangerous or unable to row, the Order’s civil courts issued a range of punishments, from fines to death, but the majority of more serious crimes resulted in imprisonment in the Great Prison (Gran Prigione) in Valle a. A er his visit in April 1786, prison reformer John Howard declared the building to consist of ‘several dirty and offensive rooms’ in which only nine prisoners languished, and he highlighted the use of torture.7 Following its incorporation into the British Empire, Malta never became part of the global convict transportation system that connected Millbank Prison in England with Van Diemen’s’ Land (Tasmania) and the convict hulks harboured at Gibraltar.8 Rather, the early years of British rule saw the Great Prison used more extensively, with inmates set to work. By day, soldiers led chained gangs through Valle a, forcing them to clean the streets.9 Convicts received an allowance for this service, as did others employed in making mats and straw hats.10 By

52 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

the mid-nineteenth century, the prison had received polarized reports. In a le er dated 6 February 1834, George Waring opined that it was ‘an exceedingly well-conducted establishment’ and continued: Their present number is between two and three hundred, forty-eight of whom are condemned for life. Refractory prisoners are confined in ‘a black hole’, on an allowance of bread and water, and the industrious are rewarded by small weekly wages, a certain part of which they are allowed to spend in wine and other articles, and the remainder is laid by for them until their liberation. The daily allowance of food for each man is twenty-six ounces of bread, thirty ounces of soup, made with macaroni, and two ounces and a half of cheese. Their drink is water.11

Waring was in the minority, however, and colonial officials began planning a new ‘modern’ prison in the style pioneered in the United States, further bolstered in 1842 by the opening of Pentonville Prison in London. Located on the land route connecting the capital and the Three Cities, the new prison’s construction shi ed the principal site of incarceration to the fringes. In previous centuries Valle a had housed the Great Prison and the Three Cities slave and debtors gaols, along with the prison of the Roman Inquisition, which is where we start. For over two centuries, the Church tried, sentenced and punished those who commi ed religious transgressions. From its establishment in Malta in 1574 to its ejection by Napoleon in 1798, the Roman Inquisition loomed large over the islands’ inhabitants, investigating suspected cases of heresy and infringements against Catholic doctrine. Those under trial or found guilty frequently found themselves imprisoned in the Inquisitor’s cells. Religious Imprisonment Provincial inquisitors more o en than not based their headquarters in Dominican convents, but in Malta the former secular Court of Justice (Castellania) had to suffice.12 As the previous site of judicial authority, it already housed a tribunal and some prison cells.13 Given the secrecy under which the Roman Inquisition operated, it is not surprising that successive inquisitors sought to develop the cells within their official residence: if the Inquisitor wanted to escape, he could visit his country residence. At first the cells were dispersed around the building, but later inquisitors consciously developed a centralized prison block. The first known plan of the building dates to ca. 1609 and shows two principal floors, plus a traditional Maltese flat roof (Figure 2.1). The lower level initially comprised an entranceway leading to a chapel

 Institutional Spaces • 53

Figure 2.1. The Inquisitor’s Palace, ca. 1609. Top: Level 1; Bo om: Level 0. Source: Archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (ACDF), Vatican City. Redrawn by the author.

54 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

and a gate to the main complex in which rooms clustered around two courtyards, with a third courtyard extending to the rear. Five prison cells surround Courtyard 1, along with a prison warder’s room, a wood store and a stable. It joins with Courtyard 2 by a corridor accessed via the main staircase. The corridor leads to a kitchen, a servants’ room and a cellar. Courtyard 2 gives access to two further prison cells, a fuel store and toilets. Two staircases lead upwards, one to a women’s prison and the other initially to a servants’ room before joining the main part of the upper floor. While the lower floor is dominated by prisons and stores, the upper floor is not. Accessed primarily by Staircase 1 at the centre of the building, the upper loggia leads to a series of rooms comprising two halls, an ante-room, a chancery and the Inquisitor’s room. If turning le at the top of the stairs, one encounters another servants’ room, the torture chamber and a large store. Connecting the store and the Inquisitor’s room is a spiral staircase that gives access to the roof.14 The system of courtyards, corridors and staircases results in a building with clearly differentiated spaces. The centrality of Courtyard 1 is apparent from the plan, but the most integrated space is that of Staircase 1.15 A single point of entrance or egress not only determines the initial route of all visitors and inhabitants, but also results in some syntactically deep spaces. Over half the rooms (twenty-six) are a minimum of six spaces from the outside. Surprisingly, this number includes only half of the prisons, but all of the other rooms that pertain to the business of inquisition (rather than domestic uses), as well as those used by the Inquisitor.16 While not syntactically the deepest space, the torture chamber is highly segregated within the complex, as are all the prisons.17 Prison 4 is the most segregated of spaces, while the women’s prison is the deepest (see Table 2.1). Overall, the building is very segregated, with nearly half of all rooms (nineteen out of forty-two) possessing only a single control point.18 Dispersing cells around courtyards was in keeping with seventeenthcentury gaols.19 However, the number of rooms demarcated as ‘prisons’, as opposed to the single ‘women’s room’, is misleading with regard to the flexibility of their potential usage. The plan most likely designates fewer cells as specifically female because more men were generally incarcerated than women. Security within the prisons was not good. Inmates escaped, were rescued by compatriots and were even accompanied by their ‘break-in’ lovers.20 Furthermore, conditions within the cells were detrimental to inmate health, which increased the cost of medical care borne by the Inquisition. The Maltese tribunal relied on funds sanctioned sporadically by Rome, which meant that both the Inquisitor’s palatial suites and the prisons developed in a piecemeal fashion. Significantly,

 Institutional Spaces • 55

Table 2.1 Summary of the relative asymmetry analysis of the Inquisitor’s Palace, ca. 1609, the female prisons at the Ospizio and Corradino, and the male civilian prison at Corradino. Table by the author.

Inquisitor’s prison

RRA (Real Relative Asymmetry)

Space

1609

Central Hall

Male prison

Female prison

1854

1861

1872

0.309

0.288

0.260

Yard

1860

1872

1879

0.678 0.528

Court (Imprisonment) Court (Imprisonment)

0.581

Level 0 Wing Corridor Staircase 1

0.414 0.659

Level 1 & 2 wing cells

0.671

Level 1 wing cells

0.617

Dormitories, W.C. & Ospizio

0.591 1.014

Dormitory (Det.), sink, corridor Median

1895

0.225

Court (Imprisonment) Lowest

1864

1.431

Dormitory (Det.), sink, W.C. (Det.) & corridor

1.200

Dormitory & W.C. (Hard Labour)

1.127

Level 1 wing cells & bathroom

0.867

Entrance

1.302

Staircase 3

1.327 (continued)

56 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Table 2.1 Continued

Inquisitor’s prison

RRA (Real Relative Asymmetry)

Space

1609

Gate Keeper’s W.C.

Male prison 1854

1861

1.229

1.156

Store 7

Female prison 1872

1860

1872

1879

1.352

Solitary cell

2.109

Lumber room 2

1.777

Lumber room 2

1.810

Protestant Chapel

1.711

Prison 4

1.681

R.C. Chapel

1.632

0.772

0.746

Staff Space

Supervised Space

P. Chapel Bathroom 1 (Level 0, 1895)

0.983

0.939

0.566

1.184

0.566

1.711

0.625

Bathroom 2 (Level 1, 1895)

0.760

Bathroom 3

0.734

Silent Execrise Yards

0.604

0.584

0.534

Interior of Silent Yards

0.763

0.740

0.653

Superintendent’s Qtrs (L1)

1.049

0.985

0.915

1.352

0.684 0.867

Matron’s Qtrs

1.959

1.618

1.776

1.438

No of spaces (k)

42

206

270

323

9

11

14

17

71

D-value

1.355

0.148

0.050

0.041

0.036

0.317

0.295

0.267

0.244

0.106

Mean

Gaoler’s room

1895

1.249

Boiler room

Highest

1864

1.205

0.669

0.622

0.593

0.951

1.356

1.416

1.173

0.867

 Institutional Spaces • 57

the two most important interventions in the evolution of the prison coincide with the papal reign of two former Inquisitors of Malta. In the 1640s, Mgr Giovanni Ba ista Gori Pannellini built the first ‘block’ of prison cells in the northwest of the building, which comprised three larger and four smaller cells along a central corridor (Figure 2.2).21 The three larger cells survive to this day and each has high lancet windows facing onto the street below, providing air and light, both of which were important for inmates’ welfare. The height of the windows was sufficient to prevent obvious face-to-face interaction with the outside world, but not auditory communication.22 The ground level of the remaining Pannellini cells cuts at its deepest approximately half a metre into the limestone bedrock, from which walls rise to vaulted ceilings around four metres high. Sinking the cells into the bedrock improved the physical security of the prison, as did positioning the cells together and along a straight corridor, which increased the potential for ocular

Figure 2.2. Phased plan of the surviving ground-floor (L0) prisons, plus the position of the four smaller Pannellini cells (now destroyed), Inquisitor’s Palace. CY-Courtyard, CP-Courtyard Pillar. Redrawn by the author.

58 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

and aural surveillance.23 The number of differently sized cells provided opportunities for separating inmates by sex and perhaps other divisions, including those awaiting trial and those serving their sentences; likewise, the combined capacity of the cells facilitated occasional ‘mass imprisonment’, such as when Pannellini incarcerated the knights’ prostitutes, an event that saw him pleading to Rome to be relieved of his post, as he was in fear of his life from vengeful knights.24 In the 1660s, the Inquisition purchased a house that adjoined the complex, which meant that public roads rather than private property now flanked the site on all sides. Due to financial delays, the pre-existing rooms in the house were not fully converted into prison cells until the Inquisitorship of Mgr Giacinto Filiberto di Messerano (1698–1703), during which time the prison block developed to its fullest extent. The plans submi ed to the Vatican by Messerano show a new prison suite at ground level that links to the Pannellini cells via a small staircase and a first floor dedicated to interrogation and trial. The development increased the total number of ground-floor cells to twelve, with additional cells on the first floor that contained provisions for chaining, interrogation and torture. Elevation drawings suggest that the cell doors were solid wood and that each new cell had a small iron-barred window facing onto the corridor or courtyard. The presence of a courtyard well indicates a self-service approach to water, along with some appreciation of prisoners’ needs for fresh air and daylight.25 The new prison block had an official entrance reached from the main corridor. In addition to giving access to the cells and courtyard, the prison corridor led to the gaoler’s room and to the ‘secret stairs’. The new so-called ‘secret’ staircase provided a passage for denouncers to enter the tribunal and Secretia (secret room) without being seen by visitors and offered a swi and discreet way to escort the accused to the torture chamber.26 Like the Pannellini block, an epigraph above the entranceway greeted prisoners. Messorano’s reads: ‘DISCITE IVS TITIAM MONITI / ET / NON TEMNERE NVMEN’ (‘Once you have been admonished, teach justice and do not fear anyone’).27 The Messerano plans only cover the prison block, preventing full space-syntactic analysis, but it is clear that the system of space regulation involved controlling access points to a room, rather than relying on the distance of a room from the building’s entrance to segregate it from the outside. Access points included the gate at the main entrance and the solid doors to the prison block, which created a three-tiered barrier to the outside. The placement of the gaoler’s room next to the secret stairs lent further security to the first-floor suite of interrogation and torture rooms, in which inmates were chained. That the ‘chained prisons’ are space-syntactically deeper within the complex than the

 Institutional Spaces • 59

other cells makes sense in terms of their function: not only could these cells be used for more socially or physically dangerous prisoners, but it is also not an efficient use of space to provide access to a courtyard if prisoners are immobile. Renovations in the 1730s destroyed several cells. What survives of the ground-floor prison complex constitutes three larger Pannellini cells, four smaller (probably Messerano) cells and a room believed by some to have contained a torture chamber. The similarity of construction material, in addition to subsequent redevelopments and uses of the site, encourage today’s museum visitors to see what remains as the finished result, yet the prison complex was far more extensive. Furthermore, its development from dispersed cells to a centralized block provided inmates with access to outside space and water. Taken together with the Inquisition’s a ention to medical and religious welfare, centralization and improved sanitary conditions echo aspects of the enlightened thinking guiding prison reforms in the northern Atlantic during the late eighteenth century. It would take the British nearly half a century to introduce a more ‘modern’ prison system based around the central tenets of ‘healthiness, security and facility of supervision’.28 Civilian Imprisonment The Great Prison was an old building and a er only a quarter of a century, British onlookers concluded that its architecture did not afford the segregation and regulation of prisoners demanded by ‘modern’ penology. In particular, it did not offer sufficient opportunity to separate male and female inmates. Consequently, the colonial government sought to establish new institutions: a male prison at Corradino Heights and a female prison ward in the Ospizio in Floriana (see Figure 0.2). Established to care for the destitute elderly in 1729, the Ospizio subsequently and simultaneously housed multiple institutions that shared the common goal of removing unwanted or ‘dangerous’ factions from general society, including Magdalen and lunatic asylums, a hospital for smallpox cases and from 1831 a female prison ward.29 The prison underwent many structural alterations and in 1845 nine rooms existed: two for the matron (a Sister of Mercy), five dormitories, one wardrobe, a combined dining and work room, plus a large yard.30 In 1864, further remodelling enabled the accommodation of multiple inmate classes separately, marking the first a empt to segregate female prisoners according to a three-tiered model of classification (see Chapter 5 under the heading ‘Classification’).31 The prison now consisted of a multi-use room for each class that acted as dormitory, day room and

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dining room, as well as corresponding airing yards (Figure 2.3). A corridor insulated a lone solitary cell (a former bathroom) from the hard labour yard, reducing the potential for illicit communication. In 1879 the prison witnessed its final and most drastic remodelling. The number of dormitories increased to five through the construction of a further two that shared a single yard. Despite the additions, the spatial relationship between room depth and class remained as before. The final phase also saw the building of new quarters for the matron, the only constructions that extended the size of the prison ward. All other interventions involved carving up existing space, which necessitated closing off spaces in a building already suffering from limited air circulation. As well as directly affecting inmates’ welfare, a lack of fresh

Figure 2.3. Plans of the female prison ward at the Ospizio. Sources: Blue Books 1860, 1864, 1872 and 1879. Redrawn by the author.

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air encouraged other problems and the state of deterioration made the building increasingly unsuitable for its purpose.32 Laying wooden pavement to circumvent damp did not suffice in stopping the colonial authorities from exploring alternative plans, with a view to closing the female prison ward.33 Finding a design for a new radial-plan prison unsuitable,34 colonial officials se led on building a female ward adjacent to Corradino civilian prison, which housed male prisoners. Corradino male prison came about because of the increase in the number of men sentenced to imprisonment and a desire to replace the Great Prison. For want of space in Valle a, the government chose a location two miles away, on the fringes the burgeoning urban area (see Figure 0.2). Work began in February 1838, but death of the original architect significantly delayed progress. In the meantime, Colonel Joshua Jebb, designer of Pentonville Prison, had become surveyor-general of prisons (1844) and ushered in a new way of thinking about prison architecture.35 He ordered the redesign of the Maltese plans in accordance with the cell sizes, ventilation and light provision prescribed in the English Prisons Act of 1839.36 The prison finally opened its doors in 1850, receiving newly convicted men and nearly a hundred of ‘the worst characters’ from the Great Prison.37 Oriented roughly north-south lengthways, an imposing rectangular perimeter wall enclosed the prison grounds and watchtowers on each angle surveyed the interior and exterior (Figure 2.4).38 The south wall contained the main Gate House, which housed the police guard’s quarters and the receiving room. At the centre of the prison, a hall connected three radiating wings both horizontally and vertically. Two wings consisted of sixty solitary cells each, spread equally over three levels. The third wing accommodated misdemeanants in twenty larger cells over two floors.39 The space between wings contained exercising yards for the criminal wards that afforded easy surveillance from a central position and allowed an entire floor to exercise at the same time, facilitating the controlled movement of inmates around the prison. An administration block comprising offices, a school room and staff quarters connected the central hall to a second prison entrance for use by officials and visitors. Buildings spread around the perimeter housed a Catholic chapel, the main kitchen, stores, a warders’ mess, two workshops, plus an infirmary and dispensary. In 1861, a fourth radiating wing created forty extra single cells over two floors (Figure 2.4).40 In 1872, the prison was reoriented so that the external entrance to the administration block, which faced onto the street, became the main entrance for prisoners and staff alike (Figure 2.5).41 The old main entrance now housed workshops and provided access to the gallows, located

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Figure 2.4. Corradino male prison (1854) with fourth wing added in 1861 (the south west wing). Sources: Blue Books 1854 and 1861. Redrawn by the author.

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Figure 2.5. Plan of Corradino male prison, 1872. Source: Blue Book 1872. Redrawn by the author.

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immediately outside. A new ‘trades’ entrance broke the northern perimeter wall and gave access to a newly built block containing the kitchen, stores, bathrooms and school room (relocated from the administration block).42 The chapel remained in position, receiving new iron railings to separate prisoners during services, and the previously adjoining kitchen was converted into a Protestant chapel.43 New oval radiating exercise yards replaced the old ones, accommodating fi y prisoners in separate yards. The last amendment to the male prison in our period dates to 1880 and involved the subdivision of the cells in the misdemeanants’ block into twenty separate cells on each floor, reflecting the increasing demand for regular single-occupancy cells. In 1895, a completed female prison joined the juvenile ward in adjoining the southwest perimeter wall. It comprised a single wing with two floors, each capable of holding twenty-one inmates in separate cells (Figure 2.6). A corridor gave access to a lavatory and bathroom block at the northern end and an administration block of offices, stores and a ‘visiting box’ to the south, along with the main entrance. The Sisters of Mercy moved with the institution and the matron lived above the administration block, replicating the position of the superintendent’s quarters in the male prison. Unlike the male complex, it contained a

Figure 2.6. Corradino female prison, 1895. Source: Blue Book 1895. Redrawn by the author.

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wash-house where the women laundered the clothes of male, female and juvenile inmates. Three yards provided room for exercise and facilitated controlled movement around the site. Female prisoners initially shared chapels with the male and juvenile wards, the chapels being located where the three wards met. To access the chapels, the women had to pass through the gallows room (now inside the prison complex), until in 1901 this room was converted into a chapel solely for female use and a designated execution room was built in the new contagious diseases (leper) wing, contained in the juvenile ward.4 Spatial categorization of female inmates is architecturally imposed at the Ospizio, but is less materially evident once the prison moves to Corradino. As the Ospizio ward develops, its space-syntactic shape becomes increasingly asymmetrical,45 which affords greater segregation of space (see Table 2.1). The solitary cell in use between 1864 and 1871 occupies the deepest and most segregated space from potential egress (Figure 2.3), which, in terms of spatial permeability and power relationships, represents the space of least power for the inmates within the prison, and the highest levels of power and control for the matron.46 From 1872 onwards, the hard labour dormitory is the deepest and least-integrated inmate space.47 A er 1864, the demarcation of space had positioned inmates within one of three classes, which located those who had commi ed the mildest crimes (detention) closest and those who had commi ed the most heinous crimes (hard labour) farthest away from the prison entrance, and hence from the outside world (see Chapter 5 under the heading ‘Classification’). At Corradino, the spatial configuration of the prison estate hierarchically ordered the inmates and staff, along with inmates’ visitors, tradespeople and official visitors, in a more sophisticated manner.48 As is typical of a late nineteenth-century prison, the design of Corradino male prison constrained inmates predominantly to the deepest spaces – the places that are the highest number of permeable spaces (and potentially locked doors) from the outside.49 The upper-level prison cells (L1 and L2) are the deepest spaces at six permeations from the outside. Each cell had only one entrance (control point), forming what Hillier and Hanson refer to as the ‘no neighbours model’,50 which allows the greatest segregation of the maximum number of spaces and, therefore, people. Interestingly, the RRA analysis for Level 1 cells reveals that, despite their distance from the outside world, they are strongly integrated spaces (see Table 2.1). Furthermore, from the prison’s beginnings until the early twentieth century, the cells occupy the median position in terms of spatial integration, suggesting that once inside the prison, cells are comparatively accessible places. Given the necessity for warders to be able to

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suppress any trouble quickly, this is not altogether surprising, but it does demonstrate further the architectural surveillance of the structure. Conversely, the superintendent’s quarters are syntactically both very deep spaces and highly segregated from the rest of the complex, materializing the power imbalance between him and the inmates. Prisoners are disempowered and isolated, under constant surveillance and in easy reach of warders, whereas the superintendent is accommodated in privacy. As with the positioning of the male superintendent’s quarters, the matron’s elevated position at Corradino afforded her superior surveillance over the prison wing corridors through a system of windows and blinds that could equally offer control over privacy. Both the women’s cells and the matron’s quarters were deep within the complex, but on different access chains, thus maximizing possible separation between the two. The reorientation of Corradino male prison a er 1872 does not drastically alter the overall configuration of the prison or the relative depth of the majority of spaces. Despite the general tendency towards an increasingly integrated structure, the building of a third entrance on the north perimeter permi ed the creation of a mini-complex based around Yard 3 that, although connected to the central hall, could effectively be cut off from the rest of the prison (see Figure 2.5). Containing the kitchen and most stores, not only did it maintain the separated lives of those incarcerated, but, crucially, it kept the main part of the prison hidden from tradespeople and the outside world. The chapels, the silent exercise yards and the school room become simultaneously spacesyntactically deeper from the outside and increasingly integrated within the complex, assuming the role of places to which inmates could be easily moved under supervision and a ended if necessary by extra warders, yet far from any potential escape route. Throughout, the central hall had more control points than any other space and the lowest RRA values. It also permi ed warders to visually and audibly survey the radiating wing corridors, the plastered walls and polished floors providing excellent sound conductors, increasing the psychological effect of surveillance on the inmates. The Ospizio’s simpler and linear architectural arrangement provided the matron a line of sight to all of the yards, assuming that the doors between them were not completely solid (see Figure 2.3). However, this also provided inmates with the potential for communication between classes when the matron was indisposed, undermining the principle of separation. In the 1860s, a Westminster report deplores the noisiness of the women and their lack of labour activities,51 contradicting reports given in the Blue Books. The freer social interaction enjoyed by

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the female convicts is supported by the communal activities in which the prison system forced them to engage, such as communal cooking, eating and sleeping arrangements (see Chapter 4 under the heading ‘Prison Foodways’). The move to Corradino afforded single-occupancy cells and therefore a more stringent and isolating regime. As in the Ospizio, there are no silent or separate exercising yards, although the single control point in Yard 3 suggests that it could be used to supervise inmates that were either in silent or free association with each other securely (see Figure 2.6). Access to the yard was through the central hall, which, as in the male prison, acted as the nexus of movement between sections of the site and was syntactically strongly integrated. The spatial ordering in all three British-period prisons materializes the analogy of the most serious offenders as farthest away from being ‘model citizens’ by spatially separating them from the outside world. The built environment afforded matrons and superintendents domestic privacy, while prisoners’ cells, although deep within the prisons, remained integrated enough to be connected to the other places to which prisoners needed to be moved on a daily basis, such as exercise yards and chapels. Despite the stark contrast in size and architectural complexity, all three prisons enabled prisoner classification. The new style of prison revolutionized not only civilian punishment; as the British army and navy moved away from corporal chastisement, it was also embraced by the military. Military Imprisonment Civil and religious authorities did not comprise the only punitive forces active in Malta. Condemnation to galley rowing may have blurred the boundaries between civilian and military institutions, but both the Order and British had their own military prisons. At Fort St Angelo, an oublie e, or dug-out hole in the ground, formed the short-term gaol for many a knight, including the illustrious artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610).52 Fort St Elmo housed prisons during the knights’ time, as did many other forts, fortlets and fortified walls. Together they formed a network of cells the primary purpose of which was detention rather than longterm imprisonment; as an institution, the Order chose other methods of punishing its own.53 When they occupied Malta, the British inherited this network and they initially maintained and added to it, but the individual prisons were small and their capacities were limited. As Malta grew in importance as a garrison and naval base, the admiralty decided to build a large prison on Corradino Heights, similar in basic style to

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and not far from the civilian prison. Completed in 1866, it became a general military prison only four years later, shared with and run predominantly by the army. Its establishment did not, however, render the clusters of fort-based provost cells redundant; rather, it functioned concurrently with those located at Upper Fort St Elmo (Valle a), St Francis’ Barracks (Floriana) and San Francisco di Paola (Co onera). Upper St Elmo had twelve provost cells, situated in a row. In 1850, the army planned nine new adjacent cells, each 11 by 6 (3.35 x 1.83 m), connected by a single corridor. The building also contained a room intended for religious worship, although it was not accessible directly from the prison corridor, but via an external entrance, raising doubts that it was intended specifically for prisoner use. By 1853, the prison had relocated to outside of the original fortifications, although still in the same vicinity. The prison and its drill yard now flanked one of the newly constructed roofed water tanks. Plans indicate further developments in the form of new accommodation for the prison’s chief warder.54 St Elmo’s cells witnessed the deaths of multiple imprisoned soldiers: on 3 September 1844, John Henderson, a Gunner in the Royal Artillery, cut his throat with a razor ‘whilst a prisoner confined in the blackhole’; on 26 May 1856, Private John Leonard of the 51st Regiment died of ‘cerebral apoplexy and diseases of the heart’ in his cell; and Private David Fe is of the 71st Regiment died of a ‘syncope’ on 26 March 1857. St Elmo’s was not the only military prison to experience the unintended consequences of incarceration: Private James Blair of the 88th Regiment hanged himself while imprisoned in one of the cells at Floriana Barracks.55 Towards the end of the century, a government report recommended closing the provost cells or employing them only for sentences of no more than four days, deeming the proliferation in one garrison of multiple military prisons each with their own system of discipline undesirable.56 The purpose-built facilities at Corradino provided less desperate conditions. The new military prison comprised a cross-shaped structure, with a gatehouse and administrative block arranged along a straight corridor that intersected with a central hallway and staircase, off which the linear trajectory continued in the form of a warders’ room.57 Two prison wings radiated perpendicularly to form the cross-bar. The gatehouse contained mirroring apartments on either side of the corridor, which housed the quarters of the Gate Keeper and the Chief Warder, including kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms arranged over two floors, as well as yards, wash-houses, coal stores and earth closets.58 The principal coal store, cart shed and earth store (for earth closets) lay adjacent to the Gate Keeper’s quarters, conveniently placed near the prison

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entrance for deliveries. The ground floor of the administrative block comprised the offices of the Governor and his clerks, as well as a larder, provision store, scullery, main kitchen, warders’ mess and telegraph office, all arranged off a central corridor. Three storeys high, the first upper floor contained rooms for the priests and chaplains, the chapel, a surgery and dispensary. The third floor housed a water cistern capable of containing 40,000 gallons (181,844 litres), an assistant warder’s room and a range of stores, including one for regimental clothing. Each prisoner wing was three storeys high and contained a total of 128 singleoccupation cells, four ground-floor dark cells and one association cell.59 As in the female addition to Corradino civilian prison, toilet facilities were initially placed at the end of each prison wing in the form of earth closets, although these were disused a er 1876. The northern walls of the prison wings and the warders’ room formed the rear of the perimeter wall, which was in most places 2 9 in (0.84 m) thick. The walled complex also contained exercise yards, a drill shed and a bathhouse to the west, and a garden to the east. Although a military site, the new penitentiary’s planning and execution followed current penal civilian architecture, which strove to provide a sanitary, reformatory environment that tended to the assumed physical and moral needs of inmates.60 During the mid-nineteenth century, military prisons across the empire underwent construction, remodelling or extension. Outside of Great Britain and Ireland, military prisons existed in Barbados, Bermuda, Halifax N.S., Mauritius and Quebec, as well as those at the Mediterranean stations in Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands (Corfu) and Malta.61 In 1860, the Mediterranean prisons accounted for a disproportionate 50 per cent of military inmate accommodation ‘abroad’, in which 40 per cent of inmates were incarcerated. Even though the facility at Corradino had not yet been built, through its network of small prisons and provost cells, Malta offered the greatest number of prisoners accommodation, with eighty-five places compared to Gibraltar’s eighty-two, although Britain’s older colony housed over twice as many inmates throughout the year.62 Only a few years earlier, Gibraltar had the capacity to hold only forty military prisoners, though building work commenced in 1863 and, when completed a year later, extended its capacity to 144.63 The prison at Fort St George on Vido Island housed Corfu’s military prison. Similar to the early provost cells at Fort St Elmo, though larger in size, the cell blocks ran along the interior of the fort’s wall and occupied a corner position within the fort, providing a total of twenty-five hard labour cells and eighteen solitary cells. Proposals marked on a series of plans and elevations indicate that in 1850, efforts were being made to improve the prison and by 1860, it

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could accommodate up to sixty inmates.64 However, in 1864 the British ceded Vido, along with the rest of the Ionian Islands, to Greece. Towards the end of the century, Gibraltar and Malta accounted for 21.1 per cent and 24.8 per cent of the ‘abroad’ military prison capacity respectively, with newly annexed Cairo occupying third place at 14.4 per cent. Clearly, the Mediterranean region had remained an important site of military incarceration. By this time, Gibraltar had a capacity of 101 and Malta 119. As before, Gibraltar saw more inmates through its doors (compare an annual intake of 799 to 591), yet the daily average number of inmates at Malta was nearly double: forty-eight compared to ninety-three.65 The noticeable difference indicates that inmates at Malta served much longer sentences than those held at Gibraltar; the facilities at Malta constituted a site of longer-term incarceration and penal punishment rather than short-term detention, a feature that marked Malta out from other colonies in terms of its carceral facilities.

Military Architectures Around the same time that Malta’s military prison opened, a British report on the state of barracks in the Mediterranean stations considered many of the problems they found – lack of a clean water supply, inadequate drainage, overcrowding, poorly constructed and insufficiently ventilated accommodation – symptomatic of Mediterranean towns in general, comparing them disparagingly to pre-Public Health Act (1848) England. Among the three garrison stations, Malta had the largest barrack capacity. Calculated on the regulation basis of 600 cubic feet (17 m3) per man, Malta could accommodate 6,955 men, Gibraltar 5,727 and the Ionian Islands 3,720. However, the vast number of rooms found to be unsuitable reduced capacity considerably, leaving ‘wholesome accommodation’ for only 5,014 men in Malta, 3,953 in Gibraltar and 2,350 in the Ionian Islands. Only Malta’s ‘enlightened Government’ had made many improvements to barrack conditions, most noticeably with the building of Pembroke Barracks, generally faring be er than Gibraltar, where ‘li le or nothing’ had improved, or in the Ionian Islands, where no one seemed ‘to care about the ma er’.66 Nevertheless, military men, women and children arriving in nineteenth-century Malta could not expect much from their accommodation. When the British first occupied Malta, the miles of fortified walls containing casemate rooms may have seemed serviceable accommodation, especially considering that the first purpose-built barracks had appeared in Britain only a decade or so earlier.67 However, the knights

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built much of the available ‘accommodation’ space as stores, manufactories or places of refuge, and from so porous rock that encouraged poor ventilation and dampness. Casemate-rich but barrack-poor Malta developed under the Order through its system of billeting local soldiers throughout the islands, usually in their own homes. Fort St Elmo twice underwent eighteenth-century remodelling that improved accommodation for the garrison, building barracks capable of housing 200 troops, before adding barracks adjacent to the original fort in what would become known as Lower St Elmo.68 Under normal conditions, however, troops congregated in numbers only for drill or guard duty.69 Therefore, many of the British ‘barracks’ were simply ‘deficient in the requisite for health’ and spread too widely over the islands, resulting in the fragmentation of regiments over large areas.70 A fort-building spree began in the 1870s with the construction of Sliema Point Ba ery and ended in the 1880s with two large forts, Rinella and Cambridge, on opposite sides of the Grand Harbour (see Figure 0.2).71 The Royal Engineers modified and extended existing buildings and fortifications in order to alleviate the perennial problems of bad ventilation and dampness, which medics thought contributed to the undulant fever that plagued troops in Malta. By the mid-1890s, overcrowding had reduced, but medical professionals still derided the army’s ‘modern improvements’ as having ‘altered li le of the stone or of the foundations’.72 From the early twentieth century onwards, the army constructed more purpose-built barracks; until that time, accommodation remained mixed. On the one hand, quarters built originally as stores in Lower St Elmo epitomized the bad conditions that were prevalent. Carved into the rock, they faced away from any sea breeze and remained virtually enclosed on all sides. Fort Verdala in Bormla, on the other hand, was purpose-built in 1853 and considered ‘one of the best barracks in Malta’.73 It accommodated troops and officers, as well as offering separate married quarters. Before the 1850s, the army had not generally provided married quarters, with blanket curtains the only source of family privacy for the rank and file.74 Facilities for ablutions, bathing and cleaning did improve. Washhouses contained coppers for boiling water, fixed tubs, ironing stoves and tables.75 The climate made drying rooms and equipment largely superfluous, although their lack caused at least one death: Sergeant Thomas Brind (14th Regiment) died in his ‘unventilated small room’ from ‘carbonic acid gas’ poisoning, having le charcoal burning overnight in order to dry his clothes.76 The introduction of modern trapped urinals and Jennings’ earthenware latrines, both of which ‘flushed’, decreased unpleasant odours, but together with the wash-house

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equipment increased the demand for water. The army responded by installing numerous roo op water tanks, as well as building large covered reservoirs, such as those still visible at Fort St Elmo. Bathing facilities also improved, although sea bathing mitigated the need considerably.77 Only a century earlier, the Order’s knights had ostensibly lived in their auberges, which were in fact baroque palaces, although graffiti on the walls of forts lay testament to the fact that many spent significant periods on duty.78 In effect, the auberge was the counterpart to the British officers’ messhouse discussed below. Both groups of men were highly mobile, though while the British army took its officers from station to station, a knight’s military travel consisted mostly of active duty in the Order’s navy. A Galley Fleet According to John McManamon, the Order’s navy served four functions: ‘to police, to protect, to provision and to privateer’.79 Policing the waters around Malta and the nearby coast of North Africa was particularly important, as was protecting the borders of Christendom. The fleet contributed to many of the pan-Catholic Christian–O oman battles that flared up, including the Ba le of Lepanto (1571), the defence of the Spanish colony at Oran, North Africa (1707–8), assisting the Venetians – at the behest of the pope – against O oman invasions in Greece that resulted in the Ba le of Corfu (1714–18) and supporting Emperor Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire in the Danube Campaign of 1739–40.80 The final function of the navy was to engage in privateering. Smaller vessels scouted the North African coastline, while larger and be er-armed boats intercepted, harassed and boarded vessels plying cargo between Alexandria and Istanbul.81 Captured bounty comprised anything on board, including the crew and the vessel itself. The naval fleet consisted chiefly of galleys; in 1685 there were just eight, a small fleet compared to other navies of the time. The Order imported galleys constructed in Marseilles, Naples or Barcelona, assembling them in Malta, although in the eighteenth century they purchased cut so wood timber and prefabricated galleys from Venice. Sail cloth represented one of the few necessities produced locally; almost everything else, from oars to paint pigments, had to be imported.82 The Grand Harbour, the southerly of two natural harbours flanking Valle a, comprises an open, central section with four creeks to the south east (see Figure 0.2). The main harbour developed round these creeks during the medieval period, with Birgu subsequently chosen by

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the Order as its maritime capital. A er the Great Siege (1565), Grand Master Jean Parisot de Vale e built a new capital, Valle a, on the northwest shore, which substantially increased the importance of the harbour. Although Valle a took over as the political and administrative centre, the creeks continued to play an essential part in daily maritime life. The navy birthed in Galley Creek (il Porto delle Galere), an inlet on the southeastern side of the Grand Harbour, sandwiched between the peninsulas of Birgu and L-Isla.83 The Birgu shoreline formed the focus of activity, housing the arsenal, accommodation for galley captains, warehouses and a bagno (slave prison).84 In the late seventeenth century, the Order rebuilt the arsenal in a grander fashion to include three covered slipways that enabled galleys to launch facing the open harbour. The new wharf also included administration buildings, but no additional fortifications, as it sheltered within the already fortified complex of the harbour and creek.85 The inland end of the creek housed many of the Order’s storehouses, while at the other end, a chain stretched from Fort St Angelo (Birgu) to the tip of L-Isla, protecting the anchorage from marauding enemies.86 Fort St Elmo and Fort Ricasoli guarded the entrance to the Grand Harbour from the north (Valle a side) and south respectively. Human oarsmen propelled galleys through the water at speed during a ack or flight, but they also possessed labour-saving sails, which captains utilized as much as possible.87 Maltese galleys typically operated a system of two masts, each rigged with a lateen sail (see Figure 2.7). They were not heavily armed, carrying only five cannons and enemy-vessel boarding marines, as their primary purpose was to capture vessels, not destroy them.88 Despite the lack of heavy ordnance, galleys lay low in the water, which made them vulnerable to swells at sea that would cover the deck. Open to the elements, the main deck provided the principal living space over which a temporarily erected awning fended off the worst weather when in harbour or sailing. The large deck area given over to rowers and crew, coupled with a shallow draught, meant that, compared to round-bo omed sailing ships, galleys had very restricted storage capacities that limited the amount of victuals taken on board at the beginning of a voyage and necessitated frequent ports of call to restock, especially for water.89 Storage comprised most of the two lower decks, which accommodated everything from food supplies to spare sails. The captain’s quarters occupied the poop at the rear of the vessel, which connected to the prow via a raised walkway (corsia) running the length of the main deck and provided soldiers and officials with a patrolling platform above the seated rowers.90 The galley had a much shorter sailing season than round-

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Figure 2.7. ‘Galeien in de Middellandse Zee’ by Jan Luyken. Source: Object no. RP-P-1896-A-19368-1140. Reproduced with grateful permission of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

bo omed sailing ships, yet its comparative cheapness made it the choice of smaller states lacking the financial and technical resources necessary for building and maintaining a large sailing fleet.91 Not even the need for a much larger crew dissuaded ambitious Mediterraneans from parting with their galleys. A galley crew consisted of three distinct groups: knights and officials, Genti di Capo and the ciurma (rowers). The knights and their personal servants numbered around twenty on one of the larger vessels. The Genti di Capo comprised soldiers and sailors, who made up the bulk of the nonrowing crew. In 1604, the fleet’s flagship carried 165 Genti di Capo, including:

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a purser, a boatswain and his helper, the ship’s pilot and his helper, a gaoler or task-master, a barber and his helper who were also medical orderlies, four consiglieri who were expert seamen, a carpenter and his helper, a caulker, a seaman in charge of oars, a cooper, six bombardiers or gunners, four musicians and a drummer, a steward, a cook, ten ‘cabin boys,’ seven scapoli [marines], and twenty muske iers [sic].92

No one of the free crew had permission to go ashore when the fleet was in harbour, unless they were ill or in some other mitigating situation. All the crew had to be armed and were expected to fight, even the knights’ servants who needed to be ‘over 20 years of age and had to carry an arquebus [short-muzzled forerunner of the musket] and a helmet’.93 A gaoler, or agozzino, had responsibility for the unfree crew on board and for conveying the majority to the slave prisons when the squadron was in harbour.94 The Order required each gaoler to pay a deposit before taking up the post, mitigating most a empts of bribery from slaves or convicts with the means and will to escape.95 Each vessel also had a chaplain, who tended to the religious welfare of the crew and celebrated Mass on Sundays and feast days, as well as acting as the crew’s confessor and instructing Muslims wishing to apostatize.96 However, clerics also spied for the Inquisition, reporting on knights and crew alike for transgressions such as blaspheming or eating meat on a fast day.97 Conditions on board afforded li le in the way of hygiene. A barber-surgeon travelled with each crew and took orders from the fleet’s physician, who sailed with the flagship. A purser kept accounts of every resource and supervised the stores.98 Officials were each responsible for their own areas and the vessel as a whole; if negligence caused damage to the navy’s property (vessel, arms, equipment or slaves), the Order sought recompense from the official responsible.99 Early modern galleys were very crowded places. In 1637, a galley of the squadron carried 280 rowers. The standard Maltese galley had fi y-two oars and twenty-six benches, with five rowers per bench.100 Rowers far outnumbered the other contingents on board, but they were not in any way a homogeneous group and comprised a mixture of forzati, buonavoglie, slaves and far fewer paid freemen. Forzati, who generally made up a small proportion of galley rowers, came via sentences passed by the civil courts and religious tribunal in Malta, as well as sometimes from the Papal States. More numerous buonavoglie had taken galley service in order to pay off debts. However, the majority of rowers were slaves: in 1632, rowers in the galley fleet comprised 175 forzati, 387 buonavoglie and 1,846 slaves.101 The Order generally shackled rowers by their ankles to a chain that ran the length of their bench and which was in turn bolted to the ribbing of the ship.102 Being contin-

76 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

uously chained meant that rowers ate and slept at their benches, defecating on deck and, ultimately, into the bilges. During a ack the gaoler chained their wrists to the oars, although he frequently exempted trusted buonavoglie, making the assumption that, as Christians, they would fight Muslim opponents.103 The same thinking motivated the intermingling of Christian oarsmen on the same benches as (mostly) Muslim slaves in order to prevent collusion. Defined by his rowing position, which his physical capability dictated, a lead rower sat at the end of the oar, closest to the gangway, se ing the stroke that the others had no alternative but to follow.104 Four lead rowers were head rowers: two from the benches nearest the poop, who set the stroke for the vessel, and two at the prow end, responsible for positioning the anchors. Oarsmen rowed ‘seated’ in a line upon a bench, a scaloccio. The space was cramped, with only 45 cm of bench per man, meaning that the rowers could not bend their arms sideways, but always had to hold them in front of themselves; a position that restricted breathing during long chases. The oars measured up to 12 m in length and weighed around 130 kg, making them dangerous if handled incorrectly. The bench area comprised four components: the bench made of sheepskin- or cowhide-covered wood, two steps, one higher than the other, and a bank connecting the other components. Starting from a seated position, the rowing cycle entailed standing, arms in front and slightly bent in order to keep the blade of the oar from the water, the shacked foot resting against the lower step, then the rower raised himself up onto it, the oar still out of the water. Next he li ed his arms to lower the blade of the oar into the water, pulling the oar backwards by pushing back with his leg against the higher step. He li ed the oar from the water to complete the cycle, dropping into the seated position again.105 This is the ideal cycle experienced by the lead rower nearest the corsia, but for those closer to the hull, the experience worsened, with the rower having to stoop and bend his back during more of the cycle. The work was an immense physical feat, on top of which rowers had to contend with the motion of the cra and the fact that they were only a metre away from the sea surface in calm weather, and even closer to scupper holes positioned to allow deck water to escape. Despite a protective awning, rowers were always wet: ‘stinging salt water and rubbing chains gave them sores and blisters on their legs; the rowing broke their backs or tore their abdominal muscles’.106 It is no wonder that writing in the 1690s, Jean du Mont described Malta’s galley-rowing slaves as ‘the most miserable Wretches in the World’.107

 Institutional Spaces • 77

The hierarchical and confined environment of a galley meant that no one had complete freedom of movement. By its very nature, only when anchored offshore or in harbour can a boat provide access to land. During the normal functioning of a galley, the captain, knights and officials in principle had access to all or most areas of the vessel, although the purser guarded the stores closely. Limited movement around the deck and rigging by sailors, soldiers and most of the Genti di Capo contrasts with the compete restriction of chained rowers, for whom freedom only came through an enemy a ack or death. Architecturally, the galley provides only the most basic of physical structures of spatial organization, including limited surveillance from the corsia and privacy for the captain in the poop. Rather, the regulatory regime on board depended upon power differences enacted though physical and psychological coercion. On land, military architectures could be more physically sophisticated, as we shall now see in the case of a Victorian officers’ messhouse. Officers’ Quarters Nineteenth-century Malta did not lack officer accommodation, but not all of it was salubrious or conveniently situated. Insufficient officer accommodation at the newly built barracks at Verdala, for instance, resulted in separating the commanding officer, the surgeon and the quartermaster from the rest of their ba alion.108 However, an abundance of pre-existing accommodation provided by the Order’s former auberges and palaces did li le to entice the army to build new quarters for their officers; rather, they modified existing buildings.109 A good example of such a building is the former ‘Inquisitor’s Palace’, which a er 1800 fell into the hands of the British army. The early nineteenthcentury history of the site is unclear. By 1826, the building housed officers’ quarters, although soldier graffiti suggest that troops also barracked there at an earlier date.110 Officially transferred to the army on 1 January 1829, the building remained at the army’s disposal ‘rent free’ until the early twentieth century.111 A plan dated 1826 shows the building in its first incarnation as an officers’ messhouse, during which time it also housed a military hospital (see Figure 2.8) and still shared a ground-floor plan similar to that of the late Inquisition-era building (see Figure 2.2). Infirmary stores and rooms for the hospital steward ran along the east wall, while a servant’s room and a privy flanked the main entrance. Four further servants’ rooms existed – one on each of the lower levels and two on the top floor – positioned round Court 1. Clustered centrally within the building and

78 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Figure 2.8. 1826 and 1830 plans of the messhouse at the Inquisitor’s Palace. Sources: TNA/MPH/1/912/8 and TNA/MFQ/1/330/62. Redrawn by the author.

 Institutional Spaces • 79

round an internal courtyard, airflow would have been limited compared to rooms with externally facing windows. All but one opened onto corridors associated with officers’ rooms and therefore most likely accommodated officers’ personal servants. The hospital comprised six wards and a surgery, as well as quarters for a surgeon and assistant surgeon, all located on the eastern side of the upper levels. The western side contained officers’ quarters. Notably, Level 1 housed all the captains’ and the field officer’s quarters, whereas Level 2 contained all but one of the seven rooms for subalterns (junior officers). The relative climatic conditions within the building were preferable in the middleand ground-floor rooms, with the smaller top-floor rooms becoming stiflingly hot and humid in the summer. Therefore, the building layout divides space functionally east (hospital) to west (officers’ quarters) and vertically by army rank. The field-officer’s quarters are twice the size of a captain’s and are located next to a privy, perhaps for his convenience or even sole use. By locating the officers’ lodgings and medical wards on the upper levels, the majority of rooms are deep inside the building, distancing them from the outside and thereby increasing the relative privacy afforded: a model usually associated with dwellings that restrict the power of visitors, who are excluded from internal private areas.112 A er the removal of the hospital in 1829, the army dedicated the building entirely to the accommodation of officers and their a endants. Spacious apartments for the field officer (L2) and a large mess room (L1) replaced the medical wards on the eastern sides of the upper levels and the number of captains’ quarters increased to eight, with seven remaining on Level 1 and another connecting to the field officer’s quarters.113 The number of subalterns’ rooms increased by one on each of the upper floors to equal eight corresponding servants’ rooms, which, as previously, clustered mostly around the internal courtyard on all floors. Several changes occurred to Level 1. The northern corner became a utility area, housing a mess kitchen and pantry. Elsewhere saw the creation of a regimental store room and a small mess room. Easily accessible from the kitchen via Staircase 4, the larger of the two Level 1 mess rooms served as the formal dining room. Staircase 4 also provided the field officer direct access from his quarters to the mess and permi ed him a limited amount of aural surveillance of the mess rooms. Again, the overwhelming majority of rooms are many spaces removed from the outside world and thus rendered relatively private, but there is no obvious space-syntactic differentiation between the quarters of differing ranks or between private and communal spaces. During the mid-nineteenth century, few major architectural interventions occurred, so much so that it may be that the existing 1841 plan

80 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

was copied from that of 1830. However, two significant differences affect the flow of traffic around Level 1. Captain’s Quarters 7 (1830), originally positioned in a rather transitory space off the Level 1 landing of Staircase 1, was redefined as a landing (1841) and the adjoining room (I) connected to Mess A. The changes did not make it possible to fully circuit the floor unhindered, but the new landing did connect rooms coming off Staircase 4 with Staircase 6, consequently providing quicker and more direct access to more rooms, especially on the upper floors and creating less segregation and differentiation of spaces. Level 0 remains reserved for utility and administrative functions. A number of incidents occurred in the second half of the century that contributed to the spatial and architectural configuration of the building. In 1860, the installation of an electric telegraph wire provided a communication link between eleven strategic military buildings, including Fort St Elmo (Valle a), Floriana Barracks and Fort St Angelo (Birgu).114 The inclusion of the Inquisitor’s Palace demonstrates its perceived importance as a place of occupation by senior officials. By the 1880s, the building starts to reflect changes occurring in the army and in late Victorian society more generally. A new doorway gave Royal Engineers direct external access to stores without having to enter the main building (see Figure 2.9). A few years earlier, the district had received a damning report on its sanitary levels and it is likely that the stores relate to the Royal Engineers’ role in the planning and construction of a new public drainage system.115 It also coincides with the replacement of the building’s drains with glazed pipes in an effort to increase hygiene.116 Reconfiguration of the rooms running eastwards from the main entrance provided the paymaster with a suite of interconnected rooms controlled by a single access point, blocking them off from the rest of the building. The deepest of these consecutive rooms afforded a space several locked doors away from the outside, as well as from the building’s inhabitants. Security to the building increased more generally with the installation of a sentry guard, whose room stood to the west of the main entrance, an arrangement in place by at least the late 1870s.117 The north corner of the ground floor remained dedicated to culinary activities, but it was no longer the only kitchen. A second had been installed on Level 2, at the top of Staircase 4 and next to officers’ quarters. Plans no longer denote accommodation specifically as ‘captain’ and ‘subaltern’ quarters, and the field officer’s quarters have disappeared: in the later nineteenth century, it was increasingly common for senior officers to live in private apartments in town or in the newly built fashionable suburb of Sliema. A laundry replaced the captain’s quarters previously

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Figure 2.9. 1841 and late 1800s plans of the messhouse at the Inquisitor’s Palace. Sources: TNA/MFQ/1/330/62 and an uncatalogued plan of the Inquisitor’s Palace, Heritage Malta. Redrawn by the author.

82 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Table 2.2. Real relative asymmetry analysis of the officers’ quarters at the Inquisitor’s Palace, 1826 and 1880s. Table by the author. Space Lowest

Highest

Servant Space

RRA (Real Relative Asymmetry) 1826

c. 1880s

Staircase 6

0.596

0.700

Secret Stairs

1.578

Surgeon

1.543

Plate Room

1.899

Scullery 2

1.841

Servant 1

1.427

Servant 2

1.104

Servant 6

1.142

Servant 8

1.098

Servant 9

1.528

Servant 6 Number of spaces (k)

1.144 83

92

D-value

0.096

0.089

Mean

1.115

1.178

found on the landing of Staircase 1, suggesting servants and family members performed increased levels of domestic activities, as opposed to outsourcing the work to military contractors. Leisure facilities concomitant with the officer class also made their way into the building in the form of a ‘racket court’ surrounded by a high wall. The presence of a wall lends itself to various racquet sports, most of which are more akin to modern-day squash than tennis or badminton, but also a racquetless game. Fives, in all its variations, is played in a walled court and takes its name from the substitution of the racquet with the hand, though it was nevertheless considered a racquet sport. During late nineteenth-century Britain, elite games such as fives spread from the exclusive public school system to provincial grammar schools, mimicking the slightly more diverse, post-Cardwellian officer demographic.118 The army knocked through walls and therefore connected several spaces, creating additional pathways that enabled inhabitants and visitors to travel around the upper levels. Nevertheless, the building

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maintained spatial privacy from the outside world, with at least five spaces separating most of its rooms from the outside. Transforming the Inquisitor’s grand suites of interconnecting apartments into individual rooms linked by a corridor created privacy and tended towards rooms with one control (access) point – the same ‘no neighbours model’ seen at Corradino civilian prison.119 The real relative asymmetry (RRA) results in Table 2.2 show that between 1826 and the late nineteenth century, the building became ever so slightly more segregated. Staircase 6 maintained its integral place as the main connector between all levels, receiving the lowest RRA value. The surgeon’s room received the highest RRA value for the 1826 configuration, which suggests that the highly segregated room afforded him most privacy. By the end of the century, the most segregated room was the regimental plate room, which suggests that the value, both symbolic and monetary, placed on the paraphernalia of the regiment dictated the choice of location. The ‘combination of communal and residential space’120 of the messhouse echoed in many ways the spatial needs of a Victorian Gentlemen’s Club and later urban hotels. The concoction of accessible and private rooms, together with those of servants, demarcates a habitat that Markus describes as one that pertains to ‘the controllers rather than the controlled’, which is highly suitable for an army officers’ messhouse.121 *** Architecture and space posed significant organizing factors to both prisons and military institutions. The Pentonville-style prisons built at Corradino in the mid-nineteenth century were considered to be ‘progressive and civilised’,122 encapsulating many of the central tenets of prison architecture being built across the British Empire, North America and northern Europe, but less consistently in southern Europe: northern Italy adopted similar styles of prison in the mid-nineteenth century, but the south generally lagged behind.123 Like Malta’s military prison, the architecture at Corradino civilian prison afforded spatial orchestration of the power relationship between inmates and guards, with inmates incarcerated in single-occupancy cells arranged along straight corridors that radiated out from a central nexus. Not only did the arrangement offer a great deal of architectural surveillance to the guards and superintendent, but it also served to enforce the separation of inmates from each other and the outside world. Near-solid cell doors and small, high windows materialized the intended psychological isolation of the prison, while providing those in charge with constant access to inmates through the use of inspection slides. Guards removed familiar

84 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

possessions of free life and the sparsely furnished cells mitigated possibilities for self-harm and harm to others. The material surroundings embodied every aspect of inmates’ time in prison. The choice to move female prisoners to Corradino only at the end of the nineteenth century is partly a result of patriarchal colonial rule, which kept men and women apart and conceived of women as more appropriate subjects for reform,124 something also evidenced by the array of charitable institutions dedicated to the ‘care’ of destitute women. The prison served as the default institution for men, who made up the overwhelming majority of those sentenced to imprisonment, which perhaps reduced the urgency for moving the women. Nevertheless, repeated modifications made at the Ospizio indicate the colonial authority’s concern for female inmates. Each remodelling reconfigured the space of the prison to enable greater classification of inmates, so that those convicted of the most severe crimes became increasingly physically and psychologically separated from the outside world. The lack of individual cells discounted the possibility of architectural separation between inmates of the same class and the sense of psychological isolation experienced by female inmates therefore increased once they moved to Corradino. Eighteenth-century incarnations of the Inquisitor’s prison shared many of the same basic arrangements as the Ospizio. Communal cells generally prevented individual segregation, yet the smaller cells could have operated as single-occupancy cells.125 Developments by Inquisitors Pannellini and Messerano demonstrate a concerted effort to create a centralized prison block, which afforded limited surveillance through a line of sight that runs from the entrance of the prison to the end of the Pannellini corridor. Solid locked doors and a gate separated the prison complex from the outside world, as well as from the rest of the building and its inhabitants. In contrast to Corradino, there appears to have been less restriction on an inmate’s movements and contact with others. Rather, isolation does not seem to have been part of a normal prison sentence, with torture and chaining to walls restricted to those individuals under investigation. Indeed, the mass of graffiti that li ers the cells and courtyard walls points towards a shared experience of imprisonment. This was a situation paralleled on the galleys, which, as a mobile prison for the majority of rowers, served to physically bind inmates to one place through chaining, yet, as Chapter 4 will show, enabled them to eat communally in their bench groups. Accurate plans detailing the structure and compartmentalization of space in a Maltese galley do not exist in the same way as those of buildings; even if they did, physical borders did not separate many of the

 Institutional Spaces • 85

spaces on deck. All the same, if a hypothetical space-syntactical analysis were carried out, rowers’ seating spaces would constitute by far the greatest number of spaces. Due to chaining, and therefore immobilization, each seat essentially acts as a room with only one control point, albeit that in order to reach the seat nearest the hull, rowers would have essentially had to ‘shuffle’ along the bench and therefore pass through each other’s ‘seats’. When rowers are chained, the spatial configuration of a galley thus echoes the ‘no neighbours’ model of not only a nineteenthcentury prison, but also an officers’ messhouse. The spatial configuration of the messhouse separates inhabitants less as punishment and more as a means of creating privacy. With clear modifications to the building in order to create a mix of private and communal rooms, the messhouse realized the communality of the army alongside the personal space required by Victorian mores. Servants’ quarters occupy less climatically desirable spaces, enacting military and social hierarchies, while extra mess rooms and sports facilities enriched the ‘leisure’ time of resident officers. One witnesses an increase of architecturally aided spatial segregation of groups that is evident in all institutional spaces examined. From the eighteenth century onwards, a slow tendency towards individualization surfaces in the single-occupancy prison cells and the demarcation of privacy for those with social or military rank. As institutions imposed on the island populations by foreign powers, all developed ways of articulating control over behaviour and restricting opportunities for acting otherwise through the control of space. On board the deck of a galley, physical exertion and the threat of bodily violence took the place of walls. The rowers’ labour harnessed by the Order is an extreme case, but labour, along with foodways and routinizing practices, played crucial roles in the other institutions too, as we shall see in the following chapters.

Notes 1. Charles Savona-Ventura, Mental Disease in Malta. Malta: Association for the Study of Maltese Medical History, 2004, 11–16. 2. Charles Savona-Ventura, History of Gynaecology in Malta. Malta: Department of Obstetrics-Gynaecology, University of Malta, 2010, 19–23. 3. For a space-syntactic study of Maltese domestic architecture, see George A. Said-Zammit, The Development of Domestic Space in the Maltese Islands from the Late Middle Ages to the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2016. 4. Guy Geltner, ‘Medieval Prisons: Between Myth and Reality, Hell and Purgatory’, History Compass 4(2) (2006), 261.

86 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

5. J.F. Darmanin, ‘The Buildings of the Order at H.M. Victualling Yard, Malta’, Melita Historica 2 (1957), 71–72. 6. Godfrey We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2002, 86. 7. John Howard, An Account of the Principal Lazare os in Europe, London: printed for J. Johnson, C. Dilly and T. Cadell, 1791, 58. 8. Command Paper 991, 1847. Millbank Prison. Fi h Report. London: HMSO, 1848, 6–7. 9. Sandra Scicluna and Paul Knepper, ‘Prisoners of the Sun: The British Empire and Imprisonment in Malta in the Early Nineteenth Century’, British Journal of Criminology 45 (2008), 505. 10. Blue Book 1835, 61–62. 11. George Waring, Le ers from Malta and Sicily Addressed to a Young Naturalist. London: Harvey and Darton, 1843, 99–100. 12. The building is today the Inquisitor’s Palace Museum and under the curatorship of Heritage Malta. 13. John Tedeschi, ‘Inquisitorial Law and the Witch’, in Brengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (eds), Early Modern European Witchcra : Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 87–88. The Castellania had been moved to the newly built Valle a, as had most other official institutions. 14. It is commonly believed that this staircase, together with Staircase 2, provided a potential escape route for the Inquisitor, to be used in case the palace was stormed by unruly knights. 15. RRA=0.659. 16. These include the ante-room, chancery, halls, private quarters and torture chamber. 17. RRA values for the prison cells are as follows: Prison 1, 1.335; Prison 2, 1.368; Prison 3, 1.351; Prison 4, 1.681; and Prison 5, 1.368. 18. Mean RRA=1.205. 19. Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, 33. 20. Ma hew Balzan, ‘From Pannellini to Messerano: The Quest for a Secure Prison Complex at the Inquisitor’s Palace’, in Kenneth Cassar (ed.), The Inquisitor’s Palace: An Architectural Gem Spanning Centuries and Styles (Malta: Heritage Malta, 2013), 51–52; Carmel Cassar, ‘1564–1696: The Inquisition Index of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of St John’, Melita Historica 11(2) (1993), 160; Kenneth Gambin, The Prisoner Experience at the Inquisitor’s Palace, Vi oriosa. Malta: Heritage Books/ Heritage Malta, 2004, 9. 21. Kenneth Gambin, The Inquisitor’s Palace, Vi oriosa. Malta: Heritage Books, 2003, 27. 22. Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, This is a Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, in the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta. London: Printed for Robert Wilson, 1662, 37–38. 23. An inscription is placed above the entranceway to the corridor which reads ‘[G] ORIVS PANNELINVS / DELEGATVS APOSTOL’ (‘Gori Pannellini / Apostolic Delegate’). 24. Andrew P. Vella, The Tribunal of the Inquisition in Malta. Malta: Royal University of Malta, 1973, 29. 25. Stone-cut water cisterns are commonly referred to as ‘wells’ in Malta. 26. Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2001, 370. 27. Translation taken from Gambin, The Prisoner Experience at the Inquisitor’s Palace, Vi oriosa, 25.

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28. Command Papers 3961-I, 1867–68. Prison Discipline in the Colonies: Digest and summary of information respecting prisons in the colonies. London: HMSO, 1867, 84. 29. Blue Book 1845, 252; R. Montgomery Martin, History of the Possessions in the Mediterranean. London: Whi aker and Co., 1837, 244. 30. Blue Book 1845, 252. 31. Blue Book 1864, 366. 32. Blue Book 1872, AB14. 33. Blue Book 1878, AB18. 34. Command Papers 3961-I, 1867–68. Prison Discipline in the Colonies: Digest and Summary of Information Respecting Prisons in the Colonies. London: HMSO, 1867, 84. 35. Blue Book 1845, 52–53. 36. Scicluna and Knepper, ‘Prisoners of the Sun’, 507. 37. NAM/GMR/64. J. B. H Collings, Reports of the Inspector, Superintendent, Deputy Superintendent, and Chaplains of the Corradino Prison for 1850. Malta: F.W. Franz, 1851, 7. 38. Blue Book 1850, 62. 39. Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 1. 40. Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 1. 41. Debtors were moved from the Great Prison to Corradino on 1 August 1860, when the Great Prison ceased to function (Blue Book 1860, 68). 42. Iron gates, rather than solid doors, closed the entrance, as the only part of the prison visible through its bars would have been internal walls (Blue Book 1872, H4). 43. Blue Book 1872, H4. 44. Blue Book 1901, T3. 45. Mean RRA values range from 0.951 (1860) to 1.173 (1879). 46. Analyses of the relationships between architecture, space and power draw on Thomas A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types. London: Routledge, 1993. 47. The W.C. also shares that values RRA=1.296 in 1872 and 1.366 in 1879. 48. All but permanent staff and inmates were considered ‘visitors’ to the prison. 49. Markus, Buildings and Power, 17. 50. Hillier and Hanson, The Social Logic of Space, 153. 51. Command Papers 3961-I, 1867–68, 60. 52. The ‘oublie e’ at Fort St Angelo was built is a reused water cistern. 53. See Emanuel Bu igieg, Nobility, Faith and Masculinity: The Hospitaller Knights of Malta, c.1580–c.1700. London: Continuum, 2011, 177–85. 54. TNA/MFQ/188/38, Plan of Officers’ Quarters and Soldiers Barracks in Upper St Elmo, 1830; TNA/MFQ/1/226/27, Plan and Sections of Military Prison, St. Elmo (1850) TNA/MFQ/1/232/6, Plan of part of St. Elmo shewing in yellow the portion of Ditch proposed to be given up for accommodation to Chief Warder Military Prison, 1853. 55. House of Commons Papers 535, 1861. Return of Trials for Murder and Manslaughter at Malta, 1840–60. London: HMSO, 1861, 19, 39, 41, 14. The ‘blackhole’ refers to a refectory or ‘dark’ cell. 56. Command Papers C.8983, 1898. Report on the Discipline and Management of Military Prisons, 1897. London: HMSO, 1898, 4–5. 57. Description chiefly based on plans held at the National Archives of Malta, NAM/ B1/39, NAM/B1/42 and NAM/B1/43. 58. The prison employed eighteen staff in all (Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 26). 59. The dimensions of the cells were regularized to 6 6 in by 11 , except for nineteen cells that were 6 9 in wide. The dark cells were all 6 6 in by 11 . The

88 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

ground floor housed forty-eight cells, the final five on the east wing of which are added in pencil to the 1877 plan; the first and second floors contained forty cells each, spread evenly over the two wings. NAM/B1/39, NAM/B1/42 and NAM/ B1/43. The prison witnessed few suicides, although the practice of imprisoning sailors and soldiers sentenced for nonmilitary crimes to Corradino civilian prison mitigated the situation to some degree. When the British took control of Cyprus in 1878, they found the island in need of a modern prison and built one in Nicosia in 1894. The number of military inmates held in military prisons outside Great Britain and Ireland in 1860 amounted to 3,503, of which 1,416 were held at Mediterranean stations. In 1860 Gibraltar saw a total of 1,240 military inmates, compared to Malta’s 540. Military prisons in India were governed by the Indian government and were not included in regular reports on military prisons (Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 14). Reginald Fowler, Hither and Thither; or, sketches of travels on both sides of the Atlantic. London: Frederick R. Daldy, 1854, 60; Command Paper 3567, 1865. Report of the Discipline and Management of the Military Prisons, 1864. London: HMSO, 1865, 4. TNA/MFQ/1/226/28–30 Plans and Sections showing proposed additions to the Military Prison, Vido, 1850. Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 13–14. Command Papers 3207, 1863. Report of the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission on the Sanitary Condition and Improvement of the Mediterranean Stations. London: HMSO, 1863, 3–4. James Douet, British Barracks, 1600–1914: Their Architecture and Role in Society. London: The Stationery Office, 1998, 60. Alison Hoppen, The Fortification of Malta by the Order of St. John, 1530–1798. Edinburgh: Sco ish Academic Press, 1979, 68. Command Papers 3207, 1863, 3–4. Command Papers 3207, 1863, 111. On 26 September 1840, the Naval & Military Gaze e and Weekly Chronicle of the United Service reported that the 47th Regiment billeted in Birgu and at the Inquisitor’s Palace, the 77th in Floriana and Fort Tigné, and the 92nd at Fort St Elmo and the Bavarian Auberge (627). Denis De Lucca, ‘British Influence on Maltese Architecture and Fortifications’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), The British Colonial Experience, 1800–1964: The Impact on Maltese Society (Malta: Mireva Publications, 1988), 313–16. ‘Fever and Invaliding in Malta’, British Medical Journal (7 July 1894), 45; Ma hew Louis Hughes, Mediterranean, Malta or Undulant Fever. London: Macmillan, 1897, 23. Command Papers 3207, 1863, 153. Peter Burroughs, ‘An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868’, in David Chandler (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 172. Command Papers 3207, 1863, 16. Brind died at Fort Ricasoli on 19 May 1854 (House of Commons Papers 535, 1861, 33). Command Papers 3207, 1863, 115, 20. For example, the name ‘la Guiche’ is found several times at Fort St Elmo, including in an inscription above a doorway: ‘Chambre De La Guiche’. John H. McManamon, ‘Maltese Seafaring in Medieval and Post-medieval Times’, Mediterranean Historical Review 18(1) (2003), 45.

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80. Anton Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2003, 211–30. 81. The subject of Greeks caught up in Maltese interactions in the East Mediterranean forms the subject of Molly Greene’s Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. 82. McManamon, ‘Maltese Seafaring in Medieval and Post-medieval Times’, 50. 83. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the British renamed the inlet to reflect the installation of a dry dock, hence its current name, ‘Dockyard Creek’. 84. Joseph Muscat, ‘The Arsenal: 1530–1798’, in Lino Bugeja, Mario Buhagiar and Stanley Fiorni (eds), Birgu: A Maltese Maritime City, vol. 1 (Malta: Malta University Press, 1993), 264. 85. Joseph Muscat, The Birgu Galley Arsenal. Malta: Pubblikazzjonijiet Inipendenza, 2001, 6–8. 86. McManamon, ‘Maltese Seafaring in Medieval and Post-medieval Times’, 50; Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Le ers to Williams Beckford, vol. 1. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773, 334. 87. Mauro Bondioli, René Burlet and André Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, in Robert Gardiner (ed.), The Age of the Galley: Mediterranean Oared Vessels since Pre-Classical Times (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1995), 172. 88. Paul W. Bamford, Fighting Ships and Prisons: The Mediterranean Galleys of France in the Age of Louis XIV. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973, 31; McManamon, ‘Maltese Seafaring in Medieval and Post-medieval Times’, 50. 89. John E. Dotson, ‘Economics and Logistics of Galley Warfare’, in Gardiner (ed.), The Age of the Galley, 19. 90. Ulrich Alertz, ‘The Naval Architecture and Oar Systems of Medieval and Later Galleys’, in Gardiner (ed.), The Age of the Galley, 151. 91. The galley sailing season ran from April to September. See John H. Pryor, ‘The Geographical Conditions of Galley Navigation in the Mediterranean’, in Gardiner (ed.), The Age of the Galley, 210–11; Bondioli, Burlet and Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, 189. 92. Joseph F. Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Hyphen 2 (1979), 52. 93. Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, 55. 94. Liam Gauci, In the Name of the Prince: Maltese Corsairs, 1760–1798. Malta: Heritage Malta, 2016, 211. 95. Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, 58. 96. Joseph A. Grima, ‘The Order of St John’s Galley Squadron at Sea’, Storja 1 (1978), 28–29. 97. McManamon, ‘Maltese Seafaring in Medieval and Post-medieval Times’, 42–43. 98. Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World. London: Allen Lane, 2015, 116. 99. Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, 56–57. 100. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 340. 101. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 341–44. 102. Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 75.

90 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

103. Grima, ‘The Order of St John’s Galley Squadron at Sea’, 16. 104. Bondioli, Burlet and Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, 173. 105. Bondioli, Burlet and Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, 181, 197. 106. Bondioli, Burlet and Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, 191. 107. Jean du Mont, A new voyage to the Levant containing an account of the most remarkable curiosities in Germany, France, Italy, Malta, and Turkey: with historical descriptions relating to the present and ancient state of these countries, by the Sieur de Mont. London: Printed for M. Gillyflower, T. Godwin, M. Wo on, J. Walthoes and R. Parker, 1696, 138. 108. Command Papers 3207, 1863, 156. 109. De Lucca, ‘British Influence on Maltese Architecture and Fortifications’, 316. 110. Paul Cassar, Medical History of Malta. London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1965, 98. For further details regarding soldier graffiti at the Inquisitor’s Palace, see Russell Palmer, ‘Graffiti as Historical Data: The British Army and the Inquisitor’s Palace (Birgu) in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Melita Historica 17(2) (2018), 37–49. 111. Kenneth Gambin, ‘The Inquisitor in Parliament: An Insight into British Colonial Policy’, in Maroma Camilleri and Theresa Vella (eds), Celebratio Amicitiae: Essays in Honour of Giovanni Bonello (Malta: Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, 2006), 160; House of Commons Paper 81, 1878, Statement of All the Property Transferred to the Military and Naval Authorities from the year 1816 to the end of 1875 with Appendix. Malta: HMSO, 1877, 9; TNA/WO/33/3237/1. Le er from F. Greenhill, Commander-in-Chief of Malta, to War Office, 30 October 1899. 112. Markus, Buildings and Power, 17. 113. TNA/MFQ/1/188/52. Plan of the Inquisitor’s Palace, Malta, 1830. 114. ‘Electric Telegraph at Malta’, The Times (30 August 1860), 10. 115. NAM/GMR/195. A. Ghio and G. Gulia, Preliminary Reports of the Mortality and Sanitary Condition of Valle a and the Three Cities. Malta: Government Printing Office, 1875. 116. Command Paper C.3813, 1883. Army Medical Department report for the year 1881, vol. XXIII. London: HMSO, 1883, 35. 117. Chaplain of the Forces, George Nelson Godwin, described ‘Leaving Piazza Vi oriosa by Strada della Porta Maggiore we see on the le a plain massive building at the door of which a sentry is posted. This is the old Inquisitor’s Palace, and is now occupied by the officers of the regiment stationed in Vi oriosa [Birgu] and at Fort St Michael in Senglea [L-Isla]’ in A Guide to the Maltese Islands. Malta: Printed by Paolo Bonavita, 1880, 182. 118. J A. Mangan, ‘Imitating Their Be ers and Disassociating from Their Inferiors: Grammar Schools and the Games Ethic in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, International Journal of the History of Sport 27(1–2) (2010), 236. 119. Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 152–53. While clearly acceptable, the arrangement differed from the purpose-built officers’ quarters in Floriana, which contain a lobby leading to a couple of officers’ and servants’ rooms (TNA/MFG/1/188/46. Plan of the Officers’ Quarters Floriana, 1830). 120. Markus, Buildings and Power, 161. 121. Markus, Buildings and Power, 157.

 Institutional Spaces • 91

122. David Arnold, ‘India: The Contested Prison’, in Frank Dikö er and Ian Brown (eds), Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America (London: Hush and Company, 2007), 149. 123. Dario Melossi and Massimo Pavarini, The Prison and the Factory (40th Anniversary Edition): Origins of the Penitentiary System. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 110–23. 124. For a discussion of patriarchy played out though colonial institutions, see Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood, ‘Feminist Theorizing of Patriarchal Colonialism, Power Dynamics, and Social Agency Materialized in Colonial Institutions’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20(3), 477–91. 125. Katherine Evans’ account suggests that individual incarceration occurred in the seventeenth century, as the Messerano cells built in the eighteenth century would also afford, though in both circumstances, only for a handful of inmates: Katherine Evans, A Brief History of the Voyage of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, to the Island of Malta. London: Printed by the assigns of J. Sowle, 1715, 27.

c3 PRODUCTIVE LABOUR

Work in an essential part of life, but in most societies the kinds of work opportunities available are not simply a ma er of free choice. This chapter explores the relationship between labour and institutions through examples of ‘productive labour’ – that is, labour that in some way produces something either required by a society at large or that contributes to the accumulation of wealth by that society’s rulers. It demonstrates that Malta’s rulers derived power not only from controlling the importation of vital supplies and governing the exportation of Maltese commodities, but that they also introduced artificial competition into the labour market by engaging slaves and convicts in the same trades and work opportunities that employed the poorest islanders. Furthermore, a group of elite, sometimes local, other times by virtue of their colonial and political affiliations, fostered business ventures that encouraged commodities produced from foreign imported raw materials over those made from local resources. Recent a empts have been made to follow the paths of Maltese commerce and its industrialists through rich notarial archives and other sources.1 In this chapter, I track some of the changing work and labour opportunities of those who le few, if any, wri en records. Despite travellers and foreigners of all sorts opining about the industriousness of the Maltese, employment rates varied over the centuries, enduring multiple booms and the ravages of disease epidemics, as well as international cycles of economic hardship. A er the Great Siege (1565) came a time of relative prosperity that witnessed the construction of a new capital. For many years, building Valle a occupied Maltese masons and cra smen, who received both wages and food rations. However, so great was the project that the Order frequently resorted to recruiting foreign – o en Sicilian – labourers, who received higher remuneration. A er the initial completion of Valle a, each Maltese man remained obliged to work on building and maintaining the islands’ fortifications for four days a year without remuneration. Such an insuffi-

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cient number of work hours encouraged the Order to force the Maltese to work further on fortifications, albeit for pay.2 The threat of further O oman raids prompted bouts of fortification during the seventeenth century, but apart from coastal raids by Barbary slavers, the islands did not experience major fighting in between the Great Siege, the Blockade (1798–1800) and the world wars of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the treaties and alliances of their rulers tied the islands’ economic success to the flows of international conflict and competition. In particular, the Crimean War (1854–56) and the Second Boer War (1899–1902) had major repercussions. In the former, Malta acted as the British Empire’s launchpad, increasing requirements for harbour- and warehouse-related labourers, as well as muleteers for transporting the armies in the Crimea.3 Furthermore, the swelling number of visitors to their shores amplified opportunities for Maltese producers to sell their wares to a captive audience at inflated prices, provoking one visitor to comment: ‘The Maltese have become comparatively rich since the war broke out; selling all their wares, from melons to gold and silver crosses, and lace and cameo brooches to li le white lion-dogs, at a very high price to eager customers.’4 A similar influx of visitors occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, as 12,000 British troops arrived on their way to fight in South Africa. Increasing the population by 10 per cent, the troops’ presence stimulated a rise in real wages for many labourers.5 As profitable as international wars were for some, others, particularly those away from the harbour towns, felt the increased pressure on finite resources and struggled with steeply rising wheat prices.6 In the countryside, the major employment opportunities remained in agriculture, producing barley and wheat for subsistence and co on as the principal cash crop, year in and year out. An early British report concluded that ‘during several months of the year not more than a tenth part of them are in the receipt of wages’, demonstrating the plight of agricultural communities.7 The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed increased interest in the prospects and welfare of the islanders from metropolitan philanthropists. Samuel Plimsoll appealed to an imperial audience in describing the hardships endured by the average Maltese, citing low wages and higher food prices than in London.8 Despite a mini-peak during the Crimean War, the numbers of those recorded as employed principally in agriculture grew minimally over the course of the nineteenth century (Figure 3.1).9 In relation to the expanding permanent population, which rose by a third between 1851 and 1891, agricultural employment remained virtually static, officially employing only 10,096 men and 3,612 women in 1901. In contrast, the

94 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Figure 3.1. Number of inhabitants employed in agriculture, manufactures and commerce in the nineteenth century. Source: Blue Books 1830–1910/11. Image by the author.

number of inhabitants involved in commerce quadrupled, exploding a er the opening of the Suez Canal. The same event seems to have caused a drastic downturn in manufactures, the majority of which aligns to the decline of the co on industry (see below). Nevertheless, some small-scale manufactures continued throughout the centuries, commonly associated with specific villages. Żebbuġ produced weaving looms, Żurrieq was well known for co on beating, and blood puddings came from Luqa. Domestic commerce also formed essential additional incomes for many, varieties of which frequently included poultry farming and egg production, while others, such as wood-cu ers, plied the streets advertising their services.10 Not all employment opportunities existed on land and unsurprisingly for an island community, some looked to the sea for their livelihoods. Ferrying goods and people around the islands and especially between Malta and the eastern Sicilian ports of Augusta, Messina and Syracuse provided work for many seafarers. Fishing also provided an income for some, who at the end of the Order’s reign stood at a ‘considerable number’, but who had by the turn of the twentieth century dwindled to just over a thousand.11 For those who had the means and experience, the most lucrative options existed in the corso.12 Corsairing in Malta pre-dates the coming of the Order; however, during its tenure the number of corsairs increased

 Productive Labour • 95

considerably, developing into a significant contributor to the islands’ economy.13 Essentially state-sponsored pirates, the Order licenced Maltese corsairs through a system that simultaneously afforded the corsair the benefits of sailing under the Order’s or Grand Master’s flag, and secured the Order a share of the captured booty (including enslaved captives).14 Various a empts at regulating this lucrative enterprise included Grand Master Alof de Wignacourt (1601–22) instituting the Magistrato degli Armamenti in 1605 and Grand Master Ramon Perello (1697–1720) mirroring other Mediterranean ports in creating the Consolato del Mare. Crucially, the la er institution provisioned for corsairs flying the Grand Master’s flag in his capacity of the sovereign prince of the state of Malta, rather than the Order’s, which enabled him to seize control of the corso and remove corsairs’ recourse to the papal courts.15 The corso ceased to function under British rule, but was replaced with a host of imperially controlled institutions. A er constructing Somerset Dock in the 1870s, the maritime commerce of Malta transitioned into one of naval power. While the sailors of the Royal Navy undoubtedly contributed to the economy by supporting local producers as consumers and increasing harbour-based employment opportunities, other less obvious colonial institutions harnessed local labour. The rise of those dedicated to the education and moral welfare of the islanders in the nineteenth century included steep rises in the number of schools and the number of pupils a ending them. For those without families able to support them, further institutions in which one lived and worked existed, such as the House of Industry. A list of tasks completed in a single month by the inmates at that institution demonstrate that the girls provided an institutionalized workforce essential to the economically efficient operating of the Ospizio more broadly: Sewed 54 new shirts, 12 trousers, 31 gowns; Mended 642 different articles of bedding and clothing; Made 229 leather and linen trusses of different sizes; Washed 6,342 different articles of bedding and clothing for the Ospizio; Cleaned and a ended in the current details of the Works; A ended as nurses in the infirmary of the Ospizio; Assisted the School Mistress.16

As well as supplying cheap labour, large institutions also provided jobs for free citizens. As Corradino civilian prison grew, so did its staff: from twelve employees in 1853 and eighteen a decade later to twenty-one employees in 1883, consisting of a superintendent, his clerk, a schoolmaster and chaplain, chief warder, assistant chief warder and storekeeper, warder and weaver, warder and carpenter, warder and tailor,

96 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

warder and gate keeper, warder and cook, infirmary warder, nine other warders, a messenger and an out gate keeper. 17 Superintendents came from the professional classes, including law, medicine and the military, British or Maltese, whereas only local inhabitants fulfilled more lowly roles.18 Each section below takes a labour opportunity that the state made productive through its intuitions of governance, taxation or commerce, funnelling the sale of goods through officials, encouraging foreign imports and engaging in forced labour. Starting with agriculture, the single largest industry in which the majority of Maltese engaged, the discussion shi s to local cra production in the form of earthenware manufacture. With the development of the harbours and maritime commerce came many unskilled jobs that slowly introduced wage labour to the islands, which is explored through dockyard labourers and factory workers. The final section moves beyond galley rowing in its explication of captive labour on the islands.

Agriculture Neither the Order nor the British Empire occupied the Maltese archipelago because of its ability to produce a surplus bounty. A semi-arid climate, lack of permanently running waterways and want of deep soil deposits all contrived to make the islands dependent on imports. In the first noteworthy British report, government officials described Malta as ‘so insignificant in size, and so poor in resources, as to be mainly indebted for its daily supplies of the first necessaries of life to the neighbouring countries’.19 Unable to grow enough food to feed its inhabitants, controlling vital supplies became key for any governing power, which in Malta meant controlling the supply of grain for bread and pasta.20 When the Order took control of the islands, the Viceroy of Sicily sanctioned duty-free imports of grain to help with the food deficit. In the sixteenth century, the main supply came from the port-town Licata in Sicily, known as the ‘granary of Malta’.21 Administering grain imports fell to the regional Università. The Order exerted a strong hold over the Università, realizing not only that safeguarding the supply of grain afforded a relatively simple way of subduing any kind of peasant rebellion, but also that a well-fed people would minimize agitation from the Maltese nobility.22 Formerly the principal local governing bodies, the knights reduced the primary function of the Università to grain distribution, which included fixing and printing annual price lists a er each Sicilian harvest. Dependence

 Productive Labour • 97

on Sicilian grain tied the cost of living in Malta directly to the fluctuating cost of grain in Sicily, but because it came by sea, the price also increased the farther inland a village lay. The wealthiest Maltese inhabitants (around 1 per cent) invested in the grain trade through the Università. Fixed profits ensured a safe and lucrative investment for those who could afford to speculate, although all the grain had to be sold in order to realize the profit. In a bid to release some of the capital, the Università issued bills of exchange to major investors, which acted in place of money and could be used to purchase goods and services.23 The system provided a solution to the island’s deficiency in grain, while facilitating economic growth and stability through a system of credit. Other import markets increasingly supplemented that of Sicily and by the eighteenth century, Greek ships frequently delivered cargoes of wheat.24 Once the British ruled Malta, the government took over running the grain concern before opening it up to free-market trade. From the mid-nineteenth century, Black Sea grain, especially wheat, flooded into the Mediterranean and Malta consumed wheat from Russia, the Ionian Islands and Algiers.25 Manufactured grain products started to arrive from the United States from the 1840s, and by the 1850s, other states had started to contribute to the market. However, it was the United States that persisted and by 1900, it supplied Malta with both wheat and manufactured grain products. Turkey and the North African states supplied not only grain, but also olive oil, while Sicily and the rest of Italy remained important for the supply of pulses and wine.26 Many other items found their way to Maltese shores through trade and corsairing activities, but the islands were not totally without their own produce. Despite poor and shallow soil, visitors frequently commented on the vivacity of the inhabitants, eking out a living from the scant earth that covered the outcropping limestone bedrock. In order to protect the carefully collected and precious soil from blowing or washing away, the Maltese divided their landscape into small parcels enclosed by drystone and rubble walls. In the eighteenth century, Brydone reported that shiploads of soil from Sicily supplemented native soils, although the validity of such claims have more recently been brought into question.27 In the only detailed examination of Maltese soils, David Lang postulates that if importation did occur, it either did so in very small quantities and was used for fertilizer, or it consisted of terra soils similar to those naturally occurring in Malta (and therefore not easily distinguishable), or both.28 Soil sampling from fields around Miżieb ir-Riħ in the Mistra Valley confirm the practices of farming a varied crop alongside cereals and the

98 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

practice of stubble burning.29 Under the Order, a Maltese farmer grew wheat, barley, legumes, fruits and vegetables. Maltese oranges could be harvested from November until June and were especially prized, being described in a le er to novelist William Beckford as ‘the finest in the world’.30 Many seeds and spices had a long history of production, including aniseed, cumin and sesame, which, like the oranges, fed both domestic and export markets. For a short time in the eighteenth century, Gozo cultivated sugar cane in small quantities and the Order briefly held Caribbean sugar plantations, but the majority of Malta’s sugar came from Portugal’s plantations in Brazil.31 Native grapes sustained Malta’s limited viticulture, while the islands’ olive groves produced a mainstay: oil. Evidence from pollen samples suggests that farmers also grew Brassicaceae such as broccoli, turnips and swedes.32 The British saw the islanders as in need of help and a empted to increase agricultural production. From the second half of the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain had been undergoing a revolution, but many of the techniques of ‘improvement’, such as enclosure and consolidation of land tenure, were redundant in Malta. Several causes hampered agricultural improvement. A system of inheritance in which land tenancies were divided among the sons upon the death of the father resulted in the fragmentation of land and reduced the size of farms, which also resulted in a type of individualism based on the farming household as the primary economic unit. Such units relied on family labour, diminishing the demand for agricultural labourers. Furthermore, the majority of land tenancies were at a fixed rate, which offered farmers neither protection nor insurance against droughts or other unforeseen problems, meaning that even in economically buoyant times, individual farmers could struggle to pay their rents.33 Furthermore, small parcels of land, shallow soils and local practices of terracing made Malta unsuited to the introduction of machine-aided production.34 In the 1850s, Frederick Robinson observed ‘men ploughing with bullocks and a most primitive machine, resembling a small wooden cylinder, and adapted apparently to the scanty stratum of soil’, although using a hand-tool akin to a ma ock was more common.35 Despite limitations and setbacks, the British succeeded in reducing the amount of uncultivated land on a greater scale than their predecessors.36 Although the acreage of uncultivated land dropped significantly over the century, the number of cultivated acres remained fairly static (Figure 3.2).37 This uneven situation is most likely due to a third factor, urbanization, which contributed to a static agricultural capacity, but a continually increasing population. Throughout the nineteenth century, wheat took up the most arable land (Table 3.1), followed by bar-

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ley and mischiato (maslin), a mixture of the two grown and harvested together.38 The wheat harvest usually followed the barley harvest by several weeks, occurring in late May or early June.39 Beans, especially broad beans, and other pulses remained important, as dried they stored well for long periods. The cultivation of a wide range of fruit and vegetables continued, with citrus fruits and onions providing viable export crops towards the end of the 1800s and into the twentieth century.40 Greater numbers of livestock also presented themselves. Ca le and goats both increased in number: milk-producing goats quadrupled, while the number of sheep remained static. The increasing amount of

Figure 3.2. Above: acres of cultivated and uncultivated land in Malta. Below: acres of cultivated land and population. Source: Blue Books 1830–1910/11. Image by the author.

100 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Table 3.1. Crops and livestock in nineteenth-century Malta. Sources: Blue Books 1830, 229–30; 1840, 244; 1850, 294; 1860, 334; 1870, Y2; 1880, Y2; 1890, R4; 1900, S4; 1910–11, S4. Table by the author. Acres used in agriculture 1830

1840

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

Wheat

10,084

9,553

1,699

7,904

7,956

8,321

9,660

8,091

7,019

Mischiato (Maslin)

5,677

6,414

4,254

4,014

3,948

2,987

1,200

0

0

Barley

6,166

5,200

3,095

3,908

2,825

2,466

2,782

2,512

1,950

Beans & pulses

2,095

3,294

2,025

3,061

1,312

2,387

1,353

1,709

1,357

Fruits & vegetables

3,536

2,923

4,716

3,992

3,206

8,878

5,452

7,964

8,289

Sesame

58

580

166

332

113

531

601

0

0

Cumin seed

374

593

140

390

709

1,540

1,021

1,510

2,414

7,297

9,483

5,013

4,447

6,158

3,850

1,309

956

478

4,176

6,348

4,599

5,073

3,811

6,969

7,642

8,728

8,766

Pasture

1,671

2,579

2,917

1,346

862

1,098

909

2,352

944

41,134 46,967 28,624 35,007 30,900 39,027 31,929 33,822 31,918

44,160 44,701 16,041

Total

Total cultivated

Co on Forage

Uncultivated land

Livestock

Cash crop

Food

Arable crop

Work animals Food

943

1,242

399

4,055

4,186

85,294 91,668 44,665 43,626 31,843 40,269 32,328 37,877 36,104

Livestock

Total

8,619

No. of animals 1830

1840

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

1910

Horses, mules 3,421 & asses

3,177

2,944

3,061

3,583

4,008

5,926

8,568

7,113

Horned ca le 5,816

4,905

3,388

5,115

3,938

7,411

7,126

6,056

4,612

Sheep

8,065

8,064

6,547

5,237

5,808

6,177

6,555

8,801

8,505

Goats

3,119

2,660

2,282

2,741

2,656

4,345

7,053

13,283 12,766

Pigs

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

3,539

347

20,421 18,806 15,161 16,154 15,985 21,941 26,660 40,247 33,343

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acres given to forage tallies well with an increase in livestock rearing and meat consumption (see next chapter). Throughout our period, the swelling population necessitated dedicating large swathes of land to growing grains, which provided the staple of the Maltese diet: bread. Times of war and blockade witnessed increased agricultural output, especially in the years of Napoleon’s Continental Blockade (1806–14), which saw Malta become briefly ‘one of Europe’s main trans-shipment points, bringing thousands of merchants and sailors to the country’.41 While grain provided a necessity of life, commercial cash crops were also very important. In around 1810, the British a empted to introduce the potato, but exports took a long time to became significant and annual reports list the crop separately only from the turn of the twentieth century.42 The production of cumin seeds for both domestic consumption and export continued throughout the centuries, unlike sesame seeds, the production of which all but ceased in the 1890s. However, none of these exports matched the importance of co on.43 Co on provided the capital with which the islands purchased foreign imports in place of the annual shortfall in native-grown grain, and co on carding and spinning provided employment within a cottage industry for a large percentage of the population.44 At the turn of the nineteenth century, Aeneas Anderson claimed that ‘almost every house contains a loom, and every loom is in continual occupation’.45 The lack of mechanized technology meant that spinners worked for up to seventeen hours a day and weavers thirteen hours a day, with men, women and children earning respectively less than each other.46 Spinning and weaving have been generally associated with female and child work, but historical accounts differ, with some suggesting that both men and women worked alternately at the various stages of production.47 Furthermore, the presence of a weaver warder at Corradino civilian prison suggests the pre-existence of weaving in a Maltese man’s labour pursuits. Given the seasonally based rotation of a cashcrop work-cycle, family members helped out wherever extra hands were needed. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Order directed economic effort towards co on production. In 1776 Grand Master de Rohan supported the co on industry by instituting a chamber of commerce the direct aim of which was to improve the export trade in yarn and cloth.48 The Order also increased the amount of cultivated land specifically for the purpose of growing co on. The two main types of co on grown in Malta were Gallipoli and Nankin, both of which grew to a height of around half a metre and both of which were sown in

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May and reaped in October and November.49 Each morning, the farmer would cut off the ripe co on pods before sunrise, ‘for the heat of the sun immediately turns the co on yellow’.50 The officials of the Order to whom the Maltese had to sell their processed co on regulated domestic prices and sold most of it directly to Barcelona and Marseille.51 A much smaller quantity went by way of the brigantine (xebec) traders, who carried mixed cargoes and plied the coastal route, buying and selling at ports along the coasts of Italy and France before reaching Spain.52 Catalonia remained the most important market for Maltese co on exports into the early nineteenth century, particularly Barcelona, where textile industrialists turned pre-spun co on into printed calicos.53 However, Catalonian introductions of mechanized spinning machines and cheap raw co on from the Spanish American colonies soon put an end to the need for Maltese produce.54 The situation forced the Maltese to focus on manufacturing their own co on garments for both domestic and international markets. As in previous centuries, maritime trade continued to support the sale of Maltese sail cloth, as it did European exports of blankets and the production of gloves and stockings ‘of high repute’.55 Nonetheless, by the 1830s, the co on industry had become unprofitable and those employed in it lived ‘a poor existence’.56 The decline of the industry in the second half of the nineteenth century resulted in the number employed in spinning and weaving decreasing from 14,446 in 1851 to 2,086 in 1901.57 Similarly, Table 3.1 charts the decline of co on through the falling number of acres dedicated to its production, peaking briefly during the American Civil War (1861– 65), when co on prices in Europe rose exorbitantly due to the shortage from North America. As Paul Caruana Galizia has argued, the decline of Malta’s co on industry occurred despite British efforts to protect it, including experimental bans on yarn imports and lint exports. Rather than blaming the British government for not doing enough to help Maltese co on farmers, he finds causes in external market forces, the island’s unsuitability to mechanization and ‘farmers’ conservatism’ for the downfall of the Maltese co on industry.58 Under the Order and the British, the islands underwent transformations in agriculture without drastically changing the modes of production. Rather, the direct involvement of each ruling entity in encouraging cash-cropping in order to increase the economic output of the islands resulted in systems that made Maltese agricultural workers and co on processers reliant on one set of officials to sell their products and dependant on another for essential food supplies. Single-crop farming and cash-cropping was not unique to Malta; other Mediterranean islands including Crete, Cyprus and the Ionian Islands also had

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agricultural economies geared strongly towards producing one main crop, though Malta’s restricted land surface le li le room for anything else.59 As one of Malta’s primary economic resources, officials had to keep cash-cropping going by finding new international outlets for the co on yarn and cloth. Similarly, supplying the staple of the Maltese diet, initially from Sicily but increasingly from the seventeenth century onwards imported from diverse neighbouring states and far-off trading partners, frequently relied on diplomatic intercession and government policy. One exportation, the other importation, both entangled the fate of non-elite Maltese to the ebb and flow of colonial relationships and international markets.

Craft Production In his visit to Malta in the 1820s, physician John Hennen observed that ‘artisans of all the usual descriptions are to be found in abundance, and of no small expertness in their respective lines of business’.60 Many smallscale industries flourished, especially those that relied on raw materials produced elsewhere. Silversmiths and goldsmiths excelled, producing filigree work for export and sold in Valle a to visiting onward-travelling passengers. But Malta’s geology contains no precious metals. Maltese furniture found admirers in the courts of Europe, but Maltese trees did not supply the timber. In the nineteenth century, Michael Borġ owned a successful cigar-rolling factory producing cabanas known as ‘Spo ed Dogs’, but the tobacco was Egyptian.61 Even the flour mills spent much of their time pounding foreign wheat. Nonetheless, the Maltese exploited the limited natural resources afforded by their island environment. Besides co on wares and arable crops, reeds and rushes provided the raw materials for baskets and ma ing, a type of employment favoured by later prison authorities, as we shall see below. Limestone – Malta’s primary terrestrial natural resource – not only provided the raw construction material for virtually all buildings, but was also the go-to material for a host of interior features, from seating and stoves to toilet seats and kitchen sinks. The islanders’ intimate knowledge of their stone was matched only by their ability to transform it into a diverse array of forms. Worked Maltese limestone found international export markets as cut building blocks, as well as sculptured vases and flowerpots, which were exhibited at many imperial exhibitions.62 However, the island’s geology offered another substance from which one could make useful things – clay – to which our a ention now turns. Rather than briefly surveying many cra s, an in-depth investigation of Mal-

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tese earthenware and its makers enables an understanding of ‘minor’ cra industries in the islands beyond economics. By sourcing, sorting, moulding and firing clay, po ers formed one of the very few artisanal groups fashioning goods from purely Maltese resources for an exclusively Maltese market.63 Ubiquitous to cultures worldwide, underpinning most Western and non-Western foodways and eating habits, po ery has for millennia proved a material of choice for cooking utensils, food containers and tablewares. Yet, despite the fact that everyone residing in Malta between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries almost certainly ate or drank something stored or prepared in a Maltese ceramic vessel, earthenware manufacture has received li le a ention beyond the anecdotal.64 The po ers of Malta have all but been erased from Maltese history, not appearing in any postSecond World War history of the islands.65 Certainly, the vessels they produced were aesthetically and technologically outshone by imported maiolica from Sicily and the Italian peninsula or mass-produced British exports. Perhaps the mundane character of Maltese earthenware has contributed to the lack of documentation that survives regarding the industry that surrounded it. Given the lack of comments in travel diaries, visitors to the islands chose to ignore it or simply did not notice it. In the early twentieth century, the British administration referred to it as a ‘sort of domestic manufacture … [that] does not count for much’ and being ‘reduced to articles that are commonplace’.66 The assortment of ‘articles’ made at the time of the report need not reflect the entire range of vessels po ers made in earlier centuries, but from archaeological remains, I have identified several ‘commonplace’ shapes that appear to have stood the test of time (see cover image).67 By far the most frequently occurring items are shallow bowls, flat on the underside and pulled up on the po ers’ wheel to make a rounded side (Figure 3.3). They are not large, with a diameter similar to that of a modern side plate. The number of examples surviving suggests that they had a range of functions, including as ‘eating bowls’ meant for individual consumption. Sometimes the lips of larger basins were thickened, much like a modern-day ceramic mixing bowl, creating a sturdy vessel in which a cook could beat a ba er or even knead a dough. Multiple jars survive in fragments, many with equally many possible functions, although their use as food containers is probable in most circumstances. Some are very large, heavy and amphora-shaped, and relate to domestic storage rather than international transport. Rare examples of earthenware bo les suggest the need for containing liquids in small, table-top-sized vessels that can be completely sealed. One- or two-handled jugs are more common. Lacking a pouring lip,

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Figure 3.3. Maltese earthenware. Top le : shallow ‘eating bowl’. Top centre: single-handled jug. Top right: decorated Maltese brazier or kenur tal-fuħħar, exterior. Middle row: decorated Maltese brazier or kenur tal-fuħħar, exterior and interior displaying shelf. Bo om le : lantern or l’imnara. Bo om right: simple oil lamp or musbieħ. Images by the author.

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these simple containers held water or wine for the table, but could just as well have been used to drink from. Maltese po ers also made two kinds of brazier. The first was used throughout the centuries and named a er a local stone stove (kenur, pl. kwiener), which is known as a kenur tal-fuħħar (‘stove from clay’) and will feature more in Chapter 4. It is roughly the size and shape of a small to medium wastepaper basket, but for two exceptions: first, about two-thirds up the body, there is a flat shelf that provides a ledge for a cooking pot to sit on and that separates the fuel from the food; and, second, a cut-out hole on one side near the bo om allows the addition of fuel without disturbing the pot during cooking. A second brazier is associated with the galley fleet of the Order. It is thicker-set and heavier than the more common brazier and it also lacks an internal shelf. Furthermore, the rim has squares cut out to form a regular notched edge, resembling the fortifications of a castle turret. While most shapes have a clearly culinary function, po ery is also put to use in other household and decorative functions. These include lighting equipment in the forms of lamps and lanterns. The lamps are simple oil lamps (musbieħ), literally a small bowl, or ‘saucer’, to which the po er has formed a lip for a wick by pulling a li le of the saucer edge out and pinching it between her or his fingers and thumb. These small lamps work on their own or in conjunction with a Maltese lantern (l’imnara), in which case they rest on an elevated bowl or inside a protective casing, rendering them portable. Other wares produced by Maltese po ers also included flowerpots of various sizes and those known from historical records, such as money boxes (carous) and ornamental objects sold to visitors and exhibited in the world exhibitions.68 However, I suspect the la er were made by urban ‘artists’ rather than those with whom I am concerned; those who authorities recorded as ‘earthenware manufacturers’, who were churning out everyday utensils. Po ery production starts with the sourcing of clay, which in Malta meant collecting it from where it outcropped. Finer clays exist in Gozo, and Maltese po ers frequently imported and worked them. Raw clay contains unwanted debris that must be removed; foreign ma er not only affects the appearance of the finished product, but, more crucially, also introduces unpredictability into the firing process. Once ‘clean’, po ers added sea sand ‘temper’ to the clay, which helps conduct heat evenly through the clay mixture, creating the desired firing properties. Now the clay was ready to be worked. In the early 1920s, anthropologists from Oxford University observed po ers in Birkirkara and Żejtun using a hand-propelled wheel.69 The scene describes making handmade po ery with the aid of a simple

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wheel, a process in which the po er’s primary tool is her or his hands and the sensory knowledge they convey. Unautomated, this method of production is as much about touching and feeling as it is about mechanically operating a wheel, and po er’s fingermarks are frequently observable. Some of the vessel-shapes were made in parts and not all on a wheel. Po ers roll clay to form handles and use clay slabs to fashion the sides of vessels larger than would be possible to throw on a wheel. In order to make a kenur tal-fuħħar, the po er fashioned up to six component parts, ‘gluing’ them together with finger pressure and a watery clay mixture. Jugs presented no less a challenge, made in two halves, plus handles. The utilitarian nature of Maltese pots has resulted in minimal attempts of decoration. Aside from the po er smoothing the outwardfacing surface or giving it a covering of reddish slip,70 the only evidence of painting on Maltese po ery exists on examples of kenur tal-fuħħar (clay brazier), which frequently exhibit geometric pa erns consisting of white lines. Once fully formed and decorated, the clay needs to dry. The process removes excess water, although the pots must not be le outside: the summer sun would bake them and rain could potentially destroy them. The fired result frequently produced a reddish yellowcoloured vessel. In early twentieth-century Malta, po ers used simple dug-out or built kilns that they could brick up during firing, although the chance find of a Roman catacomb that hit the news in 1950 suggests subterranean working conditions for firing and perhaps drying pots. The catacomb was ‘unearthed by a po er and his family ... [who] still work underground in the middle of a field, turning out unglazed po ery of surprising finish and delicacy’.71 The Maltese favoured brushwood to fuel their kilns, which, stored a er harvest, provided a reliable source throughout the year. A plentiful supply of smaller twigs and branches affords the po er greater control over the firing heat, although many other factors can affect the conditions inside a kiln. The technology may have been modest, but the production of po ery is never simple and pre-industrial po ing combines great dextral skills in forming different shapes with detailed technical knowledge about the firing process. Examination of archaeological remains suggest that firing conditions were far from ideal in every instance and the temperature inside the kiln could be variable, which will have resulted in occasional misfiring: if the kiln temperature is not high enough for long enough, the pots will not bake properly and therefore be too so ; if the temperature is too high, pots may crack or explode.72 Maltese po ers may have for most of our period produced mundane and utilitarian wares, but they were skilled cra speople.

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Census data record the number of ‘common earthenware makers’, who appear never to have been numerous. The 1851 census records only fi y, indicating one po er for every 2,470 civilian residents. The next census records only eight, which seems unlikely. The fact that census records, the primary surviving documentary source, record no potters active in Gozo already throws doubt on the reliability of the data as an accurate source of information. It is most likely that census-makers recorded only those making their principal living by way of po ing, therefore obscuring families for whom po ing constituted a secondary or subsidiary income. If we look forward to the 1931 census, eleven male and five female po ers were active in Birkirkara, with a further three men in Qormi and a woman in Żejtun. At the time, Birkirkara and Qormi had each over 10,000 inhabitants and Żejtun over 8,700, pu ing the ratios of po ers to inhabitants at 1:647, 1:3,388 and 1:8,731 respectively.73 In 1911, thirty-six po ers are listed, twenty-three male and thirteen female, indicating a per capita difference in po ers of over 27 per cent before and a er the First World War. The anomaly of only eight po ers recorded for 1861 notwithstanding, the overall trend is one of decline over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Figure 3.4). The same trend might imply that the nineteenth-century decline is part of a longer trajectory, which would suggest po ers were more numerous in earlier centuries. However, the archaeological evidence does not bear out such a pa ern; it would seem that Maltese po ers were always in competition with early modern imported wares, as we shall see in the subsequent chapters. Instead, I estimate – for want of conclusive data – that the number of earthenware makers in early modern Malta never numbered more than between seventy and eighty. Several clues exist for the economic and social organization of Maltese earthenware makers. The news report quoted earlier refers to a ‘po er and his family’ and other early twentieth-century sources also allude to family groups making up the primary organizational unit.74 In his ethnographic fieldwork during the 1950s and 1960s, Jeremey Boissevain noted that rather than in idealized nuclear families, households consisted of relatives from multiple generations, including widows and widowers, unmarried and married childless adults, as well as parents and children.75 Such pa erns likely existed in earlier centuries too, with the burden of labour in po ing families being shared around all fit and able householders. Given the work involved in po ing – not only in making pots, but also preparing the clay, building and maintaining a kiln – it is likely that a Żejtun woman recorded po ing alone in 1931 either received help from relatives in some tasks or that her family had recently died and she was still managing to carry on po ing alone.76

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Figure 3.4. Decline in the number of ‘common earthenware makers’ with respect to population shown through decimalized ratios, excluding the anomalous result of 5.9676 x 10-5 for 1861, which is lower than all other results and most likely a result of census recording methods. Image by the author.

The 1911 census records a conspicuous absence of women. All potters are male and spread around several villages: five each in Ħamrun and Paola, four in Bormla, two in Valle a and one each in Luqa, Mosta, Naxxar, Qormi, Rabat, Sliema, Tarxien and Żebbuġ.77 Local or British a itudes cannot explain the lack of female po ers, as the census notes women active in many other trades and industries. Earlier censuses record both male and female po ers in numbers that more easily suggest couples or relatives working together. The eight ‘common earthenware makers’ recorded in 1860 include one male and one female (aged 20–25 and 30–35 respectively) in Floriana, as well as three males (one each aged 30–35, 40–45, and 65–70) and three females (one each aged 15–20, 20–25 and 30–35) in Żejtun.78 It is too presumptuous to assume that the equal numbers of men and women correlated to married couples, but the mixed ages of those po ing in Żejtun certainly support the idea of an enterprise based around a kin group. The kin-based model approximates well to household industries in which, rather than paid assistants, family members contribute their labour and pass on expertise. In his archaeological and ethnographic survey of ‘household po eries’, David Peacock argued that they are ‘almost everywhere’ associated with poverty and an ‘inability to maintain a reasonable standard of living from farming alone’.79 Despite many peasant populations demonstrating participation in a range of income-generating activities, in Malta the level of poverty suffered by earthenware makers suggests that the cash-cropping and other models

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of agriculture and industry adopted by the Order and the British did not provide employment for everyone, with some forced into more precarious livelihoods. Whether or not earthenware manufacture comprised someone’s primary economic activity would affect how census officials recorded a person, but the fact that anyone at all is recorded as an ‘earthenware maker’ suggests that there was sufficient profit in po ing to dedicate most of one’s efforts to it. In the early twentieth century, po ing provided adequate employment for a family to survive without taking on more secondary work as to overtake po ing.80 Earlier British documents suggest that po ing was the sole, or at least principal, occupation of po ers in the 1830s, who earned ‘miserable wages’, less than spinners, weavers, salt makers and tanners.81 Given the low earning potential of po ers throughout the nineteenth century, it is probable that they supplemented their incomes with farming activities in a similar fashion to later residents, whom Boissevain found ubiquitously supplementing their primary incomes with rearing and selling poultry or small-scale farming, irrespective of where they lived or whether they were urban civil servants or unskilled rural labourers.82 Conversely, the emergent picture does not support the reverse scenario of po ing providing a sideline to other economic activities.83 Unlike many other industries, Maltese earthenware existed as an industry in the island’s economic backwaters, a local industry of no real commercial consequence. Yet its survival into the twentieth century demonstrates continued demand for its wares, no ma er how lowly or mundane. As Chapter 4 will demonstrate, the significance of the industry lay in its social and cultural embeddedness in local foodways and subsistence, not in economic success.

Wage Labour During the second half of the nineteenth century, the labour landscape in Malta altered. Being part of a global empire certainly stimulated some changes, but so too did the general trends of industrialization and urbanization sweeping over the Western world. These manifested themselves in Malta primarily in the new employment opportunities in areas of manufacturing, commerce and trade rather than agricultural production. While co on may have lost significance in the nineteenth century, other traditional products had not. At the end of the century, lace making employed 5,503 compared to only 2,785 forty years earlier. A trade almost completely dominated by women, the islands

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became known for the lace fancies visitors could purchase. Other predominantly female occupations such as domestic service had already established themselves by the middle of the century and though the market did not experience the same level of growth as lace, it grew nonetheless.84 Bumboatmen, who ferried across the harbour, horse cabmen, omnibuses and a since-disused railway for land travel together comprised a travel sector that employed over 2,500 men at the turn of the twentieth century, a far cry from the coaches and sedan chairs of earlier centuries. Industry more generally developed in response to the burgeoning British population and international visitors, which centred upon the harbours and the cities surrounding them. In order to provide a glimpse into the development of some of the major employment opportunities open to those with few or no skills, I focus on the harbours and the development of factory-style work. The importance of the dockyards and harbours as sources of employment grew from the seventeenth century and they soon became the centre of commercial activities in the islands. Malta’s quarantine station provided a necessary lure for maritime traffic passing from East to West or returning from North Africa; much of the shipping that came through early modern Malta’s harbours was there simply to complete quarantine before moving on to primary or home destinations. Others used the port as a base for trade or took advantage of the islands as a clearing house.85 By the mid-eighteenth century, Malta was very important for French Mediterranean trade, with large amounts of Levantine co on yarn making its way to Marseille via Malta. Goods came to Malta by and large through international shipping, with Maltese merchant vessels usually restricting themselves to the ports of Sicily and southern Italy. English boats brought coal and heavy metals.86 Venetian vessels brought merchandise from around the Mediterranean and Ragusan vessels ferried grain and co on from the Balkans. Ships on their way back from North Africa, especially Tripoli and Tunis, transported beans, dates, sugar, cattle, chickpeas, tobacco and even empty po ery jars.87 Whatever the reason of calling, a vessel in harbour provided the knights with an added income stream through customs duties and employment for those offering a host of dockyard and victualling services. With the foundation of a fleet of round-bo omed sailing vessels in 1701, the Order developed its own facilities at French Creek (directly north of Dockyard Creek) into a functioning naval arsenal that echoed those of other European powers. Building the bastions, barracks, granaries, wharves and warehouses employed many Maltese masons and unskilled labourers, as well as convicts and slaves. Once built, the new facilities gave rise to temporary employment opportunities

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in ship-building (each ship taking about two years to complete) and as longer-term dockyard workers. In the week ending 17 June 1719, 136 tradesmen worked on constructing the San Giorgio (including sixty builders-shipwrights and fi y-eight caulkers), assisted by 122 slaves. Half a century later, 151 tradesmen and 200 slaves worked on constructing the San Gioacchino in a single week. Around the same time, another 227 tradesmen were employed at the shipyard, including ninety-eight caulkers, eighty-three carpenter shipwrights and eighteen coopers, in addition to forty-three boys carrying ballast and eight slaves under the cartwright. Tradesmen employed at Dockyard Creek and French Creek included not only many shipwrights, carpenters and caulkers, but also coopers, sail makers, rope makers, stone block and pulley makers, blacksmiths, coppersmiths, weighers, porters, painters, oar makers, sawyers and weapons masters – a long list that to some extent demonstrates the increased specialization of the workforce. In calculating the total number of workers employed by the Order in its two naval arsenals (galley and sailing), Anton Quintano concludes that it was comparable to contemporaneous English naval yards, such as Plymouth.88 However, none of these workers truly worked as wage labour as it developed in the nineteenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, Dockyard Creek, which had once accommodated the galley-fleet of the Order’s navy, housed naval victualling facilities, a dry dock, a naval bakery and a ropery, all of which provided employment for local inhabitants and formed part of a network of dockyards, naval yards and victualling yards that kept the British Empire mobile and without which its commercial and military (army and navy) aspirations would never have been realized. In 1847, just before the Crimean War, Her Majesty’s dockyards and victualling yards in Great Britain employed 3,189 labourers, with 639 at Portsmouth, 539 at Chatham, 529 at Devonport, 470 at Deptford, 362 at Woolwich, 297 at Sheerness, 212 at Pembroke, eighty-seven at Gosport and fi y-four at Portsmouth. Naval yards at Antigua (1), Cork (7), Bermuda (34), Gibraltar (7), Halifax N.S. (18), Jamaica (15) and Trincomalee (42) employed a total of 124 labourers, with the victualling yards at Bermuda, Halifax N.S., Jamaica an additional eleven. Malta was the only designated HM Dockyard outside of Great Britain and Ireland besides Bombay, employing sixty-two labourers on top of the forty-five working in its victualling yard. It is noteworthy that at this time, Malta was the only British dockyard and victualling yard in the Mediterranean and the largest outside home or Indian ports.89 As a large colonial establishment, its efficient running required a host of institutions and employees. As early as 1821, no fewer than seven

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government departments dealt with aspects of port regulation, including the Offices of Port Dues and Collector of Excise.90 By the beginning of the next century, the Customs and Port Department employed a total of ninety-nine staff.91 Such positions came with relative security and the benefits of government superannuation. However, for the majority of those working at the harbour, employment was rarely secure. The numbers employed in maritime activities such as rope and sail making remained surprisingly low, amounting to fewer than 250 in the 1840s and reducing to half that by the end of the century. The trend reflects the diminishing need for sails and rigging as steam became the dominant means of maritime propulsion, just as the enlargement of the dockyards reflects a jump in the number of shipwrights, from forty to 167.92 Similarly, while coal heavers do not appear in the list of artificers and labourers counted in 1861, by the end of the century, they numbered 1,796.93 The concentration of large numbers working cheek by jowl at the harbours and their exposure to international workers’ developments such as trade unions meant that dock workers were in many ways more politically organized than other Maltese workforces. In 1899, a strike by coal labourers lasted over six weeks and ‘occasioned much trouble and expense to the coal merchants of the port’.94 Work may have been available, but wages were low. As government officials reported: ‘The rapid growth of the population, unaccompanied as it is by even a moderate amount of emigration, has had the most depressing effect upon the price of labour. Since 1857 wages have been going down in nearly all employments in the face of a redundant population’.95 Many dock workers in the 1870s received similar wages to those working in the 1830s. At 1s 6d per day, an 1870s coal heaver could expect no more for his troubles than his 1840s counterpart, while grain li ing had become one of the lowest-paid harbour-side occupations at just 8d per day. Freshwater suppliers commanded the best harbour-side wages throughout the nineteenth century, reflecting the essential nature of what they provided. Overall, the mean wages of those working on the docks increased from 1s 6d 10/13 in 1837 to 2s 1d 8/13 in the 1850s, slumping to 1s 6d 5/13 in the 1860s and still further to 1s 2d in the 1870s. The mid-century peak reflected the boom created by the Crimean War, during which coal heavers, ferry boatmen, freshwater suppliers and wine rackers alike could earn as much as 2s 6d per day, with bumboatmen commanding a daily wage of 3s.96 The volatile labour requirements of the harbours depended in part on global trade cycles, but were also buoyed by Mediterranean wars and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which thrust Malta onto the

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maritime route between Britain and India.97 The same currents of trade affected the development of factory production, although the manufactory mode of production was not new to the islands. In an effort to provide employment for inhabitants of Gozo, the early nineteenthcentury colonial government established a co on factory. Gozo provided Valle a each day with fruit, but clearly the trade was not enough to support everyone.98 The factory’s principal objective was to ‘give employment to a great number of indigent persons particularly females at as li le expense as possible to the Government’.99 The factory was not a success. Over the course of the first eleven years, it had accrued losses of £1,600 and had consequently seen its monthly cash advances dwindle from £200 to £50. Wages alone in 1828 amounted to over £40, which paid a much greater number of female spinners than male beaters. While the factory processed locally produced co on, its main supply of raw co on wool came from Bengal, suggesting that it was either cheaper to import co on from the subcontinent or, more likely, that creating a net increase of employment on the islands necessitated importing non-native co on, lest jobs be taken from existing co on spinners working from their homes.100 Maltese industry centred round processing several imported raw materials. Although turning precious metals into jewellery and foreign timber into furniture offered li le in the way of employment for unskilled labourers, tobacco processing employed thousands. Tobacco was not a new import, as evidenced by the many Turkish-style chibouk pipes recovered from Dockyard Creek (see Chapter 5). In the late nineteenth century, US Consulate John Worthington reported that: ‘All Maltese men and boys smoke small black cigars made of the rankest sort of Virginia tobacco, the cost of which is one penny for eight cigars’.101 By this time, Malta had transitioned from not only consuming tobacco products but also manufacturing them as viable export commodities. Much of the tobacco leaf arrived via O oman ports, although it frequently originated in Egypt or came from Kentucky and Virginia.102 Only the lowest-grade tobacco could be used, ‘as the cigars have to be sold very cheap, hence every economy has to be used in manufacturing them’.103 Once in Malta, the tobacco leaf needed blending, rolling and packing, with an increasing number of machines aiding production. Both hand-rolled and machine-made cigare es provided export markets for Maltese products. By the 1830s, the first early factories opened, including that of Vincent Marich in 1838.104 The industry manufactured some 50 million cigars annually, which equated to 3.4 per cent of total exports by the end of the decade.105 The trend continued with Greek native Constantine Colombos opening a factory in 1868, moving to larger

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premises towards the end of the century. The new factory employed around 250 people, with the best makers able to manufacture 2,000 cigare es per day of ten hours.106 So successful were many of these cigar and cigare e manufacturers that their businesses frequently survived several generations. Vincent’s nephew, Lawrence, took over V. Marich and Co. and C. Colombos passed to Constantine’s sons, John and Michael.107 One of the reasons the industry thrived was the lack of import duty on tobacco. Even though it was discussed at times, British officials recognized that to apply a duty to tobacco leaf would be to destroy the manufacturing industry in Malta.108 Census records indicate that the numbers employed in actually making cigars and cigare es amounted to 1,534 in 1851 and 1,854 in 1861. By the late 1870s, officials estimated that around 4,000 individuals earned their living by making cigars and cigare es, or in the box-making, warehousing and shipping departments of the self-same factories. A.G. Cousis alone employed 300 ‘skilled hands’ in his factory in Valle a.109 By the turn of the century, numbers dipped, with only 256 men and 390 women recorded as working in tobacco-product manufacture, a decline associated with the decreased demand for hand-rolled cigare es and an increased fashion for machine-made ones.110 Memories of locally made clay pipes made without moulds in Żejtun and Rabat captured in a radio programme in the mid-1990s suggest that Malta’s tradition of clay-pipe smoking appears not to have been transformed by the interventions of the Empire Pipe Factory in Marsa, which manufactured pipes from briar and olive wood.111 On the edge of the harbour, the Marsa, like the wharves of Valle a, was a popular location for factories and other industries centred around processing imported goods. In the early twentieth century, it was also home to Malta Canning Works, which specialized in canning fruit and vegetables produced in the islands and employed between 300 and 400 (mostly) women in the canning season.112 Many other factories and works sprang up in the area over the course of the nineteenth century. Collis and Williams’ Nile Factory manufactured aerated waters, though, as with brewers and pharmacists, they procured their glass bo les and machinery mostly from Great Britain and therefore did not provide much Maltese employment (see Chapter 6). While the docks and factories were not the only ‘wage labour’ employment options available to an increasingly urbanized population, they both reflect major worldwide – especially European and North Atlantic – trends in labour and production. The commercial docklands brought workers into contact with a global maritime workforce that transcended purely colonial networks, whilst at the same time

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Malta assumed its place in global networks by virtue not only of its location on major shipping channels, but its role as an imperial maritime hub. Indeed, it was the communication and transportation networks afforded by the docks that encouraged and made possible the construction of manufactories producing goods primarily destined for overseas export markets. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Maltese dockyard and factory workers were very much global workers.

Captive Labour With growing numbers a racted to the harbour and surrounding urban areas for work, so the vices associated with nineteenth-century cities increased. Chief among these was an increase in cheap alcohol consumption, which in turn led to an increase in the number of convictions for associated pe y crimes. Arrests for brawling, the and other misdemeanours frequently resulted in short spells in prison, some for only a few days. However, more serious crimes incurred longer sentences of years or even life. Long- and medium-term prisoners invariably worked, encouraged to do so by the prison authorities who believed that work simultaneously helped prison warders to keep order and offered a rehabilitative path to offenders.113 Those sentenced to hard labour were forced to work, but others could elect to engage in labour and they did, contributing to their upkeep and their own pockets, as well as the institutional coffers. In keeping with the dominant ideas of the time, the organization of nineteenth-century prison labour depended on the gender and class of the inmate, marking a definite break with previous centuries. While imprisoned by Inquisitor Girolamo Casanate (1620–1700), Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers a est to kni ing stockings and mending garments a er their money had run out and they had already sold their hats, but work played no role in the regime of the prison and was only necessary if one had no money.114 Conversely, the severe and physically demanding regime endured by the Order’s galley rowers and described in the previous chapter necessitated choosing men for their fitness and strength, especially in the case of deciding who to sell in Malta’s slave market and who to funnel into galley service. Losing vital rowers through exhaustion and injury jeopardized the safety and success of a caravan, therefore a galley captain had every reason to ensure only the strongest available men rowed for him. In 1606, Fra. Roberto Dati, Knight of the Order, offered to buy a contingent of 500

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slaves from Malta and Livorno, stipulating that they should be between eighteen and thirty years old, tall, robust and brave.115 Not only did Malta’s slaves row, they also performed a host of other duties, from private domestics to working in vital support roles. Young slaves worked within the confines of the prison in Valle a processing co on and the Order’s bakery depended ‘almost exclusively on slave labour’.116 Those who were no longer able to row or were middle-aged fulfilled the roles of valets to the knights or assistants to the cook, while others laboured as coopers, maintaining the large casks used for storing water and wine. At the dockyards, we have already seen that ship-building occupied both slaves and convicts. Additionally, around thirty slaves manned dredging barges and assisted cra smen in maintaining the dockyards, alongside free boys.117 Slaves owned by the common treasury frequently worked in constructing new buildings, repairing old ones or maintaining the streets, and were joined by galley slaves, beggars and convicts when required.118 The use of coerced labour continued under British administration, as it did elsewhere around the Empire. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 put an end to state-sponsored slavery and while Britain transported many convicts from the imperial homeland to its colonies, it did not generally move them from colony to colony. Instead, colonial convicts worked locally, which in Malta meant continued employment in public works. One of the most noticeable and commented-on manifestations of this practice was the spectacle of armed soldiers escorting chained gangs of inmates from the Great Prison, who cleaned the streets of the capital.119 On his tour of the empire’s Mediterranean possessions in the 1820s, Hennen observed that those serving hard labour in the Great Prison worked ‘in cleaning the streets, in the repairs of the works, and for other public purposes. On application to the proper authorities, they may also be employed by private individuals’.120 Hennen’s revealing comments demonstrate that penal labour was harnessed by private individuals, which may be seen as analogous to the ways in which slaves could be bought, sold and hired for specific projects. Elsewhere in the world, the leasing of penal labour had already been trialled in the notorious chain-gangs working on roads and in industries such as the lumber trade. Rather than a continuation of the Order’s penal practices, the use of convict labour in public works echoed practices already used at home, while also embracing ideas emanating from the United States. By the time Corradino civilian prison opened, opinions began to change and the moral role of labour in convict rehabilitation concentrated more of inmates’ work away from the public gaze. When necessary, warders or a sentry guard escorted small groups

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of six to eight men to work in fields or repair walls, each man selected for his good conduct.121 In Gibraltar, the small population increased the use of convict labour outside the prison, with one commentator noting them working in public as late as 1863, where following the discovery of ancient human bones, the convicts-turned-archaeologists excavated the remains.122 In Malta, however, most work took place within the prison confines. Corradino civilian prison had no crank or treadmill, but instead concentrated on productive labour activities.123 Conversely, non-productive work including physical drill and shot exercises continued at military prisons throughout the century, as they reminded ‘the prisoners that they are still soldiers and not criminals’.124 Nevertheless, economically useful work dominated the prison regime. The use of stone as the primary building material in Britain’s Mediterranean stations created a demand and military prisoners contributed to the broken stone required by the Royal Engineers for their construction and maintenance projects.125 Commonly prescribed for those serving hard labour, or ‘stage one’ inmates, military authorities clearly privileged the need for stone-breaking over idealized prison conditions. In the late 1890s, the governor of Malta’s military prison decried the lack of ‘a shed with separate boxes for stone breaking’, which necessitated that inmates work in association, breaking their regime of inmate separation.126 He had the same concern about inmates working in association when working in the laundry. Similar problems were posed by the women’s wash-house. Female inmates at the Ospizio washed bedding and clothing not only for the Ospizio asylum inmates, but also for civilian prisoners at Corradino. Once the women joined the men at Corradino, these duties increased to cooking for them as well. Neither the kitchens nor the wash-houses provided adequate provisions to keep the women apart from one another. Whilst cooking, cleaning and repairing clothes were common male duties within the military prison and the military more generally, the civilian prisons followed a differently gendered programme of labour division. General cleaning was also an important task, echoing the work of the girls employed in the House of Industry, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Male occupations included carpentry, masonry, plastering, plumbing, shoe making and the tailoring of clothing for the prison and hospitals.127 Such activities frequently required working in silent association, although in Corradino civilian prison, partitions absent in the military prison ‘boxed’ inmates off from one another. Where possible, inmates toiled in their cells with the door open or closed, depending on the severity of their class.

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Picking oakum was perhaps the most severe yet commonly issued task in prisons around the Western world, providing as it did a service to the navy and therefore essential to any maritime power.128 In Corradino civilian prison, it appears not to have continued beyond the early 1870s and in Gibraltar, with its small local workforce and great need for construction material, oakum picking gave way to breaking stone.129 Yet at Malta’s military prison, it constituted one of the most important forms of hard labour and ranked among the toughest tasks, alongside the crank and stone breaking. Occupations in Malta’s prisons were not constant but varied over the decades. The practice of mending barrack and hospital beds and bedding, common at Gibraltar’s military prison and others around the empire, ceased in Malta some time before 1897 because the irregular influx of inmate labour resulted in an unpredictable supply unsuited to the demands of the barrack department.130 In the civilian prisons, employment included a wide range of trades and manufactories: broom making and ma ing were considered ‘especially suitable’ occupations in English local prisons and they were the most common activities at Corradino too.131 The reduction in the number of straw workers in Malta from 700 in 1851 and 589 a decade later to 321 in 1901 may reflect a decline in the fashion for straw hats and rush work, but equally competition from prisons. Ma ing or ‘rush work’ provided the method of creating many daily items, from baskets and fans to hats and chair seats, at the Ospizio.132 In 1875, the authorities added weaving at looms for the women, although the men had had a warder-weaver since 1853.133 As in England, engaging prison labour in traditional manufactures created competition with ‘free’ tradespeople, adding to the destitution of poorer inhabitants and increasing the stigmatization of convicts.134 At each prison, a different system of daily working hours and remuneration operated. At the Ospizio, the women were employed and generally worked seven hours a day in the winter, from 7:30 am to 11:30 am and from 1:30 pm to 4:30 pm, and nine hours in the summer, from 6 am to 11 am and from 2 pm to 6 pm.135 The difference most likely reflects the costs of lighting needed to work a er dark, rather than the weather in different seasons, although a different pa ern is observed in the male civilian prison. At Corradino, the men worked from 7:30 am to 11:30 am throughout the year, and a further 3½ hours in the a ernoon, starting half an hour earlier in the winter. A total of 7½ hours’ work gives Corradino civilian prison the shortest working hours, which in part reflects the complicated regime of separation and movement around the site.136 It contrasts starkly with the situation of male military prisoners. At Gibraltar a simple system of working for 11½ hours per day on ‘no

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Figure 3.5. Earnings in pounds sterling from inmate labour at Corradino civilian prison. *Combined male and female inmates’ earnings. Source: Blue Books 1875–1910. Image by the author.

occupation, with any variety or interest in it’ contrasts with the more progressive system at Malta, where labour was tasked by quantity, in terms of the amount of oakum picked or number of blankets mended rather than hours laboured.137 Maltese convicts had earned money from their labours since the prisons of the Order and the Inquisition, and in the first half-decade of British rule, inmates of the Great Prison provided not only public labour, but also worked for themselves manufacturing various items, keeping two-fi hs of what they earnt.138 Women at the Ospizio received half the money earned from their labour, which the asylum clerk put on deposit until the prisoner’s release. However, a er 1850, all earnings went to the government.139 Corradino male prison earnt substantial sums of money from its inmates’ work, which increased significantly during the early twentieth century (Figure 3.5), and if the prisoner possessed good conduct stripes, he could receive a scaled gratuity for his labour. In 1875, nearly 30 per cent of the prisoners’ earnings were paid back to them as gratuities, with the remainder used towards the maintenance of the prison, but by 1890, the proportion paid in gratuities had dropped to 20 per cent, with the remainder going directly to the colonial treasury.140

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Nevertheless, the gratuity associated with good conduct stripes (discussed further in Chapter 5) afforded an incentive to civilian inmates that was not open to military prisoners. The utilization of coerced and forced labour continued throughout our period, although it involved different institutions at different times, depending on who ruled. While prisoners on hard labour at the turn of the twentieth century may have not been officially ‘owned’, as in the case of the Order’s slaves, their labour was nonetheless harnessed and made ‘productive’. Frequently competing with the outputs (labour or manufactures) of free islanders, slave and convict labour reduced the potential earnings of islanders and became unwi ing proponents of the power relationships enacted through the islands institutions. *** Work opportunities and the level of employment clearly differed chronologically and spatially, though rather than seismic shi s in direction, the labour landscape evolved: slowly in the case of the decline of the co on industry; rather more quickly in response to the increase in steam-powered shipping and the opening of the Suez Canal. Economic historian Caruana Galizia has argued that although ‘British rule created a colonial economy shaped by colonial institutions … some areas, policies affecting industry and trade showed longer continuity’.141 Several interventions from both the Order’s and the British administrations worked to create employment and prosperity in the islands, mostly encouraging co on exports and dockland or maritime development. Intervention percolated into almost all industries, enabling control and directing labour into modes that were ‘productive’ or beneficial for the islands’ rulers. Institutions not merely represent a legal apparatus, but lived and embodied ways of life for the islands’ workforces, whether this meant neglecting one’s primary work due to compulsory labour on fortifications for several days a year, spinning co on yarn to be exported by others to Barcelona, rolling cigars in a factory or rowing a galley oar. Furthermore, access to the international markets for imports and exports was mediated by an elite on which the poor were reliant for many raw materials. Earlier and later changes in naval policy had equally occasioned changes in the composition of workforces. Reduction of the Order’s galley fleet and the development of its sailing navy necessitated a reduction in the number of slaves utilized for rowing and the redeployment of some in the construction of round-bo omed ships, while an eventual emphasis on Malta as a British naval base skewed industries and man-

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ufactures to the needs and wants of a military station rather than the needs of a self-governing and economically self-sufficient people. Furthermore, the Order’s and British production of cheap institutionalized labour through the employment of captives not only reduced opportunities for Maltese labourers, but also frequently introduced competition to the islands’ tradespeople. The employment of slaves and free unskilled Maltese, as we have seen, o en overlapped and resulted in free and enslaved workers labouring alongside one another. Separated from free society, the prisoners in Corradino civilian prison manufactured wares identical to some of Malta’s poorest to be sold on the same domestic market. Of course, not everyone worked. The number of retirees recorded in 1901 displays a curious imbalance in the number of men (4,018) to women (38,325). Rather than relaxing in their dotages, the figures suggest that older women particularly struggled to find employment. A great number probably contributed unpaid work to an extended family household, while others may have found themselves on the breadline seeking charity from one of the Order’s institutions or a later destitute asylum, such as the Ospizio, or reduced to street begging. Observational accounts set the number of beggars to have been high in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and clustered around the harbour towns, although at the turn of the twentieth century, the census data records reveal there to have been li le difference in the number of male (265) to female (229) mendicants.142 That children, or at least juveniles, also begged is undisputed, their cry recorded as: ‘carità nix mangiare – nix padre – nix madre – nix pane per i piccolo in casa’.143 Just what everyone ate and how is a story in which the wares of Maltese earthenware manufacturers play a central role and is the subject of the next chapter. An economically negligible industry according to British commentators, the Maltese po er produced vessels from local resources that were not only crucial in the creation and maintenance of Maltese foodways and eating habits, but were also foundational in the construction of a collective island identity.

Notes 1. See the works by Michael Refalo, especially The Maltese Commercial Class, 1870– 1914: Business, Families, Networks. Pisa: Edizioni Plus-Pisa University Press, 2010. 2. Alison Hoppen, The Fortification of Malta by the Order of St. John, 1530–1798. Edinburgh: Sco ish Academic Press, 1979, 137–38.

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3. Rita Grima, ‘Some Economic Effects of the Crimean War on Malta’, Melita Historica 7(4) (1979), 347. 4. Lady Hornby, Constantinople during the Crimean War. London: Richard Bentley, 1863, 15. 5. Paul Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 52. 6. Grima, ‘Some Economic Effects of the Crimean War on Malta’, 346–52. 7. House of Commons Papers 141-I 141-II (1837–38). Copies or Extracts of Reports of the Commissioners appointed to Enquire into the Affairs of Malta, Part I. London: HMSO, 1838, 33. 8. Samuel Plimsoll, The Condition of Malta. London: Kelly, 1879, 1–2. 9. Sakis Gekis observes a comparable decline in the numbers recorded as working in manufacture and agriculture in the British-controlled Ionian Islands in ‘Colonial Migrants and the Making of a British Mediterranean’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 19(1) (2012), 80. 10. Aeneas Anderson, A Journal of the Forces which Sailed from the Downs, in April 1800. London: Printed for J. Debbe , 1802, 179–80. 11. Only 1,129 fishermen and 18 fisherwomen were recorded in 1901. Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905. Census of the British Empire. 1901. London: HMSO, 1906, 36–37. 12. Much has been wri en on the Maltese corso, of which Peter Earle’s Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970) has for many years provided a standard introduction to the subject. For a more up-to-date treatment of eighteenth-century corsairing, see Liam Gauci, In the Name of the Price: Maltese Corsairs, 1760–1798. Malta: Heritage Malta, 2016. 13. Salvatore Bono, ‘Navel Exploits and Privateering’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798: Studies on Early Modern Malta and the Order of St John of Jerusalem (Malta: Mireva Publications, 1993), 388–89. 14. Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary, 114. 15. The Order was ultimately responsible to Rome, whereas the Grand Master as sovereign was not. See Gauci, In the Name of the Prince, 16–18. 16. The list pertains to July 1849. NAM/GMR/127. G. Montanxro, ‘Report on the Work of the Ospizio Girls, Offices of the Comptroller of Contracts, Valle a, 2 August 1849’. 17. Blue Book (1853), 186; Blue Book (1862), 200; Blue Book (1883), H54. 18. Superintendents included: physician J.B.H. Collings, appointed 29 December 1848 (Blue Book 1853, 186); lawyer G. Falzon, appointed 1 January 1890 (Blue Book 1891, H50); and Major. M.G. Laing Meason (Blue Book 1883, H54). 19. House of Commons Papers 141-I (1837–38). Copies or Extracts of Reports of the Commissioners appointed to Enquire into the Affairs of Malta, Part I. London: HMSO, 1838, 46. 20. Paul Sharp, ‘Malta and the Nineteenth Century Grain Trade: British Free Trade in a Microcosm of Empire?’, Journal of Maltese History 1(2) (2009), 23. 21. Carmel Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Malta. Malta: Mireva Publications, 2002, 4. 22. Sharp, ‘Malta and the Nineteenth Century Grain Trade’, 23. 23. Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity, 4–43. 24. John Debono, Trade and Port Activity in Malta: 1750–1800. Malta: BDL Books, 2000, 81. 25. Blue Books 1860, 296–301. 26. Blue Books 1900, Q6–Q7.

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27. Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Le ers to Williams Beckford, vol. 1. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1773, 313. 28. David Malcolm Lang, Soils of Malta and Gozo. London: HMSO, 1960, 19. 29. Christ Hunt and Nicholas C. Vella, ‘A View from the Countryside: Pollen from a Field at Mistra Valley, Malta’, Malta Archaeological Review 7 (2008), 59. 30. Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Le ers to Williams Beckford, 311. 31. Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Le ers to Williams Beckford, 311; Thomas Freller and William Zammit, Knights, Buccaneers, and Sugar Cane: The Caribbean Colonies of the Order of Malta. Malta: Midsea Books, 2015, 95. 32. Hunt and Vella, ‘A View from the Countryside: Pollen from a Field at Mistra Valley, Malta’, 59–60. 33. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 77, 82–83. 34. John Chircop, ‘Underdevelopment: The Maltese Experience, 1880–1914’, unpublished MA dissertation. Msida: University of Malta, 1993, 18–26. 35. Frederick Robinson, Diary of the Crimean War. London: Richard Bentley, 1856, 13, 19–20. 36. As Paul Caruana Galizia (The Economy of Modern Malta, 39) has noted, crop production dominated nineteenth-century farmland, while pasture was marginal. 37. Blue Books 1830–1910/11. 38. Carmel Cassar, ‘State Intervention in the Grain Trade of Malta (16th–20th Century)’, Mediterranean Review 6(2) (2013), 60. 39. Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Le ers to Williams Beckford, 310. 40. Blue Books 1910/11, S4. 41. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 45. 42. David Gentilcore, Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550–2000. London: Continuum, 2012, 62; Blue Books 1900, S4. 43. Co on has received significant a ention in large-scope volumes in recent years, though discussions of Mediterranean co on production usually focus on the medieval period, treating it as the ‘prehistory’ of modern co on production, whereas discussions of its production or trade in the Mediterranean during the modern era are largely absent. See Sven Beckert, Empire of Co on: A Global History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014; and Giorgio Riello, Co on: The Fabric That Made the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 44. Samuel Tayler Coleridge, Collected Le ers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols, 1801–6. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956, 577. 45. Anderson, A Journal of the Forces which Sailed from the Downs, in April 1800, 179. 46. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 11. 47. Contrast John Hennen, Sketches of the Medical Topography of the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and Malta. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830, 461 with Anderson, A Journal of the Forces which Sailed from the Downs, in April 1800, 179. 48. John Debono, ‘The Chamber of Commerce and the Co on Trade of Malta in the Eighteenth Century’, Melita Historica 10(1) (1988), 31. 49. Brydone A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Le ers to Williams Beckford, 310; William Henry Smyth, The Mediterranean: A Memoir, Physical, Historical and Nautical. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1854, 33. 50. Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Le ers to Williams Beckford, 311.

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51. Debono, Trade and Port Activity in Malta, 88. 52. Carmel Vassallo, Corsairing to Commerce: Maltese Merchants in XVIII Century Spain. Malta: Malta University Press, 1997, 15. 53. Laureano Carbonell Relat, ‘Trade Shipping between the Spanish Harbour of Barcelona and Malta, from 1892 to 1870’, in Toni Cortis and Timothy Gambin (eds), De Trirembus: Festschri in Honour of Joseph Muscat (Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2005), 512. 54. Alex Sánchez, ‘Technological Transfer and Industrial Location. The Case of the Co on Spinning Industry in Catalonia (1770–1840)’, History of Technology 30 (2011), 97. 55. C.W. Rördansz, European Commerce; or, Complete Mercantile Guide to the Continent of Europe. Boston: Printed by Cummings and Hililiard, 1819, 525. 56. Thomas MacGill, A Hand Book, or Guide, for Strangers Visiting Malta. Malta: Printed by Luigi Tonna, 1839, 23. 57. Government of Malta, Census of the Islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino, Taken on the 31st October 1861. Malta: Malta Government Printing Office, 1863, 62–63; Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 38–39, 80. 58. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 146, 58. 59. Crete and the Ionian Islands had agricultural systems built around viticulture and olive production (Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 110; Thomas A. Gallant, Experiencing Dominion: Culture, Identity, and Power in the British Mediterranean. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002, 5) and Cyprus co on and silk (Michael Given and Mario Hadjianastasis, ‘Landholding and Landscape in O oman Cyprus’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 34(1) (2010), 50). 60. Hennen, Sketches of the Medical Topography of the Mediterranean, 461. 61. Advertisement in the Malta Daily Chronicle & Garrison Gaze e (8 August 1896), 8. 62. For instance, those illustrated in The Crystal Palace Exhibition: Illustrated Catalogue, London 1851. New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1970, 292. 63. There is no evidence that Maltese po ers made for a proto-tourist trade until the twentieth century. 64. Notable exceptions include infrequent interventions from folklorists (especially Guido Lanfranco). Archaeologists interested in medieval po ery have almost exclusively focused on imported rather than locally made wares; see Alessandra Molinari and Nathaniel Cutajar, ‘Of Greeks and Arabs and of Feudal Knights’, Malta Archaeological Review 3 (1999), 9–13; Thomas F.C. Blagg, Anthony Bonanno and Anthony T. Lu rell, Excavations at Hal Millieri, Malta. Malta: University of Malta Press, 1990; Brunella Bruno and Nathaniel Cutajar, ‘Imported Amphorae as Indicators of Economic Activity in Early Medieval Malta’, in Demetrios Michaelides, Philippe Pergola and Enrico Zanini (eds), The Insular System of the Early Byzantine Mediterranean: Archaeology and History, British Archaeological Reports International Series (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), 15–29. 65. The bizarre situation means that much more is known about po ers and their wares of two millennia ago than two centuries ago. 66. Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13. Royal Commission on the Finances, Economic Condition, and Juridical Procedure of Malta. Minutes of Evidence. London: HMSO, 1912, 70. The description of a ‘reduced’ industry suggests that it had once been larger. 67. The po ery descriptions offered here are intended to give the reader an impression of Maltese vessels. For a detailed and technical archaeological description, please

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68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84. 85.

86. 87.

see Russell Palmer, ‘Post-medieval Maltese Earthenware and Its Makers: Unearthing a Forgo en Industry’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 24(2) (2020), 422–55. Leonard H. Dudley Buxton and A.V.D. Hort, ‘The Modern Po ery Industry in Malta’, Man 21 (1921), 131. For instance, John Diston of Valle a, exhibited ‘Specimens of Terra Co a Vases, Flower-Pots, &c.’ in ‘Paris Exhibition of 1867’, London Gaze e (27 November 1866), 6476. Buxton and Hort, ‘The Modern Po ery Industry’, 130. Slip is a watery mixture of clay and perhaps some natural colourants. Anon, ‘A Royal Home in Malta’, Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer (13 September 1950), 2. For a detailed explanation of firing conditions, see Russell Palmer et al., ‘Neighbourly Ties: Characterizing Local and Sicilian Po ery in Post-medieval Malta’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 19 (2018), 583–86. Ratios based on 10,349 inhabitants in Birkirkara, 10,165 in Qormi and 8,731 in Żejtun (Government of Malta, Census of the Maltese Islands, Taken on Sunday, 26th April, 1931, under Ordinance XI of 1930. Malta: Malta Government Printing Office, 1932, 80). Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13, 70; Buxton and Hort, ‘The Modern Po ery Industry’, 131. Jeremy F. Boissevain, Ħal-Farrug: A Village in Malta. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, 13–15. Government of Malta, Census 1931, 80. Government of Malta, Census of the Maltese Islands 1911. Taken on Sunday 2nd April 1911 under Ordinance VII of 1910. Malta: Malta Government Printing Office, 1912, 70–71. Government of Malta, Census 1861, 69, 105. David P.S. Peacock, Po ery in the Roman World: An Ethnoarchaeological Approach. London: Longman, 1982, 23. Buxton and Hort, ‘The Modern Po ery Industry’, 131; Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13, 70. House of Commons Papers 140, 1839. Copies or Extracts of Reports of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Affairs of the Island of Malta, and of Correspondence Thereupon. Part III. London: HMSO, 1839, 7–8. Boissevain, Ħal-Farrug, 12. Although this has been recorded elsewhere in the Mediterranean, especially in situations involving a gender bias among po ers. Hélène Balfet noted that twentiethcentury po ers in Morocco and Tunisia, where the po ing was a largely female affair, frequently treated it as a subsidiary economic activity (‘Ethnographical Observations in North Africa and Archaeological Interpretation: The Po ery of the Maghreb’, in Frederick R. Matson (ed.), Ceramics and Man (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1966), 163). Government of Malta, Census 1861, 62–63; Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 79. See Joseph Abdilla, ‘A Convenient Clearing-House for France: Malta and Levantine French Commerce, 1723–38’, Storja (1998), 5–22 for a discussion of the importance of Malta to French trade in the early and mid-eighteenth century. Victor Mallia-Milanes, ‘English Merchants’ Initial Contacts with Malta: A Reconstruction’, Melita Historica 6(4) (1975), 345–46. Debono, Trade and Port Activity in Malta, 79–88.

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88. Anton Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2003, 27, 115–25. 89. House of Commons Papers 690, 1847–48. Return Showing the Number of Labourers Employed in Each of Her Majesty’s Dock-Yards and Arsenals. London: HMSO, 1848, 1. 90. Blue Books 1821, 51–84. 91. Blue Books 1903, H10–H19. 92. Government of Malta, Census 1861, 62–63. 93. Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 79. 94. Tozer, Kemseley and Fisher Limited, ‘The Coal Labourers’ Strike at Malta’, London Evening Standard (2 August 1899), 3. 95. Command Papers C.2032, 1878. Correspondence Respecting the Taxation and Expenditure of Malta. London: HMSO, 1878, 11. 96. Command Papers C.2032, 1878, 40. 97. John Chircop, ‘Evolution of a Harbour Infrastructure: From Mercantile to Naval Control’, Melita Historica 12(2) (1997), 211. 98. Anderson, A Journal of the Forces which Sailed from the Downs, in April 1800, 155. 99. Blue Book 1829, 264. 100. In 1828, the factory purchased 2,015 Maltese Rotoli (3,526¼ lbs) of ‘Native Co on Wool’ and 6,207 Rotoli (10,862¼ lbs) of Bengal co on wool (Blue Books 1829, 265). 101. US Government, Labor in Europe. Reports from the Consuls of the United States in the Several Countries of Europe on the Rates of Wages, Cost of Living to the Laboring Classes, Past and Present Wages, &C., in Their Several Districts, in Response to a Circular from the Department of State Requesting Information on These Subjects. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1885, 1627. 102. Command Papers C.2032, 1878, 17. 103. US Government, Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Countries during the Years 1887 and 1888. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1889, 497. 104. Allister MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, & Resources. London: W.H. & L. Collingridge, 1915, 342. 105. Figure includes re-exports. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 145. 106. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 328–30. 107. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 330, 342 108. Command Papers C.2032, 1878, 17. 109. Government of Malta. Census 1861, 62–63; Command Papers C.2032, 1878, 17; MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 315–17. 110. Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 80. 111. Guido Lanfranco, ‘Old Smoking Pipes’, L-Imanra 5(1) (1994), 22; John Wood, ‘Tobacco Pipes from Dockyard Creek, Birgu, Malta’, Clay Pipe Research 3 (2008), 8. 112. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 354. 113. Eleanor Conlin Casella, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007, 61. 114. Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, This is a Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, in the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta. London: Printed for Robert Wilson, 1662, 42. 115. Phillip Williams, Empire and Holy War in the Mediterranean: The Galley and the Maritime Conflict between the Hapsburgs and O oman Empires. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014, 113.

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116. Godfrey We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2002, 218. 117. Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798, 135. 118. Hoppen, Fortification of Malta, 138. 119. Sandra Scicluna and Paul Knepper, ‘Prisoners of the Sun: The British Empire and Imprisonment in Malta in the Early Nineteenth Century’, British Journal of Criminology 45 (2008), 505. 120. Hennen, Sketches of the Medical Topography of the Mediterranean, 471. 121. Blue Book 1875, AB11. 122. Frederic Sayer, The History of Gibraltar and Its Political Relation to Events in Europe. London: Chapman & Hall, 1865, 2. 123. Blue Book 1889, S4. 124. Command Papers C.8983, 1898. Report on the Discipline and Management of Military Prisons, 1897. London: HMSO, 1898, 42, 50. 125. Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 42. 126. Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 50. 127. Command Papers Cd. 2238-16, 1905. Colonial Reports. No. 439. Malta. Report for 1903–4. London: HMSO, 1905, 38–39. 128. Picking oakum involved picking apart by hand old ropes for use by the navy, especially in caulking. The work would make inmates’ hand raw and bloody. 129. Blue Book 1889, S4. 130. Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 42, 51. 131. Séan McConville, English Local Prisons, 1860–1900: Next Only to Death. London: Routledge, 1995, 254. 132. Robinson, Diary of the Crimean War, 12; Blue Book 1872, AB12. 133. Blue Book 1853, 186; Blue Book 1876, AB12. 134. McConville, English Local Prisons, 1860–1900, 256. 135. Blue Book 1848, 287. 136. Government of Malta. Regulations for the Corradino Prison/Regolamenti per la Prigione de Corradino. Malta: Printed at the Government Press, 1854, 4–5. 137. Reginald Fowler, Hither and Thither; or, Sketches of Travels on Both Sides of the Atlantic. London: Frederick R. Daldy, 1854, 60; Command Papers C.8983, 1898, 50–51. 138. Hennen, Sketches of the Medical Topography of the Mediterranean, 471. 139. Blue Book 1848, 287; Blue Book 1850, 319. 140. Blue Book 1875, AB10–11; Blue Book 1890, S4–S5. 141. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 127. 142. Anderson, A Journal of the Forces which Sailed from the Downs, in April 1800, 181–82; Command Papers Cd. 2660, 1905, 36–51. 143. ‘Charity, nothing to eat – no father – no mother – no bread for the li le ones at home.’ Adolphus Slade, Turkey, Greece and Malta. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837, 115. Trans. R. Palmer.

c4 FOODWAYS

Food and its consumption are fundamental tenets to all human life, but access to life-sustaining resources is o en controlled by small groups of elites. Distinctions between rich and poor frequently translate into greater food choices for those with money or other sources of power and influence, and far fewer, if any, choices for those without. Throughout early modern and nineteenth-century Europe, food production responded to the devastations of war and famine, as well as to the introduction of new crops, such as the potato and maize. Regime changes o en marked the beginning of foodways that, while not necessarily new, nevertheless diverged from the old. As we have already seen in the case of Malta, the grain needed to make bread was largely imported through regulated systems governed by the ruling powers. Under the Order, Sicily became the larder of Malta. British free trade subsequently ushered in immense quantities of grain from the shores of the Black Sea and processed-wheat products from across the Atlantic. Both of these trades can be – and have been – traced through historical documentation.1 But recovering who ate what types of food products and who grew, processed and prepared them is never easy. Some Maltese historians have claimed that ‘we lack the information on food consumed by artisans and peasants of early modern Malta’,2 but I counter such claims by integrating historical and archaeological evidence. Although this discussion is not limited to a history of diets and eating habits. Rather than furthering ideas of static early modern diets, I direct a ention to the dynamic nature of the foodways that fed the non-elite population; foodways that were frequently affected by political decisions, but lived through the individual choices and material processes of food production and consumption. By privileging foodways over diets, this chapter engages with many facets of food production, procurement, preparation and consumption, including the social and political contexts of each. It also builds on the previous chapter that

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explored agricultural production and the wares of local po ers, as well as highlighting the ways in which food supply and eating were no less entangled in power relationships than any other aspect of life. Historians and archaeologists frequently make distinctions between the diets of the urban and rural poor, which is useful if we consider many north European or, closer to our context, Spanish or Italian examples. Yet in Malta, the boundaries are not always so clear-cut. At their most polarized, the disparities between urban and rural contexts correspond to the geographical orientation of the island, with urbanization losing ground to villages and then to remote rural farmsteads the farther westwards one travels from Valle a. Nonetheless, the continuous network of small sea-cra ferrying between coastal se lements and the capital, not to mention the sprawling network of ‘suburban’ villages developing round the harbours, disturb any idealized a empts to completely separate urban from rural contexts with respect to food and its production. Blurring the traditionally applied boundaries of ‘town’ and ‘country’ does not deny that differences existed; rather, it asserts that in order to understand what those differences were in a geographically compressed island context, it is necessary to treat each context as a whole comprised of deviating parts rather than distinct entities. Therefore, by ‘Maltese foodways’, I refer to the people, things and processes involved in nourishing the bulk of the islands’ population, who were mostly locally born and poor. The story involves some of the people, places and processes introduced in the previous chapters, introducing the dynamic political, and increasingly transnational, relationships between people, their food and their means of preparing it, while also demonstrating how the actions of ruling elites and their institutions shaped the food choices available to others, which were at times accepted, ignored or subverted. Continuing with the thematic, rather than geographical, analytical categories employed throughout, the notion of food control is brought to the fore in the consideration of restricted foodways. Starting with the diets and foodways associated with galley crews (free and unfree), the discussion then turns to the highly regulated diets of prisoners, revealing that, perhaps surprisingly, food was o en more abundant in institutions of confinement than in the ‘free’ world of the poor. Finally, the chapter explores the international dimension of food procurement and eating. Concentrating predominantly on the foodways of wealthier inhabitants, the section entitled ‘Globalized Foodways’ discovers the superfluity and eighteenth-century luxury of the galley captain’s table,3 the cosmopolitan foodways of British army officers supplied through imperial and globalized supply networks, and beverages.

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Maltese Foodways Not long a er the beginning of British occupation, Padre Carlo Giacinto described the diet of Maltese peasants as consisting of barley bread with onions or radishes for breakfast and lunch, and a minestra (soup) with pasta and bread in the evenings, all washed down with Sicilian wine.4 At the same time, Louis de Boisgelin suggested that the usual Maltese diet consisted of li le more than ‘a clove of garlic, or an onion, anchovies dipped in oil, and salt-fish’, whilst also asserting that ‘Figs when dried in the oven, furnish, with a li le barley-bread, the principal sustenance of the numerous and finely-formed inhabitants of the islands’.5 A couple of decades later, Thomas MacGill observed a similar diet, based around ‘bread made at home’, which was eaten with a relish of ‘cheese, olives, onions, garlick [sic], dried fruits, salt-fish, [and] oil’, with seasonal fruit and vegetables eaten freely.6 In the evening, the poor ate a hot meal of minestra or cooked vegetables. A er eighty years of British rule, official reports suggest that li le had changed, with bread and pasta constituting ‘almost the sole food of the working classes, who rarely eat meat’.7 Such accounts are typical and paint a picture of a static, unchanging people; dietary conditions presumed a natural continuation from previous centuries. But was this really the case? Much of what is known about the diet of low-earning Maltese inhabitants derives from observations reported by visitors to the islands, many of whom were colonial officials, military men or in some other way associated with Europe’s ruling classes. If one reads multiple travel accounts of Malta, it becomes evident that the same points are repeatedly highlighted: the industrious cultivation of the islands despite the lack of soil; a frugal, bread-based diet supplemented by soup; copious consumption of Sicilian wine; and the dependency of the islands on imported provisions.8 While some of the published repetition may be down to one author copying from his predecessors, the points are interesting in that they have contributed to a historical meta-narrative of stasis.9 Changes in diets, food processing and eating practices are masked, as are any changes not immediately obvious to colonial observers, to whom the whole foodway was foreign and unintelligible. A late nineteenth-century report provides an unusually detailed description of Maltese eating practices: The people bring their batch of bread with them to their work and eat it with a li le oil, a small piece of fish, or a slice of cheap Sicilian cheese, by way of relish. When they can afford it, they drink from half a pint to a pint of the common wine with their meal; but in the country districts wine is not a usual item of daily food. Spirits are largely consumed by the labouring class, especially by those working in the harbours and in town.10

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By focusing solely on the midday meal, it is clear that the reporter has described his observations, yet has failed to comprehend the networks, processes and social relationships involved in the production and eating of the meal. In the following sections I reconstruct the foodways of free, non-elite Maltese people and argue that, despite significant similarities in diet over time, the processes, networks and social relationships at play were dynamic and complex.

Daily Bread One cannot overstate the importance of both home-grown and imported grain for the inhabitants of Malta. From before the Order’s rule until the Second World War, grain-based products – bread or pasta – constituted the principal staple foods in a frugal diet, providing the overwhelming majority of most islanders’ daily calories. Although Malta imported vast quantities of grain, most home-grown grain was processed locally as needed, as grain keeps far be er and for longer than flour, which is prone to insect and mould infestations. Moreover, both grain and flour are costly and awkward to transport. Underground chambers, or fossae, dug into the limestone bedrock provided the storage solution. They could be sealed fast and kept grain fit for use for a number of years, depending on how successfully airtight and watertight the closing: grain was laid on ‘beds of wood and straw placed at the bo om, on which it was spread. When these were entirely filled, they were closed by a large stone, which was plastered over with puzzolana’.11 Administered by the Università, several large and communal fossae were constructed in the harbour area during the seventeenth century and many exist built into the islands’ fortifications.12 Smaller underground granaries were ubiquitous, with some nineteenth-century streets reportedly containing more than a hundred. So suitable were fossae to Malta’s geology and climate that they were considered appropriate for maintaining a corn reserve for Great Britain in the early nineteenth century and the last fossos went out of use as late as the 1960s.13 Given Malta’s humid climate and the number of fossae, it seems that grain was always kept in preference to flour, which at the beginning of the Order’s rule translates into most grain being ground into flour in the home on a daily basis. While hand-grinding at home did surely not become obsolete overnight, over the centuries, flour production became commercialized through the appearance of increasingly large and industrialized mills. Due to the intervention of several Grandmasters, mills prolifer-

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ated around the islands in the seventeenth century. Evidence exists for animal-powered mills, but the majority were windmills. In urban areas, some have been associated with grinding charcoal for gunpowder rather than grain for bread, although records are scant.14 As long-lived buildings, many mills built during the seventeenth century will have had multiple and recurring uses into the following centuries. Two rare examples survive in Bormla; those at San Ġwann t’Għuxa and St Margherita were both built in the late seventeenth century and while they may have originally been used to produce gunpowder, they were definitely grinding grain by the nineteenth century. Simon Mercieca and Joseph Muscat argue that countryside windmills and those located outside or on the edge of villages were exclusively used for flour production.15 If this is correct, the question of whether these mills were used to grind locally grown or imported grain (or both) remains unanswered. Two of the key aspects of large-scale milling in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the conversion to steam-power and a move away from traditional stone-grinding to roller plants. Louis Farrugia established a small mill with four pairs of grinding stones in 1892, erecting a roller plant in 1901 and a further plant for processing hard and so wheat in 1906, all in Ħamrun. The la er incarnation, the Victoria Steam Roller Four Mill, was described as the pinnacle of milling: ‘nowhere in Malta is the application of machinery to the preparation of the staple commodity of life be er exemplified’.16 Likewise, millers Ant. Cassar and Figli started out in Żebbuġ in 1885 with a stone-grinding mill, but built the four-storey St George’s Mills at Marsa in 1903, employing Rochdale firm T. Robinson and Son Ltd for its design and erection. Until at least 1914, both the Żebbuġ and Marsa mills ran concurrently.17 As the number of flour mills increased, so did the number of commercial and state-run bakeries. In urban centres, bakeries played an important role in providing bread for town dwellers and military populations, whether the navies or army garrisons. The Order had its own bakery in Valle a and the King’s Bakery was built for the Royal Navy on the shore of Dockyard Creek (see below). At around the same time, enterprising businessmen began to establish commercial bakeries. Frederick Blackley served all but the poorest residents of Valle a through a retail outlet. A er his death, his daughter Laura Emma Blackley continued the business and invited Edwin Herbert Morris into a partnership in 1893, who built a new factory in Pièta in 1907, a modern ‘model bakery’ that furnished residents of the capital with a wide range of Britishinfluenced breads and confectionaries.18 Bread, like grain, was graded and a socioeconomic status symbol.19 Prized fine wheat bread cost the

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most and was therefore beyond the means of the populace until the end of our period. The majority of Maltese ate barley bread, or perhaps mischiato, a mixture of barley and wheat that contained higher proportions of barley during times of economic pressure.20 At a domestic level, bread-baking constituted a prominent daily household activity rooted in community-based and neighbourly relationships, as local country bakeries were a relative latecomer. Large, locally made earthenware basins seen in the previous chapter are appropriate for mixing family-sized quantities of dough at home, although not necessarily for rising bread dough, as porous earthenware is liable to remain cooler than the ambient temperature in Malta’s humid climate. Inquisition records suggest that in the late sixteenth century, it was common practice for women21 to knead bread in the evenings and leave it overnight in wooden troughs before baking it the next morning. Not everyone had their own oven and the use of a neighbour’s was common.22 Even if each user provided their own fuel, survival depended on access to an oven in which one’s bread could be baked – an oven to which access could be granted and denied. Using another’s oven necessitated negotiating a relationship that, unless it in some way became reciprocal, made one household beholden to another, creating an important relationship that was likely to be as central, if not as foundational, to the organization of a village’s social structure as that of the Church. Public or commercial bread ovens developed in clusters around the principal population centres, tending to the daily needs of inhabitants. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Qormi housed so many bread ovens that it was also known as Casal Fornaro (‘village of the ovens’).23 However, commercial bakers, where one could purchase ready-made bread, were a largely urban phenomenon. In 1859 the British colonial government constructed public ovens in an a empt to ‘break through a monopoly de facto enjoyed by a few bakers’.24 In the countryside, public bread ovens slowly substituted the neighbourly agreements of previous generations, providing a place to which households took their ingredients to make their own dough and have it baked by a baker. The practice survived until the Second World War, by which point bakeries had stone counters ‘containing sink-like depressions where people would mix and knead their own dough’.25 However, the rural situation was by no means monolithic and multiple bread-baking practices continued side by side, depending on a household’s affluence, facilities and preferences at any given time. Therefore, although each village had at least one bakery with an oven by the close of the eighteenth century, home-baking remained common in the early twentieth century if one had an oven.26

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Crucially, bread making seems to have undergone two major transitions between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. First, the grinding of grain slowly became mechanized. If home-baking did not die out, then it is likely that neither did the hand-grinding of grain in the home. Paying a miller to grind grain that could be ground at home for free will have been an extra expense for a population the majority of whom had li le disposable income. Rather, grain produced on one’s own – or leased – land (for those whose land was sufficient) was processed by hand in the home, and milled flour, rather than imported or local grain from the ‘centralized’ stores of the Università, became a more frequently purchased item for those who could afford it. Therefore, it makes sense that mills increasingly ground grain, slowly replacing home-grinding and freeing time up for activities economically beneficial to the household, such as spinning co on. Second, while home-baking remained a popular option for those who had the facilities, ovens ceased to be the site of inter-household relationships based on reliance and cooperation; instead, the focus of activity moved to the village bakery, changing the social structure of village life. It is clear that neither the transition from home-ground to milled flour nor the decline of using a neighbour’s oven in preference to public bakeries was swi or complete. Some villages had a bakery before others, larger villages frequently had multiple bakeries and small hamlets had none. Similarly, not every village had easy access to a flour mill. Nevertheless, under the Order’s rule, traditional village relationships evolved and production of the staple food was taken out of the home and o en put into the hands of specialists: millers and bakers. As the workforce was mobilized towards co on production (see Chapter 3), the Order organized their basic needs and controlled the supply of grain and many other foodstuffs – a system that continued under the British. Intensive development of the harbours and dockyards encouraged an urban population with increasing cra specialization, in addition to an array of opportunities for unskilled labourers, coal heavers and porters.

Pasta and Poverty Food historians have recently problematized simple correlations drawn between grain production or importation and bread consumption, questioning the role of bread as the sole end product. Giovanni Rebora argues that ‘the notion that with grain one can produce flour, from which pasta can be made by hand, seems to have occurred to almost no one, not even when confronted with evidence of grain im-

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ports of hard grain destined for the fabrication of dried pasta in a pasta cu er’.27 Pasta had spread around the Mediterranean by the sixteenth century, with macaroni already considered to be a ‘typical dish of the Sicilians’.28 However, the variety of pasta consumed by the majority in Malta was relatively unsophisticated and simpler. Spread by coral fishermen and others from North Africa into the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Western Mediterranean, it was the predecessor of what is today ubiquitously referred to in Western supermarkets as couscous, although the North African kuskussù consisted originally of less uniformly sized pellets, which one would create by hand from moistened semolina.29 A variety consisting of larger pellets – approximately three millimetres in diameter, when dry – survives in Malta’s national cuisine as kusksu and, now as in the past, it is typically eaten in soups. Pasta requires different, harder kinds of wheat compared to those o en used to make bread, although the British found that in Malta, Greek polacca ships were importing hard Egyptian wheats for what they assumed was bread production.30 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of steam-powered mills mechanized flour production and by the end of the century, millers such as Farrugia and Sons Ltd had branched out into the mechanized production of macaroni, spaghe i and vermicelli, supplying the other staple food of the poor.31 Visitors were quick to observe the relative poverty in which the majority of Maltese lived. Adolphus Slade claimed that in the towns, beggars appeared to ‘grow on the street’.32 In the country, poverty was endemic, though perhaps less overtly visible to foreigners, not least because many seldom wandered far from the harbours unless to visit a palace or refined garden. Meagre incomes earned through agriculture or rural industries, such as co on spinning and weaving, forced many to spend their entire incomes on basic necessities, with li le or nothing le over.33 Low-earning cra -producers, including the earthenware manufacturers discussed in the previous chapter, were particularly hard-hit unless they found ways to supplement their incomes.34 Rural the also become a problem, forcing farmers to employ (frequently overpowered) watchmen, adding yet further expenses.35 On top of all this, the islands’ limited agricultural capacity meant that Malta keenly felt the burdens of feeding a burgeoning population. Population growth was a European-wide problem in the nineteenth century and many states embraced the potato as a primary food source for increasingly industrialized communities.36 While Malta’s elites had grown the potato in botanical gardens since the 1770s, it was not until forty years later that the British introduced the potato as a general crop in an effort to reduce the islands’ dependency on imported grains.37

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Potatoes were not popular with the Maltese and official annual reports only start listing them separately from the turn of the twentieth century, by which time potato crops occupied 14.3 per cent, or 4,837 acres, of all cultivated land.38 Rather than feeding the local population, the warm climate of the Mediterranean provided a new-season crop that found a market in Britain. Export and import merchants, such as the Maltese Walter Briffa, not only exported potatoes, onions and cumin from Malta, but imported many of the seeds used in Maltese agriculture, highlighting that even ‘home-grown’ vegetables comprised part of the increasingly globalized food economy of the late nineteenth century.39 The development of Maltese agriculture and food industries meant that the islands now made once-imported foodstuffs, including pasta, with others replaced by imports of new specialist products. Tomatoes became increasingly important, especially once canned ‘tomato juice’, or passata, became available from Sicily at the end of the nineteenth century.40 Fresh meat and fish were largely absent from the diets of urban and rural labourers. In 1582, it was reported that the islands abounded with rabbits and hares, which has convinced some that rabbit was widely available and eaten by peasants. While seen as a national dish today, the knights enjoyed hunting and created a series of laws denying peasants the right to hunt rabbits and hares, wildfowl or migrating birds on common land, which were only revoked in 1773.41 Similarly, the pigs that roamed the streets of towns and villages belonged mostly to the Church and their convents, and were not for public consumption.42 Much later, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Malta imported unprecedented numbers of ca le, but most were destined for the tables of military men and merchants. In 1878, Maltese families consumed only two-fi hs of all imported meat; a class of upwardly mobile merchants, entrepreneurs, government administrators, soldiers and the old Maltese elite enjoyed the rest.43 Nearly a quarter of a century later, li le had changed, with the poor only able to afford the ‘refuse’ of frozen meat imported for the garrison.44 Domestically reared livestock consisted mostly of goats, which were reared ostensibly for milk production rather than specifically for eating (see Table 3.1). Similarly, fish was not in great supply, despite Boisgelin’s claim that fish ‘is very abundant on the Maltese coast, and being both common and cheap, is a great resource of the inhabitants’.45 Perhaps the season in which he observed such markets caused his view to err, but in general, the Maltese ate surprisingly li le fresh fish. Unlike the Atlantic and the North Sea, the Mediterranean was not a fish-laden larder. For Maltese fisherman, the sea represented risk: whether being captured by

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Barbary corsairs or just arriving home empty-handed. Throughout the region, all but the wealthy had to make do with small fish, such as sardines, which could be caught in quantity with a net.46 Under the British, Maltese fishermen were no longer hampered by the perils of being caught by slavers, but were nonetheless constrained by restrictions imposed on fishing grounds, with fishing forbidden in many coastal waters. Furthermore, those eking out a living through fishing were kept at a subsistence level by middlemen to whom a catch had to be sold before reaching the central market.47 The market system had developed under the Order’s rule and, like other industries including earthenware production, fishing was regarded as negligible and unprofitable, so was largely ignored by later colonial administrations. Preserved meats and especially preserved fish were available and more commonly eaten. Under the Order, this meant preserved fish from Sicily, Italy and around the Mediterranean, but as part of the British Empire, herrings and smoked haddock became available, as did airdried Atlantic cod, or ‘stockfish’. In the nineteenth century, the United States exported salted fish directly to Malta.48 The range of ingredients available to a non-elite Maltese family varied through the centuries and it is clear that technology played a part in supplementing traditionally preserved foodstuffs with new canned and processed products. The networks of the Order and the British also played roles in both determining which products derived from European expansionism made their way to Maltese shores and ensuring access to basic imported staples. What did not change drastically is the relatively low percentages of animal-based protein. If meat or fish were on the menu, it would usually be boiled up into a soup with pasta, but mostly the soup contained only pasta and vegetables.49

Around the Soup Pot Traditional soups remain popular in Maltese home cooking. The ingredients of a twenty-first-century recipe for Kusksu bil-ful, a broad bean and pasta soup, reads like a po ed history of Maltese food: broad beans, tomato paste, onions, potatoes, kusksu, fresh or frozen peas, salt, pepper, chicken or vegetable stock, parmesan cheese, fresh ġbehniet (sheep’s cheese), olive oil and water.50 Mass production of hard Italian cheeses, such as parmesan, have made them economically accessible to wider swathes of the population, the Church no longer regulates chicken consumption, which in early modern times was usually restricted to festivals or feeding the sick, and nineteenth-century additions of potatoes and tomatoes are supplemented by today’s frozen peas. Nevertheless,

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the general assemblage of available vegetables, pasta and oil boiled up together echoes the basics of a seventeenth-century concoction. Making soup requires no elaborate equipment, but it does require a heat source. Historically, the Maltese answer has been the kenur (pl. kwiener), a stove hewn from Coralline limestone, it being the harder and more heat-resistant of the two local stones (Figure 4.1). The ingenious form persisted into the twentieth century and is so inherently connected with Maltese food and culture that it became an icon of pre-independence anticolonialism and post-independence national identity, represented through images on coins and stamps. There was no standard size – I have seen kwiener ranging from 30 cm3 to 70 cm3 – and it is likely that every household had one. Horizontally, it is divided by a grate, atop which sits a cooking pot and below which fuel burns. The system is mimicked in the kenur tal-fuħħar (‘stove of clay’), the more portable earthenware version (see Chapter 3 under the heading ‘Cra Production’). Firewood and charcoal were frequently imported,51 but it is unlikely that such an expensive commodity would have fuelled labourers’ cooking activities. As in the firing of earthenware discussed in the previous chapter, scrub and twigs provided the most common and accessible fuel source, but sources also record the burning of roo opdried animal dung and thorns, while older generations remember candles proving the heat source used in clay braziers during the a ermath of the Second World War.52 The multiple sizes in which a kenur came contributed to its versatility. Despite being made of heavy stone, its frequently small size enabled residents of Valle a, for instance, to cook on the balconies of their tenements.53 Where possible, food was prepared outside: while working in Malta as a colonial government official (1804–5), Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that it was the habit of the Maltese to cook on ‘fire pots’ (braziers) just outside their doors.54 Whether on a stone stove or a clay brazier, once the fuel was burning, a cooking pot was required. Rather than locally made pots, Maltese favoured a more heat-resistant earthenware produced in the Messina Straits area of Sicily around the town of Pa i (Figure 4.2). Po ers from this area, unlike the Maltese, glazed the insides of their vessels, making them impervious to liquids and ideal for cooking. In addition to a range of smaller skillets, useful for frying fish or preparing smaller meals, they also produced larger ‘soup pots’, which could sit safely on top of a stone stove or clay brazier. Maltese earthenware made its contribution in the form of water jugs and bowls in which vegetables were prepared. Foreign observers frequently commented on the unfamiliar stoves and the usefulness of Maltese braziers for making coffee,55 but they

140 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Figure 4.1. Maltese stoves. Top le : woman using a kenur tal-fuħħar table-top in the home, with a l-Imnara si ing next to it (Anon. ‘Cusina Maltese nel temo dell’ordinare’, 1841, FAS 0614, pencil on paper, Inv. No. FAS 0614, Heritage Malta National Museum of Fine Arts); top right: boy using kenur tal-fuħħar in conjunction with a pâgna and cooking pot made of a dark red (Sicilian) pottery (Charles Frederick de Brocktorff (1775–1850), ‘Maltese Making Helowa [Ħelwa]’, coloured lithograph, Inv. No. FAS/P/498; 1011-2, Heritage Malta National Museum of Fine Arts); middle: early twentieth-century kenur tal-fuħħar (ETHN/CER/36; 11291-2, Heritage Malta Inquisitor’s Palace and National Museum of Ethnography); bo om: top and side views of a stone kenur. Photographs by the author.

Foodways • 141

Figure 4.2. Sicilian cooking vessels from Dockyard Creek: (a) and (b) cooking pots exhibiting sooting; (c) flat-based pan missing handles. Images by the author.

provide few observations of eating practices beyond those already cited. The role of eating together has long been recognized as important in the negotiation of cultural identities, forming social bonds and relationship affirmation,56 although the idea of a household seated around a table, preparing to eat together a er a day’s work is perhaps be er suited to an industrialized, urban situation. The social hierarchy of table manners developed in northern Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was part of a ‘civilizing process’ that had yet to take hold in non-elite Malta, where other modes of eating existed.57 In his ethnographic study of traditional earthenware-using households in Cyprus, Ioannis Ionas observed that family members o en served themselves from a central pot of soup and ate wherever they liked in the family’s courtyard. Furthermore, they ate their soup from simple earthenware bowls almost identical in form to the simple bowls described in the previous chapter as Maltese ‘eating bowls’.58 A functional use such as individual eating explains the higher numbers of these bowls found archaeologically. However, in desperate times – and Malta had many – a household need not own much in the way of crockery. As Ionas observed in Cyprus, while a minimum of food preparation and storage vessels are essential, ‘it was easy to eat directly from the cooking-pot and do without [bowls]’.59 Such eating pa erns may appear fractured and unsociable to today’s Western sensibilities, but bear in mind that rural inhabitants most likely spent many hours a day working with at least some household members, and mealtimes did not represent the family-oriented gathering they do in industrialized societies. The material culture of everyday eating and drinking suggests that, despite the transformations in flour milling, changing relationships

142 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

based on neighbourliness and bread-baking, and increased access to processed foods, the labouring Maltese maintained their eating habits (if not ingredients) over many generations. Small eating bowls fit broader pa erns of increasing individualization that occurred in the northern Mediterranean and North Atlantic worlds over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but contrast with notions of drinking from shared water and wine jugs.60 At the end of the Order’s rule, the dining situation of most Maltese must have looked a long way from individual place se ings marked by matching sets of crockery. Nonetheless, just such a material culture arrived when the British took control. By the mid-nineteenth century, British ceramics appear to have started to make their mark on the rural populations. Alasdair Brooks’ study of the Staffordshire Gaze e demonstrates that ceramic exports leaving Liverpool for Gibraltar and Malta increased by 30 per cent from 1860 to 1861.61 Does the apparent uptake of British ceramics indicate a change in diet or eating practices? Certainly, it is clear from contemporary Malta that many British dietary customs were assimilated,62 but it does not automatically follow that because Maltese slowly accepted British tablewares into their households that eating practices drastically changed. British ceramics recorded from the Malta Survey Project date to the second half of the nineteenth century and all appear to be open forms: bowls and plates. These indicate the presence of tablewares only, not teawares or cooking wares. While the limited accumulation of British teawares, tablewares and cooking wares for purposes other than eating, such as display, many not be totally dismissed, it would seem that eating, rather than cooking, was being influenced, resulting in a hybridized foodway. The coexistence of Maltese eating bowls and British plates suggest a diversification of eating practices; something along the lines of ‘everyday’ and ‘special occasions’, as the mass-produced, pa erned crockery slowly became incorporated into daily routine and made commonplace. If this is so, might it also suggest a mirrored development in the food eaten? The gradual increase of meat in the diet of the poor is unlikely to represent any significant trend towards dryer, more meat-and-potatoes-based food for special occasions and liquid soups for every other day. While at first glance, the incorporation of plates might support such an argument, nineteenth-century plates were substantially deeper than those we use today and would have done for thick soups. Instead, a shallower receptacle assumes – if not necessitates – eating from a table. Maltese diets were most certainly not static and incorporated new ingredients over time, but rather than the ingredients, the greatest

Foodways • 143

change Maltese foodways experienced realized itself in a shi in eating practices: from a pa ern of dispersed consumption to kin-based or household dining.

Restricted Foodways For most of our period, many (though not all) choices regarding food were limited economically and socially, but for some, choices were substantially diminished. The restriction of food choices is common in many institutional environments. Forcing everyone to consume the same meals or limiting dietary options not only works towards homogenization and de-individualization, but it also provides a practical way of ensuring that there is sufficient food for a large number of people. Food regulation was central to the major charitable and penal institutions of Victoria’s empire; from prisons to workhouses, food was governed both fiscally and nutritionally, resulting in restrictions on choice and quantity. While on land the greatest limitation for authorities in ensuring that everyone had (just) enough to eat may have been financial, except during times of war and famine, the practicalities of food delivery were not generally an issue. At sea, if the captain did not load sufficient food and water on board, his crew would soon suffer the consequences. Providing sufficient rations for men at sea became the bane of eighteenth-century navies, as a voyage could last only as long as the crew had edible food. Salt-preserved meats lasted well, but other provisions had more limited lifespans. The concentration of Napoleonic-era naval ba les in the Mediterranean coincided with the rebuilding of Gibraltar a er its Great Siege (1779–83) and prompted British naval authorities to recognize the fortress-colony’s importance as a victualling station.63 In later years, the harbours and wharfs of Malta proved more suitable and it soon became the sole Mediterranean victualling station of the Royal Navy. The rations of an early nineteenth-century Royal Navy crew typically included bread or biscuit, meat (usually pork or beef), suet, some bu er and cheese, all washed down with beer. Growing awareness of certain medical conditions resulted in an increasing incorporation of vegetables into the diet as the century progressed. Rations given to officers were the same as those issued to sailors, although officers were more likely to benefit from the wine and live animals brought on board by the captain. A stable isotope study of bone collagen from seamen interred in Royal Naval Hospital burial grounds concludes that early nineteenth-century crews had a relatively high protein (meat and/or

144 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

fish) diet, compared to their working-class terrestrial counterparts.64 However, the mainstay of a diet at sea was bread or biscuit. As early as 1818, the Royal Navy entered into contracts for purchasing large amounts of wheat at Malta (120,000 lbs or 54,431 kg), to be converted into flour.65 Mirroring the planned centralization of victualling facilities in England, though pre-dating its implementation, most of Malta’s victualling stores and offices were at Birgu, along Dockyard Creek, with another cluster of stores and a bakery at Valle a.66 The Victualling Board found this bakery insufficient, so in 1848 a newly built bakery opened in Birgu. Variously referred to as the ‘naval’, ‘Queen’s’ or ‘King’s’ bakery, it catered to the needs of the Royal Navy, producing bread and biscuit.67 The bakery’s three floors mirrored the bakery at the Royal Clarence Victualling Yard, Gosport, built just a decade earlier.68 In the middle of the century, William Tallack describes the process of ‘steam biscuit making’ that he observed during a tour. A series of steampower mechanical devices separated the flour from the bran, mixed, kneaded and rolled the dough, before cu ing out hexagonal-shaped biscuits. A er twenty minutes baking, the cooled biscuits were stored in bags ready for the adjoining victualling department.69 By the very end of the century, the bakery no longer produced biscuit, only so bread (see below). Unlike victualling facilities at Deptford (Royal Victoria Yard) and Plymouth (Royal William Yard), Malta did not use kilndried flour, but only raw flour. Comparative data show that Deptford used 922,000 lbs (418,212 kg) of raw flour, Gosport 612,640 lbs (277,888 kg), Plymouth 419,470 lbs (190,268 kg) and Malta 865,703 lbs (392,676 kg).70 These figures suggest that at around the turn of the twentieth century, Malta baked nearly a third of the Royal Navy’s officially produced so bread.71 In the twentieth century, Malta’s potatoes would also feed crews on the onward voyages, but potatoes require large storage facilities the likes of which were not present in the smaller vessels of earlier years, such as the Order’s galleys.72 The Order confined galley slaves to prisons when ashore, yet it was at sea rather than on land that they had potentially more freedom to procure extra food items. Therefore, we remain at sea, following the foodways of the Order’s galleys before heading landwards to investigate changing prison foodways in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Documentary and archaeological evidence provides many clues for reconstructing the diets and foodways of galley crews in the Order’s navy, from lists of ingredients purchased to objects and food remains recovered from the seabed. The following section considers the supply and origin of food and drink, the preparation and consumption

Foodways • 145

practices associated with different socioeconomic demographics of the crew, as well as the practicalities of food storage and preparation on board. The foodways of the knights and officials on board are dealt with below (under the heading ‘Captain’s Table’).

Eating at Sea For a short period between 1639 and 1647, the Order a empted to streamline expenditure by essentially ‘outsourcing’ the supply of galley victuals, first to Bailiff Carlo Valdina and subsequently to Grand Master Lascaris. Unsuccessful in both instances and resulting in illequipped vessels, the practice reverted to individual captains taking responsibility for victualling their vessels.73 Before embarking on a voyage, a galley captain had to procure everything that might be needed, including food, drink and the utensils necessary for their preparation and consumption. For the Order’s galleys, this could mean not only loading what the captain could source in Malta, but also making Sicily a first point of call on the outward journey and visiting their victualling station at Augusta (see below under the heading ‘Captain’s Table’). Galley crews were entitled to free rations the quantities of which were regulated by the Grand Master.74 The Order’s navy was known for providing a decent diet for its rowers in comparison with other European navies, such as the French, and the Order recognized that rowers had to be fed and watered well enough to keep them strong and healthy. Nevertheless, galley rowers received the lowliest diets on board, amounting to one-twentieth of the cost of that of officials. In the eighteenth century, cheese became increasingly eaten by rowers, together with sardines and ‘tunny’ (tuna). Additionally, paid rowers – those who were not slaves or prisoners – received double the ration of wine compared to slaves. But not all slaves were equal. Baptized slaves received dietary benefits for being Christians, but had to abide by Catholic eating habits, including fast days.75 Sailors, minor officials and soldiers, who made up the Genti di Capo (nonrowing crew), were also subject to religious regulations. On fast days they typically ate tunny or sardines and on other days salted meat or cheese. Thick soup was available every day and eaten with ships biscuit. All crew and rowers had an entitlement to a daily ration of bread or biscuit, with the la er storing be er and lasting far longer than fresh bread. Therefore, the crew resorted to biscuit only once the supply of bread had been exhausted. Fresh bread from the Order’s bakery in Valle a, founded in 1584,76 went stale or mouldy within a few days and, unlike its longerlived cousin the rations of which were given twice daily, at midday

146 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

and evening, rations of fresh bread were distributed among the crew at port.77 The result produced a rare situation in which each crew member had control over his own food beyond that expected to last for a single meal, requiring a certain level of food management that may have encouraged the maintenance of one’s own eating implements. If so, the situation would imply that, despite the cramped conditions on board, rowers had some access to a small storage space, perhaps under or at the end of their benches. Within the confines of a galley, their room for the consumption of food and drink at mealtimes was restricted. In all likelihood, sailors and soldiers will have eaten in small groups, although convict and slave rowers had li le choice but to eat at their bench, as they did everything else. It has been suggested that rowers drank from wooden or tin-plate beakers and shared bowls with their bench-mates.78 The use of individual, or even individually owned, bowls is suggested by a relative abundance of unglazed, simple bowls recovered from Dockyard Creek.79 Given the simple diets of most on board, a small eating bowl would suffice for eating soup just as well as it could for a meal of sardines or cheese with bread or biscuit. Furthermore, marks scratched into the underside of bowls may indicate a empts at demarcating ownership. Individualized eating practices run against the communal eating George Angas observed in a seaborne se ing in the mid-nineteenth century, which involved Sicilian sailors on their way to Malta, ‘si ing around a large dish on deck, out of which they were eating their supper very quietly with wooden spoons’.80 If the situation were that individualized eating was encouraged on galleys, it would have served not only as a way to regulate food supplies, ensuring each rower was fed (and therefore strong enough for work), but also as a method of preventing disrupting arguments over who ate what, contributing to the disciplining of the men. Other signs of the scarcity of possessions on board for some include evidence of mending vessels, especially bowls and dishes. At sea, a finite supply of items exists, so if something gets broken, mending becomes a necessity. But it is also possible that there was some sort of hand-me-down economy that enabled glazed vessels to be used by the rower-class more frequently than on land. The presence of plain glazed bowls found in Dockyard Creek by archaeologists points to use by the socioeconomically heterogeneous paid rowers and crew, as does the presence of glazed earthenware jugs and costrels. It would seem probable that such vessels were used by individuals both for collecting their wine ration and for drinking it, negating the need for separate drinking vessels. Local common wines

Foodways • 147

loaded at port in Malta or in victualling stations in Sicily constituted the principal drink of this class and were stored on board in barrels. Wine consumption must have been deemed pleasurable, if not a luxury. Captains exploited the effects of wine as a stimulant, issuing extra rations to rowers during particularly arduous work, such as giving chase.81 Everyone on board could purchase extra wine rations, provided they had the means to do so. Slaves frequently sold whatever they could do without, including the clothes issued to them at the onset of a voyage, and made money in whatever business or trade they could ply when revictualling at Muslim islands. They also borrowed money on board, although the debts they could run up were restricted.82 Wine was not the only drink on board and there is nothing to suggest that a sailor, soldier or ingenious slave was incapable of procuring himself a quantity of aquavit, rum or some other alcoholic beverage.83 Nor was wine in limitless supply, though it would frequently last longer than water. Whether sailor or rower, the most vital resource at sea was fresh water. Drank ‘straight’, used to dilute wine or make soup, the ability to store and replenish water stocks dictated travel itineraries and the frequency of visiting ports of call. Water rations were carefully administered and distributed from barrels kept on the deck (unlike wine and most other alcoholic beverages, which would be stored in the hull). In order to prevent water evaporation or contamination, the barrels formed a closed system, opened only through a reed tap.84 When water ran out, crews turned to wine: a lack of soup necessitated the soaking of ships biscuit in wine in order to so en it enough to make it edible (see Table 4.1). The staple of the rowers was similar to that of other members of the crew insofar as it consisted of thick soup, albeit made with more basic ingredients. Principally, it contained water and preserved meats, such as salted ham, or a legume – o en broad beans – on fast days. Frequently containing pasta, it was more likely to contain vermicelli loaded on board at Sicily rather than the locally made kusksu eaten by Maltese on land (see above, under the heading ‘Pasta and Poverty’). Flour or oats thickened the water mixture, which was seasoned with pepper. Additions of oil or vinegar perked up the flavour and daily rations were served alongside ships biscuit. Due to the potential fire hazard, cooking was normally centralized and limited to once a day, preferably in the morning, so that it was possible to distribute a whole day’s ration together.85 Paid cooks and their (not always paid) assistants prepared food on board. Their main task of the day involved cooking the soups that provided the mainstay of everyone’s diet. Galleys contained a fuocone, a kind of hearth with ‘three metal pots suspended over three grills carefully positioned for quick je ison’.86 Coal fuelled

148 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Table 4.1. A list of galley victuals and their places of procurement, with an a empt to distinguish who ate what. Sources: Liam Gauci, In the Name of the Prince: Maltese Corsairs, 1760–1798. Malta: Heritage Malta, 2016, 111; William Zammit, ‘A Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Balance Sheet of a Galley of the Order of St. John’, in Toni Cortis and Timothy Gambin (eds), De Trirembus: Festschri in Honour of Joseph Muscat (Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2005), 531–33. Table by the author. Consumed by

Procured from (where known)

Knights

Officials

Sailors/ Soldiers

Rowers/ Slaves

Sick

Sicily

●

●

?

-

●

Cheese (Holland) The Netherlands

●

●

-

-

-

Piacentino cheese

Sicily

●

●

?

-

?

Salted cheese (Augusta)

Sicily

●

●

●

-

-

Bu er

Flanders

●

●

-

-

-

Lard paste

Barbary

●

●

●

●

●

Malta

?

?

?

?

?

Fresh peas

Malta

●

●

-

-

-

Lemons

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Onions

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Oranges

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Scorzanera (root vegetable)

Sicily

●

●

●

●

●

Strawberries

Malta

●

●

-

-

-

Tomatoes

Malta

●

●

-

-

-

Dates

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Dried iced prunes

Sicily

●

-

-

-

-

Mediterranean

●

●

●

?

●

Raisins with moscatella

Italy

●

●

-

-

-

Marmalade

Mediterranean

●

●

?

?

?

Victual Dairy Cacioavallo cheese

Eggs Fresh fruits and vegetables

Diced and preseved fruit, nuts

Raisins

Foodways • 149

Consumed by

Procured from (where known)

Knights

Officials

Sailors/ Soldiers

Rowers/ Slaves

Sick

Mediterranean

●

●

?

?

?

Almonds

Mediterranean

●

●

?

?

?

Pine nuts

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Walnuts

Mediterranean

●

●

?

?

?

Beans

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Broad beans

Malta

-

●

●

●

●

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Levant

●

●

●

●

●

Capers

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Olives

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Powdered mushrooms

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Salted mushrooms

Mediterranean

●

●

?

?

?

Victual Sour black cherries

Dried legumes

Chick peas Lentils Preserved vegetables

Livestock Chickens

Malta

●

-

-

-

●

Cows

Malta (via Barbary)

●

●

●

●

●

Duck

Malta

●

●

-

-

-

Mediterranean

?

?

?

?

?

Gallid’india (turkeys) Hens

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Mu on

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Pigeons

Malta

●

●

●

-

-

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Pork brains

Malta

●

●

-

-

-

Salted ham

Mediterranean

-

-

●

●

●

Italy

●

-

-

-

-

Veal Preserved meat

Soppressate (pork sausage)

(continued)

150 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Table 4.1 Continued Consumed by

Procured from (where known)

Knights

Officials

Sailors/ Soldiers

Rowers/ Slaves

Sick

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Levant

●

●

●

●

●

Anchovies (salted)

France

●

●

?

-

-

Bo arga (salted tuna roe)

Malta

●

●

?

-

-

Calamari

Malta

●

●

?

-

-

Dentex fish

Malta

●

●

?

?

?

Victual Tobacco Tobacco Pipe reads Preserved fish

Dired tuna cavier

Barbary

●

●

●

-

●

Dried salted cod

Atlantic

-

●

-

-

-

Herring (salted)

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

-

Salmon

Mediterranean

●

●

-

-

-

Sardines (salted)

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Sorra (row)

Mediterranean

?

?

?

?

?

Tuna (salted)

Mediterranean

●

●

?

?

?

Cold cuts of tuna (fresh)

Mediterranean

●

●

-

-

-

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Mallorca

●

●

-

-

-

Flour Common flour Flour Grains Rice

Mediterranean

-

●

●

-

●

Wheat oats

Mediterranean

-

-

●

●

●

Sicily

-

-

-

-

-

Extra crips bread (bran)

Malta, Sicily

?

?

?

?

?

Fresh bread (bran)

Malta, Sicily

-

●

-

-

-

Fresh bread from auberges

Malta, Sicily

●

-

-

-

-

White biscuit (bran)

Malta, Sicily

-

?

●

●

●

Grain for resell Bread/biscuit

Foodways • 151

Consumed by

Procured from (where known)

Knights

Officials

Sailors/ Soldiers

Rowers/ Slaves

Sick

Malta and Gozo

●

●

●

●

●

Italy

●

●

-

-

-

Sicily, Italy

?

?

●

●

●

Black pepper

Mediterranean

●

●

?

-

-

Cinnamon

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Cloves

Mediterranean

●

●

?

?

?

Malta

●

●

●

-

-

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Victual Oil Olive oil Pasta Fine pasta Vermicelli (Spaghe ini) Spices, flavouring

Mint Nutmeg Rose water

Mediterranean

?

?

?

?

?

Salt

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Sugar

Mediterranean

●

●

?

-

?

Truffle (Tartufo)

Mediterranean

●

?

-

-

-

Levant

●

?

-

-

-

White pepper

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Vinegar

Mediterranean

●

●

●

●

●

Vanilla

Drinks Chocolate

Americas

●

●

●

●

●

Martinique

●

●

●

-

-

Orangeade

Malta

●

●

?

?

?

Water

Malta

●

●

●

●

●

Coffee

Wine, common

Sicily, Malta

-

-

●

●

●

Wine, foreign

France, Italy

●

●

-

-

-

Wine, Verdea

Italy, Ionian Islands

●

●

?

-

?

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the fuocone, which most likely came from northern Europe; coal was being imported from Newcastle as early as the sixteenth century, although the many islands and se lements do ed along the Mediterranean coastline provided ample opportunity to procure firewood.87 Some pots and pans used for making food have survived archaeologically. While the large metal cauldrons are long since gone, smaller po ery vessels related to preparing and storing food account for a third of the vessels recovered from Dockyard Creek. Almost half of these come from the same area in Sicily (Pa i) as the glazed earthenware pots typical in Maltese foodways (see above).88 As on land, the undersides of many are stained black with the remnants of soot (Figure 4.2a and b). Whether or not these vessels would have been suitable for cooking on the fuocone as described above is debatable, but there are several other possible explanations: first, it is unlikely that the comparatively small amount of soup required for the captain’s table was made in a large vessel; second, the captain’s table required food other than soup; and, third, some of the cooking pots may have been for use not on the fuocone, but on small braziers. Importantly, these braziers differ significantly in form from the kenur tal-fuħħar that comprised such an integral part of terrestrial foodways in Malta. However, chemical and mineralogical analyses of samples from them confirm that they are of Maltese origin.89 It could be that the Order commissioned Maltese po ers to produce specifically for its galleys within one of the navy’s own workshops, or that the Order employed non-Maltese po ers in Malta, resulting in braziers made from Maltese clay, but lacking the culturally defined shape of the Maltese braziers. The presence of braziers opens up the possibility of small-scale cooking and some level of self-sufficiency. Furthermore, most of the cooking jars and flat-based pans from Pa i would fit well on a brazier, which would point to individualized cooking. However, they would need to have procured ingredients and it may merely reflect the meals made by the crew le on board at harbour rather than at sea. Either way, on board the galleys, most rowers and crew were cooked for and afforded only minimal and occasional input into the preparation of their food. The control of food and its production is a method typical of institutional contexts, as we shall now see in the case of terrestrial prisons.

Prison Foodways As penology developed in the eighteenth-century North Atlantic world, administering food became one of the principal instruments of pro-

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viding daily routine and regulation. At Corradino civilian prison, the superintendent’s journal for the 1860s contains li le other than information regarding prison timetables, except descriptions of mealtimes and lock-up times.90 The prison environments I discuss below demonstrate the partial and uneven pa ern in which these ideas were taken up outside of the North Atlantic metropoles. In order to highlight the differences and similarities between the institutional foodways in each of the prisons, this section will develop thematically addressing food procurement, cooking and preparation, before considering eating practices. The scant historical information available about the food inmates received in the Inquisitor’s prison is mostly anecdotal. In 1739, Inquisitor Mgr Ludovico Gualterio Gualtieri (1739–43) lamented that he had insufficient funds to provide each prisoner with preserved meats or soup, only daily rations of two loaves of coarse bread, some cheese (probably local fresh goat’s cheese) and onions, yet other records confirm that soup was eaten.91 Archaeological evidence provides some further clues. Excavated cooking utensils and braziers also contradict Mgr Gualtieri, which is no surprise as inmates could obtain extra supplies through the gaoler and other intermediaries. The two English Quaker women imprisoned in the mid-seventeenth century refused hens offered as a bribe for taking Holy Communion from Inquisitor Mgr Gierolamo Casanate (1658–63) and the wife of the English consul brought the women food, though they did not eat it as they thought it might be poisoned.92 Katherine Evans repeatedly fasted in protest against her incarceration and as part of her pious devotion, which led to a weakened bodily state. When a friar enquired what she might require, Evans replied ‘something hot to eat’, which almost certainly referred to soup.93 A series of small earthenware ‘eating bowls’ recovered also conforms to the more liquid diet of a simple soup, made from vegetables, oil and pasta, and eaten with bread. Such a diet does not differ in any practical way from that of most ‘free’ Maltese, or indeed from prisoners in the nineteenth century. In the Ospizio, female inmates ate a rotating diet that consisted of soup on all days except Sundays. The daily ration included 20 ounces of bread, 3½ ounces of ‘paste’, oil for soup, one ration of fruit and another of vegetables, plus half an ounce of coffee and the same of sugar. Additional foods created routinized variation: olives on Mondays and Thursdays, cheese on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and salt fish on Tuesdays and Fridays. On Sundays, the lack of oil and addition of meat (six ounces of pork) suggest a day without soup and a drier meal. 94

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In Corradino’s first year of operation, fi y-eight of the eighty-five civilian inmates weighed more than once were found to have increased in weight, prompting imperial visitors to claim repeatedly over the years that the diet was too good.95 The ration to which a prisoner was entitled depended on his status and the day of the week. As a newcomer, an inmate received rations of 24 ounces of bread and half a pint of soup on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays (soup days), and 27 ounces of bread plus one ration of either cheese, olives or salt fish on all other days (dry days). A er three weeks’ imprisonment, the ration of soup doubled to one pint on soup days and the daily ration of bread increased by 4 ounces. It is noteworthy that the system penalized those incarcerated for short sentences, which, as discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, may have served to discourage recidivism or, given the comparatively large number of inmates serving short-term sentences, reduce the running costs of the prison. Inmates sentenced to hard labour received additional rations consisting of either an extra nine ounces of bread on soup days, half a pint of soup and half a ration of cheese, olives or salt fish on ‘dry days’, or four ounces of meat and a pint of coffee on Sundays.96 Inmates could also ‘earn’ extra food and drink, especially wine, through good behaviour (see Chapter 5, under the heading ‘Compliance’). Located in Floriana, the Ospizio was closer to the large urban markets than Corradino, but there is no indication that the prison’s matron had any involvement in procuring supplies for her charges. Nor were there any storage facilities within the prison ward. Rather, the prisoners received the same supplies delivered to the asylum inmates. Before 1872 in Corradino, the prison cook collected provisions for the inmates’ rations daily from the Ospizio, where they were stored.97 A er remodelling, Corradino’s kitchens and supplies received greater a ention; the kitchen had direct access to the storerooms and access to the ‘trade entrance’ via Yard 3 (see Figure 2.5). Tradesmen delivered food and other supplies directly to the prison stores without entering the prison proper. Regardless of how food made its way into the three prisons, there remains a significant difference between the cooking arrangements: at Corradino, the men received ready-prepared soup, increasing the degree of control over and institutionalization of inmates, but in the Inquisitor’s and Ospizio prisons, inmates cooked for themselves. Taking bread, cheese and onions may be an individualized affair, but cooking requires more effort and a li le skill. More importantly, cooking requires equipment and utensils. The presence of kitchens at the Inquisitor’s Palace and Mgr Casanate’s comment regarding giving prisoners soup do not necessarily suggest that inmates received cooked soup.

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Prison occupation-related archaeological deposits yielded a range of locally made earthenware bowls and Sicilian cooking wares bearing soot marks, together with examples of clay braziers (kenur tal-fuħħar) (see Figure 4.2 for similar examples). Collectively, these artefacts demonstrate that cooking took place within the cells and the prison courtyard. Katherine Evans makes it clear that had she accepted the Inquisitor’s gi of hens, the task of preparing them would have fallen to her fellow inmate, Cheevers: ‘And away he went to Sarah with the Hens, and told her that I was sick, and the Lord Inquisitor has sent two Hens, and I would be glad to eat a piece of one if she should dress one of them presently and the other tomorrow’.98 Preparing one hen immediately and the other the following day strongly suggests the hens were alive and that by ‘dressing’ them, Cheevers’ tasks would have included slaughtering and plucking, as well as cooking, the birds. Rations, it seems, consisted of ingredients rather than prepared foods, much like at the Ospizio prison. Here, the list of items issued to each woman included a soup plate, a dessert plate, two spoons (one table and one tea), a drinking pot and a coffee basin.99 Unlike their male counterparts at Corradino, who received ready-cooked soup and coffee, the women received rations of ingredients. However, the lack of cooking equipment listed above indicates that inmates pooled their rations and cooked communally in the yards. Perhaps the airing yards of each prisoner class contained a stone kenur. Cooking pots would not need to be listed, as they were not issued to individuals, but in such an environment, it is likely that they employed Sicilian vessels similar to those found at the Inquisitor’s prison. Cooking in groups serves many functions. During the winter months, Maltese humidity levels create a climate that feels much colder than the ambient temperature and encourages damp conditions, as already seen in Chapter 2. The warmth provided by hot food and its preparation will have no doubt provided a welcome respite from the cold and damp, as well as from the psychological negativity resulting from conditions in the cells. But in both institutional se ings, cooking also necessitated the negotiation of power dynamics through the organization and allocation of tasks. Communal food preparation forms a daily focal point for which inmates needed to cooperate if they were to benefit from the skills and pooled resources of others, thereby creating a situation in which inmate hierarchies may have formed, but that equally reinforced inmate solidarity. That inmates cooking within prisons has not been noted by historians of Malta is not surprising, since contemporaneous sources are unlikely to mention something that is merely an extension of a practice commonplace around the islands. Much less common, at least for all but the very wealthy, was to be cooked for.

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Unlike at the Inquisitor’s and Ospizio prisons, which despite existing under different political regimes are both incarnations of the ‘premodern’ prison, inmates at Corradino were not expected to cook for themselves. The prison employed a cook from the outset, with Angelo Zammit, the first recorded incumbent of the role, receiving an annual salary of £20. Not staying long, it would seem that Angelo le in the same year and Carmello Borg replaced him from 1 December 1851 on the same salary. Annual statements record no cook for 1853 and 1854, so presumably a series of temporary staff were engaged, or warders substituted for the cook. From 23 May 1855, stability came in the form of Paolo Chircop, who held the post of prison cook for a decade. Starting on an annual salary of £25, by the time he le the institution’s employ, he earned £33 a year, plus an extra £3 in lieu of quartering in the prison. Filippo Cauchi replaced Paulo on 1 December 1867, at which time the role had morphed from ‘cook’ to ‘warder and cook’. On an annual salary of £38 plus £3 housing, the job represented a marked increase from Filippo’s previous employment, which was as a porter at the Central Hospital (Floriana), where he earnt £30. Filippo’s previous employment record also demonstrates that prison cooks need not have had any particular gastronomic experience or facility. Rather, they were expected to follow a simple recipe, not worrying too much about the taste. The final cook listed for Corradino is Salvatore Grima, who started at the prison on 1 April 1872 on a salary of £35 and lived in, marking an increase of £5 plus lodgings from his previous role as Constable in the Interior Police. By 1884, he earned £39 a year and, having sought private quarters, received an extra £4 for lodgings. In line with other warders, his salary decreased in 1886 by £4, with what appears to have been a reorganizing of the warders into first and second classes. He le the prison in 1887, a er which time records no longer specify who is cook.100 Presumably, other warders took up the role, but the decision not to appoint another dedicated cook probably anticipated the opening of the female ward, as the female inmates were expected to cook both for themselves and their male counterparts. Not only cooking but also eating practices differed across the prisons. A er they collected their rations, prisoners at Corradino ate alone in their cells at prescribed times, whereas the Inquisitor’s prisoners could eat in their cells or in the courtyard, potentially together or alone, and as they pleased during daylight hours. Echoing closely the eating practices of free Maltese, food consumption vessels found at the prison include local earthenware ‘eating bowls’. Although inexpensive and commonplace, the bowls seem to have had an amplified value within the prison economy due to their scarcity, evidenced by mending similar to that

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Figure 4.3. Evidence of mending bowls from the Inquisitor’s prison. Images by the author.

seen on board the knights’ galleys (Figure 4.3). By contrast, the women at the Ospizio each had their own plate and spoons issued to them on entry and ate with women of their own prisoner class. As part of the process of institutionalization, differences based on material culture, even the ownership of eating utensils, were restricted by nineteenth-century prison authorities wherever possible. Yet for free members of society with wealth, the variety of available food items increased exponentially.

Globalized Foodways Nineteenth-century foodways of the poor and captive differed from those of previous centuries through the inclusion of an increasing amount of foreign, especially non-Mediterranean, foodstuffs. Yet, when we move the focus up the socioeconomic scale, the chronological division becomes less straightforward. During a late sixteenth-century visit to Malta, Philipp von Merode’s servant procured food for his master. On their first night at the German auberge, they simply consumed bread, meat and wine, but food purchased in the following days was more extravagant and included oranges, pomegranates, hazelnuts, nutmeg, foreign wines, rosewater, tuna, hens and a chicken pie. The servant also bought fuel with which to cook the ingredients, preparing on Friday a meat-free dish from fish, oil, vinegar, eggs and salad.101 Within two days of arriving, von Merode had sampled many of the delicacies early modern Malta had to offer, which included local and Mediterranean fresh goods, as well as spices traded from Asia and Africa. In subsequent centuries, new edible discoveries from the Americas and the Caribbean became both available and fashionable, from chocolate to tomatoes. By the early twentieth century, mechanization and steam-power enabled industrialists to manufacture more and faster than ever before. While technical developments in freezing, canning

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and bo ling ushered in new, long-lasting processed foods that survived global transportation. By examining the tables of a captain in the Order’s galley fleet and a Victorian army officer, these examples of more opulent eating will demonstrate how the diverse array of ingredients that became incorporated into the diets of the Order’s officials and British imperialists were linked to political aspirations and European fashions.

Captain’s Table Galley captains were at home in their environment, navigating currents and winds round the coasts of the Mediterranean on familiar sailing routes. Calling in at the same bays and harbours time and again, captains and crews forged trading relationships that enabled stores to be replenished. The island of Lampedusa offered the opportunity to replenish water supplies102 and small islands along the North African coast and in the Levant, even those inhabited by Muslims, frequently provided fresh supplies, with slaves sometimes engaged as brokers.103 The Order had a major victualling station at Augusta, Sicily, where it had a second bakery and where archaeological evidence shows that galley captains purchased many glazed and decorated ceramic vessels. Of the three main po ery groups represented in the assemblage from Dockyard Creek, the former galley-fleet home, one is Maltese earthenware similar to that used by those on land, the second is the equallyfamiliar glazed dark-red, iron-rich cooking ware hailing from the Pa i region in Sicily, while the third is more varied and less commonplace. It specifically links the activities of the Order’s galley fleet with the taking on of goods at Augusta: mineralogical and chemical evidence taken from sherds of the po ery demonstrate that it comes from the area around Augusta and Syracuse.104 The ‘Augustan’ po ery suggests a seventeenth-century date, given the destruction and disruption Augusta experienced during the earthquake and subsequent tsunami of 1693, although facilities at Augusta were rebuilt and extended in the early eighteenth century for the Order’s sailing fleet.105 It cannot be ruled out that the Order commissioned the po ery especially for its navy or, indeed, that the Order owned potteries in the area. Regardless, it would seem that captains took on many goods at Augusta on their outward journeys. During the long seventeenth century, a period that also equates roughly to the most active time of the Order’s navy, Maltese merchants supplied many foreign goods, while Maltese farmers offered a significant crop of fresh fruit and vegetables, along with fodder for livestock

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and a small amount of fresh meat.106 Produce came primarily from the villages, but urban areas also contributed. The Order’s bakery in Valle a was advantageously positioned to service not only urban-dwellers, but also the Order’s navy.107 Yet not all supplies were so inanimate. As well as salted meats, fresh butchered meat was taken on board at harbour to be consumed in the first few days. Living livestock provided the rest of the fresh meat and included calves, goats and sheep, plus chickens, hens and other fowl kept in coops. Although the church generally prohibited the free eating of fowl, chicken broth was frequently administered to the sick.108 Animal bones found among the po ery sherds in Dockyard Creek a est to the presence of mammalian livestock, as does a sheep or goat’s horn. The climate meant that fresh food fouled quickly, which is why so many dried, pickled and salted foods are listed by galley captains, the majority of which came in wooden barrels.109 A great disparity existed between ingredients procured for the captain’s table and those destined for rowers (see Table 4.1). Not only did the captain – and, by extension, all who ate at his table – have access to a wide range of ingredients, but the ingredients represented the more globalized economies in which the knights and their peers engaged. In particular, eighteenth-century additions seen over a century later in poorer diets, including tomatoes, strawberries and salted Atlantic cod, joined Mediterranean products, such as almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts, as well as grapes, olives and peaches, for all of which excavators found evidence in Dockyard Creek. Yet ingredients alone do not make a good meal and, following the courts of Europe, galley captains at times employed fashionable French cooks.110 Unlike catering for the crew, meals for the captain, knights and officials could be prepared on a much smaller scale, yet soup remained a mainstay of their diet, albeit made with more choice ingredients. Soup was served twice daily on fast days, o en with salted fish, and on other days with roast or cured meats, or meatballs. As on land, the captain’s table was subject to religious prohibitions, but also regulations specific to the Order’s navy: for instance, it was forbidden to take ovens on board.111 Nevertheless, a day’s food could comprise ‘helpings of roasted and boiled meat, thick soup, and [a] dessert of herbs and fruit according to the season’.112 In addition to cooking pots and utensils, the inclusion of twine for the kitchen in a list of nonfood victuals points to the preparation of food items such as stuffed joints of meat. The captain’s cabin lay within the poop, at the rear of the vessel. Shielded from the sun and rain, in the eighteenth century it became

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the se ing of lavish elite dining. French linen tablecloths and napkins adorned the captain’s table, which received further embellishment from decorative porcelain centrepieces.113 Servants served food onto silver plates with silver utensils and the captain’s guests ate with silver cutlery. There were many silversmiths in Malta and silverware was the fashionable table accessory of the wealthy. The navy secured the presence of silverware and the like through the Order’s centralized Common Treasury, which supplied such items on loan for each voyage.114 Further silver presents itself in the form of sugar bowls – potentially filled with sugar from the knight’s plantations in the Caribbean – supplied for consumption with coffee, which they drank from imported, probably porcelain, coffee cups.115 One captain recorded the purchase of a porcelain service ‘de la reine’, indicating that the service came from Fabrique de la Reine in Paris, the favoured porcelain manufactory of Marie-Antoine e.116 Although the captain bought the service for resale in Malta, it indicates not only the high aspirations of some knights but also their commitment to following the fashions of the French court and their spending power.117 A lack of silverware and porcelain in the archaeological assemblage is unremarkable, as captains carefully managed their prized possessions and returned the silver, at least, to the treasury. The absence of ceramic plates a ests to the use of metal (silver) eating implements; instead, most sherds of higher-end po ery come from bowls and dishes. While some are brightly decorated in polychrome painted pa erns, others are more utilitarian, epitomized by the plain white tin-glazed wares, but all contrast starkly with the unglazed earthenware vessels used by the crew and rowers. Rather than for eating from directly, these glazed items suited be er the distribution of food on the table. Two particularly interesting examples contain relevant depictions; a bowl containing the IHS monogram is the only overtly Christian symbol found among the assemblage and a sherd from a polychrome dish depicts a section of a square-rigged sail and top yard, making it the only maritime representation (Figure 4.4). The French influence and origin of many of the luxury goods on board the Order’s galleys is undeniable. Knights frequently took up senior roles in the French Navy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the increasing desire to eat in the style of French aristocrats can be seen as part of a broader aspirational trend across Europe. By the 1730s, even the relatively provincial Bourbon court at Naples followed French fashions.118 For the knights’ part, a vow of poverty did not get in the way of partaking in the superfluous consumption of globalized fashions, with many Maltese artisans engaged in the produc-

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Figure 4.4. Le : maiolica bowl with IHS monogram. Right: polychrome maiolica dish depicting part of a square-rigged sail. Images by the author.

tion of luxury goods, from silversmiths to cabinet and clock makers.119 Rather, members of the Order managed to indulge without the burden of material ownership; as with the silverware, much of the Order’s luxury goods belonged to the Order itself rather than to individuals. It is clear that even though many aspects of life would be restricted at sea, captains and knights managed to maintain their on-land diets and the socially prescribed pleasures of conspicuous and polite dining. Moreover, despite the potential for on-board clergy to relate opulence to the Inquisitor when back on land, at sea, captains were kings and knights largely self-regulated. Away from home and too many prying eyes, sea voyages may well have presented opportunities for less restraint, regardless of the physical and material limitations of what could be taken on board.

Victoria’s Officers From around the mid-1800s, Malta’s transient visitors had access to an ever-widening array of international goods not dissimilar to that available ‘at home’ in Britain, especially in London. For British residents, two principal routes of procurement presented themselves. The first solution was open to civil and military occupants alike and involved employing a local servant. While the positions of maid and governess were most frequently filled by women from Great Britain and Ireland,

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indigenous servants had the advantages of speaking the local language and understanding the market culture. In a description infused with colonial paternalism, Fredrick W. Ryan explains in his early twentiethcentury guide to Malta the benefits of engaging a local woman: The servants (se uri they are called in Malta) are faithful to the ‘sinur’ and ‘sinura’s’ [sic] interests, and, though o en illiterate, will render an exact account of every penny spent in the morning market. From this they will return in a lordly manner, followed by a small boy balancing gracefully upon his head a tall narrow basket containing the purchases for the daily needs. To those who would venture upon the gentle art of housekeeping for themselves, a li le book by ‘Fat Rabbit’, published locally, which tells of prices and places where to buy, will repay perusal. To watch Maltese peasant women doing their housekeeping, wrangling and haggling together over the price of olives or a chicken, gesticulating wildly, with expressive movements of the features and falde a amid a positive torrent of words, is an awe-inspiring treat.120

The second solution to food procurement involved dealing directly with the many merchants and shopkeepers who established outlets in Malta. Extending credit on ‘English terms’ to army canteens and officers’ and noncommissioned officers’ messes, concerns such as Messrs J.E. Mortimer and Co. promoted themselves as military suppliers in a competitive imperial market (see Chapter 6, under the heading ‘Material Networks’). Of the two solutions, the la er suited institutional procurement be er, though the two methods need not have been mutually exclusive. Couples billeted at an officers’ messhouse ate mostly apart from the other officers and it is therefore logical that they may have relied more heavily on the employment of local intermediaries. Bachelors, however, ate with their fellow officers in the mess dining room. Cooking facilities at the messhouse in Birgu appear to have been a far cry from those of an upper middle-class kitchen in England. An early nineteenth-century plan shows the ground-floor ‘Mess Kitchen’ to contain a ‘range’, while an adjoining scullery is fi ed with an ‘oven’ and sink. The second, smaller kitchen, located on the first floor, contained a small cooking range.121 Today, there are no traces of food preparation in what was once the mess kitchen, but the scullery still contains a stone sink, a stone cooking range and two stone ovens. It is noteworthy that in a 1609 plan, the scullery wall along which the later cooking range and ovens run shows a bank of Maltese latrines, which consisted ‘of a long shelving trough of porous stone, having an opening into a drain at its deepest end’.122 It is probable that the basic structure of the stone cooking range was fashioned out of the latrine, especially in the partial reuse of the stone shelf that made the range’s top surface, on which

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previous inhabitants once sat in order to defecate.123 Stone has a certain permanence, but the army enthusiastically endorsed removable steel cooking ranges from 1870 at the latest. As nonpermanent fixtures, they and other moveable objects seldom appeared on building plans.124 Mid- to late nineteenth-century kitchens were awash with objects made from metal. Far removed from the luxury silver items encountered on the early modern captain’s table, Queen Victoria’s army issued commonplace and mass-produced baking trays and roasting dishes fashioned from copper and ferrous alloys that were frequently enamelled. Ferrous-alloy objects tend to oxidize and degrade, or rust, over time and consequently do not survive well when buried in the ground. It is unsurprising, then, that archaeological evidence for metal cooking equipment is limited to what is le of a bowl and an enamelled saucepan; we can only assume the presence of enamelled metal utensils in the kitchen. Nonetheless, the greatest insights into the consumption habits of officers and other residents at the officers’ mess at the Inquisitor’s Palace have come from archaeological evidence. Nearly 42.8 per cent of finds relate to the storage, preparation and consumption of food, and another 16.8 per cent to drink, suggesting that eating and drinking played a significant role in the experiences of those billeted in the messhouse. At this point, it is useful to observe the distinction between the physical messhouse and the mobile institution of the officers’ mess that organized and structured daily activity wherever the regiment went. Plate (silver and commemorative porcelain) and utensils belonged to the officers’ mess of a particular regiment and moved with the company or ba alion, whether that meant along the coast to Fort Ricasoli or to Hong Kong. Unlike metal or porcelain, earthenware is heavy, cumbersome and generally low-value. Given that baggage allowance was regulated on a sliding scale dependent upon rank, with only 20 lbs (9 kg) of cooking utensils seen as sufficient for three officers, it is unsurprising that regiments le coarse Maltese or Sicilian ceramics behind.125 The numerous earthenware cooking vessels found archaeologically include a range of flat-based pans and skillets not dissimilar in shape and function from today’s frying pans, alongside traditional cooking pots with rounded sides and bases, and a lip at the rim that supported a lid. A cross between a modern saucepan and a handled casserole dish, these cooking pots reflect the tradition of cooking atop a stone kenur or its smaller earthenware relative, or on the stone range. Both flat and rounded vessels demonstrate evidence of sooting and, as on board the Order’s galleys and in Maltese foodways, iron-rich lead-glazed earthenware from Sicily (Pa i) dominated the local market for cooking wares

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(Figure 4.2). The functional difference between the ‘frying pans’ and the more saucepan-like pots reflects two traditional cooking techniques – namely, frying and boiling or stewing. Officers certainly ate stews and soups, though as a nineteenth-century chant reveals, they did not necessarily constitute the monotonous mainstay of their diets: Officers’ wives Get puddens and pies, A Sergeant’s wife gets skilly, But a private’s wife gets nothing at all, to fill her empty belly.126

Rather than soup, round-bo omed earthenware pots provided the necessary utensil for boiling water and vegetables (especially local potatoes), cooking sauces and preparing fillings for pies to be baked in the ovens. Flat-based pans were suitable for frying meat and fish for the table. Such small-scale, individualized portions contrast with large quantities made to feed many mouths, suggested by the presence of earthenware basins. Most appear to have been locally made, but others are glazed, decorated and imported from southern Italy. Basins have multiple uses, including mixing ba ers for cakes and pastry, making traditional suet puddings, or even flaking fish for kedgeree made with spices from India; kedgeree was a popular breakfast dish among Victorian imperialists by the mid-nineteenth century.127 The relatively high number of these vessels points markedly to an institutional rather than domestic se ing, where such large basins would be scarce or absent. The cooking ceramics le behind represent the very basics of food-preparation equipment, together with broken or other low-value goods discarded by departing regiments. Regardless of whether purchases were made ad hoc both for the mess generally or for individual officers’ and servants’ use, regiments purchased cheap kitchen basics from local markets as temporary supplements to their permanent collections of cooking and dining utensils, always with the intention of discarding them. Over time, the collection accumulated, necessitating later regiments only to top up when required. Therefore, the kitchen of an officers’ messhouse in Malta will have looked much more like one in a messhouse anywhere else in the empire than the archaeological assemblages initially suggest. In this light, it is debatable whether officers ever considered local ceramics part of their institution’s material culture. Nevertheless, they were part of the specific material practices of a messhouse in Malta.

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As with food procurement, Maltese servants may have assisted with the lowliest tasks in the messhouse, as occurred in soldiers’ barracks.128 Nevertheless, it was the right of each officer to take a servant from the ranks and it was these soldiers who most likely cooked. The army saw cooking as part of a soldier’s duty and, as such, each was rostered for cooking in the privates’ canteens and noncommissioned officers’ messes. A bad cook was to be ‘kept constantly on fatigue as Cook’s assistant, till he has acquired a competent knowledge of his duty’.129 In the context of Malta, it might be supposed that the soldier-servants preparing food for the officers had to become accustomed quickly to alien utensils, but this is only partly true. Apart from the fact that everyone ‘on the strength’ had to some extent to become acquainted with the local culinary and material cultures of wherever they happened to be posted, these were always used alongside familiar regimental objects and integrated into army- and culturally prescribed practices of food preparation. Making food in an officers’ messhouse involved integrating the foreign with the familiar, but rather than seeing the resultant practices as a distinctly Maltese-British colonial hybridization, it is worth remembering that soldier-cooks and their officers encountered such circumstances repeatedly; to be in Victoria’s army was to make sense of and survive in alien se ings on a daily basis. For the officers, the level of institutional hybridization occurred on an increasingly wider level, creating new colonial practices in their global messhouse. The foodways of officers both connected the colonial incomers to and separated them from the local population, and highlight the entangled nature of colonial relationships. Once cooked, soldier-servants drew on their cultural knowledge to dress and serve the resultant food with all the accoutrements pertaining to formal Victorian dining that the army and colonial suppliers could provide. One of the main constituents of an officer’s table largely missing from the local diet was meat. In 1880, Barbary exported 5,127 bullocks to Malta, which imported a further 4,102 from Tunis. By the turn of the century, a colossal 16,235 head of ca le from Barbary, 14,038 from Tunis and 4,092 from Morocco were imported for annual consumption, representing a fourfold increase in less than a quarter of a century, which was due mainly to the presence of the British military.130 Yet beef was not the only imported meat. Foreign table birds, including partridges, pheasants and quails from the United States,131 supplemented seasonal migrating game. As a junior officer reported in The Graphic in the spring of 1891, quail ‘when cooked in oriental fashion with rice furnish a most agreeable change of diet at the mess-table’.132 As with kedgeree and

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curry puffs, the influences of rice and spices from India permeated into an officer’s culinary experience. Whilst drying, salting and freezing facilitated the global transportation of an ever-increasing array of foodstuffs, the development of moulded, mass-produced and o en patented glass containers provided the vehicle for sauces and preserves (see Chapter 6, under the heading ‘Material Networks’ for further discussion relating to glass bo les and containers). Glass bo les from the messhouse demonstrate that processed factory-made sauces accompanied some mealtimes and the presence of specific jar types indicates the consumption of jams and other fruit preserves.133 Through the merchants of not only Valle a, but also those based in the Three Cities and along the coast around Sliema, officers and visitors could procure food from home and around the empire, yet perhaps the most visible global commodities were not edible, but drinkable.

Beverages Common wines transported in barrels from Sicily in great quantities and consumed by the majority of inhabitants may by volume constitute one of the most imported products throughout the centuries under consideration. At times, it was cheaper to buy in Malta than in Sicily.134 Yet it was by no means the only beverage or even the sole wine unloaded from ships in the Grand Harbour. The knights enjoyed wine from around the Mediterranean, especially from the Italian peninsula and France. A number of costrels and wine-style jugs recovered from Dockyard Creek indicate the ways in which decanted wine may have been distributed among those seated at a galley captain’s table. Similarly, the digging of a wine cellar at the officers’ messhouse in the early 1830s together with stemmed goblets and wine bo les from the site demonstrate that Victoria’s imperialists, whether military or civilian, could enjoy a Bordeaux or Champagne from France.135 Rather than the place of origin, the principal factor that changed over the centuries and across the political regimes was the ease and facility with which one could purchase foreign wines. Established businesses such as Woodhouse & Co. exported Masala wine from Sicily from as early as the 1770s. A er temporarily securing their own stores in Malta at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they therea er relied on Maltese wine merchants such as Henry Twelves to convey their products to customers, as did other exporters. Allister MacMillan claimed that a wine and spirit merchant has ‘the entire resources of the world’ at his disposal,136 although this does not mean that

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everything was imported. Messrs Agius Bros established themselves as wine merchants in 1863, but in 1909 started manufacturing red and white wine at Birkirkara.137 They were not the only entrepreneurs to see the possibilities of manufacturing, rather than importing, alcoholic drinks for the local market. Joining established British brewers H. & G. Simmonds Limited (Reading) and military canteen agents Mortimer & Co., some a empted to brew on the islands.138 Dublin brewer Stannus Geoghegan had relocated to Malta by 1894 and was living at 8 Piazza Miratore, Floriana. In 1895, he entered into a partnership with Antonio Despo of Bormla, brewing stout and ale.139 While beers and ales may be more readily associated with the rank and file, the occurrence in the messhouse assemblage of a complete ale bo le embossed with ‘Geoghegan and Co’ and ‘MALTA’ indicates that officers too consumed local brews.140 Other bo les from the messhouse reflect the drinking of Benedictine from France, gin from Britain and the Netherlands, schnapps from Germany and many other international drinks, as do the range of tumblers and stemmed glasses. By the end of the century, it was commonplace to see champagne from Rheims, whiskey, beer and rum from Scotland, Feuerheerd’s ports and sherries, produced in Portugal by the German company established by Dietrich Ma hias Feuerheerd, and O.T. Ltd cordials from Australia all advertised together by a single merchant. Easier access to alcoholic spirits, both in terms of affordability and availability, brought with it some unwanted social problems. Intake of stronger alcoholic beverages started to displace the centuries-old habit of consuming comparatively weak common wines in urban areas. The conspicuous increase of intoxication around the docks and in Valle a o en accompanied gambling and prostitution. Occurring in full view of visitors to the islands, colonial officials regarded common drunkenness as a hindrance to their own political ambitions.141 The judiciary’s response was to exponentially increase the number of prison sentences for such offences, which is reflected in the sharp rise in both male and female inmates at Corradino prison around the turn of the twentieth century, as well as in high levels of recidivism (see Chapter 1, under the heading ‘Captives’). Not all imported beverages were alcoholic. The knights had drunk coffee from Martinique and chocolate from the Americas since the seventeenth century. Like later British incomers, it is conceivable that they used Maltese ceramic braziers as mobile sources of heat to make hot drinks away from designated kitchens.142 While the warm beverage of choice for the knights was coffee, the British brought with them their habit of drinking tea. Well established by the beginning of the nine-

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teenth century, the ritual of taking tea comprised part of the routine of polite society and those who could afford to, emulated it. Remnants of teacups and saucers from the officers’ messhouse include a range of inexpensive British wares and a rare example of a regimental ware. Made from ironstone, the base of the cup bares the hand-painted name of the 53rd (Shropshire Light Infantry) Regiment (see Figure 4.5). By the close of the century, a cup of tea, or ‘peg’, was widely available thanks to the establishment in Malta of Sco ish tea giant Lipton Ltd in 1899.143 Other nonalcoholic drinks available locally included ‘orangeade’, which featured on lists of drinks taken on board the galleys, and the British introduced ginger beer.144 Fragments of ginger beer bo les found at the officers’ messhouse demonstrate that, again, Mortimer & Co. was an important business in terms of the supply of beverages, but other, smaller concerns also produced ginger beer. Made in Malta from an imported syrup diluted with carbonated water, it went hand in hand with the manufacture of aerated waters.

Figure 4.5. Regimental wares of the (le ) 53rd and (right) 44th Regiments. Source: Inquisitor’s Palace messhouse. Images by the author.

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While the traditional methods of collecting and storing rainwater in both private and public subterranean stone-cut cisterns continued into the twentieth century, the building of a seventeenth-century aqueduct serving Valle a to which branch lines were added in the nineteenth century greatly improved access to water in urban areas.145 A colonial investigation into hygiene and cleanliness in the Three Cities concluded that while the poor consumed spring water transported via the Bouverie aqueduct, the middle and upper classes drank water collected in roo op tanks, which was ‘very o en polluted by organic impurities’.146 Women collecting water and carrying local earthenware water-jars on their heads feature prominently in artists’ depictions of daily life in nineteenth-century Malta, as do male water sellers. Water was sold by the glass or in tin beakers in urban areas. However, a late nineteenth-century fashion for aerated waters and cheaply available glass bo les transformed water from a daily local concern into a global commodity to which Malta was not impervious. *** Several historians have linked the late nineteenth-century industrialization of food manufacture to an increased consumption of colonial goods in order to claim that ‘ordinary people began eating more meat and sugar, and less bread’ in Malta at the turn of the twentieth century.147 While this may be true, Maltese diets had gone through other changes over the centuries, many of which were entangled in relationships between the ruling powers and their subjects. The control of food through its procurement, production and processing was central to the institutionalization of foodways. As grain-based products constituted the principal source of nourishment on the islands, it is not surprising that both the Order and the British sought to ensure adequate supplies. By and large, both regimes successfully avoided major shortages, but their motivations proved practical rather than paternalistic. Food shortages have throughout history prompted civil unrest and, as Rebora has observed, ‘if there is a bread shortage, the people rebel and create serious problems for those in power’.148 Ensuring sufficient grain supplies provided a way of decreasing the likelihood of revolt and eased their rule through centuries li ered with common uprisings, from the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution to the Indian Mutiny. Flour milling and bread-baking underwent major changes. With the construction of mills in the seventeenth century, the knowledge and associated profit of grinding moved to the few, and by the twentieth century, baking at home had declined, while commercial baking pros-

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pered in urban areas. British free trade encouraged entrepreneurs to mechanize bread and pasta production, resulting in a society more reliant on ready-made staples rather than raw ingredients. Similarly, although the British administration encouraged more land to be turned over to agricultural production, they continued the practice instigated by the Order of placing more emphasis on cash-cropping – be it co on or potatoes – than producing food for the islanders. One major shi came in the form of meat consumption. Like other expensive foodstuffs, meat was entangled in the supply networks of the ruling authorities. Galley slaves received higher levels of protein in their diet than Maltese peasants through the mostly preserved meats added to their soups, and prison diets guaranteed Corradino’s inmates meat at least once a week. However, the increase in imported ca le during the second half of the nineteenth century served to provide colonial incomers with beef, while preserved meats and fish remained the primary sources of protein for the rural and urban masses. Institutional se ings afforded the authorities the potential to control consumption habits and foodways, and while the Inquisition appears not to have regulated inmates’ consumption beyond the prescriptions of religion, structured diets and eating practices proved integral to the order of later civilian prisons. Similarly, the constraints of galley diets resulted not only from the sea, but also from the desire to hierarchically differentiate social groups. The increased level of individualism experienced by galley rowers does not appear to have directly transferred onto land, neither did it influence how a galley’s knights and officials ate, but rather it remained part of the coercive system of galley rowing. Further up the social scale, the same maritime venue afforded the opportunity to indulge in superfluity at the captain’s table. A similar level of opulence graced the messhouses of Victoria’s officers a century later, but here the apparent freedom and privilege was in fact rigidly regulated though a mass of rules and society norms, which I will explore further in the following chapter.

Notes 1. See Chapter 3 in Carmel Cassar, Society, Culture and Identity in Early Modern Malta. Msida: Mireva Publications, 2000; and Chapter 2 in Paul Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 2. Carmel Cassar, Fenkata: An Emblem of Maltese Peasant Resistance? Malta: Ministry for Youth and the Arts, 1994, 4.

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3. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, ‘The Rise and Fall of Luxury Debates’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 7. 4. Carmel Cassar, ‘State Intervention in the Grain Trade of Malta (16th–20th Century)’, Mediterranean Review 6 (2013), 62. 5. Louis de Boisgelin, Ancient and Modern Malta: Containing a Full and Accurate Account of the Present State of the Islands of Malta and Gozo, vol. 1. London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1805, 78, 138. 6. Thomas MacGill, A Hand Book, or Guide, for Strangers Visiting Malta. Malta: Printed by Luigi Tonna, 1839, 35. Although MacGill claims vegetables were eaten freely, John Hennen observed that they were sold at predetermined published tariffs, which are unlikely to have helped illiterate Maltese, in Sketches of the Medical Topography of the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and Malta. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830, 466. 7. Command Papers C.2032, 1878. Correspondence Respecting the Taxation and Expenditure of Malta. London: HMSO, 1878, 12. 8. In 1880, Malta consumed 179,169 barrels of Italian common, or ‘inferior’, wine (Blue Books 1880, W8). 9. Unlike accounts of eighteenth-century Gibraltar rendered by female ladies of letters, such as Catharine Upton’s The Siege of Gibraltar: From the Twel h of April to the Twenty-Seventh of May, 1781. to Which Is Prefixed, Some Account of the Blockade. London: Printed for the authoress and sold by J. Fielding, 1787, published female interventions concerning Malta did not generally appear until later in the nineteenth century and were confined to the periodical press. A notable exception is Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers’ This is a Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, in the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta. London: Printed for Robert Wilson, 1662, edited by Daniel Baker. 10. Command Papers C.2032, 1878, 12. 11. de Boisgelin, Ancient and Modern Malta, 42. Puzzolana is a mortar made from puzzolane, a volcanic rock, named a er a town near Naples. 12. Anon., Memorial on Establishing a Permanent Depôt of Rice and Corn at Gibraltar or Malta. London: Printed by B. McMillan, 1812, 10. 13. David Dandria, ‘Il-Fosos: Underground Grain Storage in the Maltese Islands’, Treasures of Malta 48 (2010), 48–51. 14. Simon Mercieca and Joseph Muscat, ‘Windmills and the Production of Gunpowder in Malta’, Symposia Melitensia 9 (2013), 5–7. 15. Mercieca and Muscat, ‘Windmills and the Production of Gunpowder’, 2. 16. Allister MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, & Resources. London: W.H. & L. Collingridge, 1915, 350. 17. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 365. 18. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 333; Michael Rafelo, ‘Commercial Partnerships in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Malta’, Journal of Maltese History 1(2) (2009), 78. 19. Cassar, Fenkata, 4. 20. Cassar, ‘State Intervention in the Grain Trade of Malta (16th–20th Century)’, 61–63. 21. The example drawn on here specifically refers to the evidence given by a woman. There is no obvious evidence that the domestic production of bread for the household was carried out by men, unlike later male bakers. However, this does not preclude the possibility of households arranging domestic labour in multiple fashions.

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

Cassar, ‘State Intervention in the Grain Trade of Malta (16th–20th Century)’, 64. de Boisgelin, Ancient and Modern Malta, 52. Blue Book 1859, paginated annex, 20. Greta Kliewer, ‘Maltese Bread: A Changing Symbol of the Island’s Identity’, Omertaa: Journal of Applied Anthropology (2008), 213. Cassar, ‘State Intervention in the Grain Trade of Malta (16th–20th Century)’, 62–66. Giovanni Rebora, The Culture of the Fork: A Brief History of Food in Europe, trans. Albert Sonnenfeld. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, 2. Rebora, The Culture of the Fork, 7. Rebora, The Culture of the Fork, 13. Anon., Memorial on Establishing a Permanent Depôt of Rice and Corn, 12–14. Michael Refalo, The Maltese Commercial Class, 1870–1914: Business, Families, Networks. Pisa: Edizioni Plus-Pisa University Press, 2010, 80; Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13. Royal Commission on the Finances, Economic Condition, and Juridical Procedure of Malta. Minutes of evidence. London: HMSO, 1912, 211; MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 350. Aldolphus Slade, Turkey, Greece and Malta. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837, 114, 115. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 91. Cassar, ‘State Intervention in the Grain Trade of Malta (16th–20th Century)’, 62; House of Commons Papers 141-I 141-II, 1837–38. ‘Copies or Extracts of Reports of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Affairs of the Island of Malta, and of Correspondence Thereupon’, 7–8. Jacqueline Azzopardi Cauchi and Paul Knepper, ‘The Empire, the Police, and the Introduction of Fingerprint Technology in Malta’, Criminology and Justice 9(1) (2009), 80. Rebecca Earle, ‘Food, Colonialism and the Quantum of Happiness’, History Workshop Journal 84 (2017), 180. David Gentilcore, Italy and the Potato: A History, 1550–2000. London: Continuum, 2012, 62. A total of 4,837 out of 33,822 acres (Blue Books 1900, S4); Carmel Cassar claims that ‘as late as the 1850s, there was no trace of the culinary use of the potato’ in Maltese diets (Fenkata, 24). MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 326. Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13, 69. Cassar, Fenkata, 6–8; Joseph Gauci-Maistre, ‘“Tax-Xiber”: The Indigenous Rabbit of Malta’, Cahiers Options Mediterranéennes 41 (1999), 184. de Boisgelin, Ancient and Modern Malta, 79; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Le ers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols, 1801–6. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956, 577. Command Papers C.2032, 1878, 12. Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13, 73. de Boisgelin, Ancient and Modern Malta, 106. Rebora, History of the Fork, 60. John Chircop, ‘Living on Fishing, Caught in the Market: The Maltese Fishing Communities, 1860s–1920’, Journal of Maltese History 2(1) (2010), 21–27. The Romulus, captained by J. Allen, arrived on 20 October from Boston carrying flour, tobacco, salted fish, sugar and coffee. ‘Arrivi Mercantili’, Malta Government Gaze e (4 January 1826), 8. Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13, 73.

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50. The list of ingredients is taken from Pippa Ma ei’s recipe for Kusksu bil-ful. Retrieved 26 March 2018 from Malta Today, h ps://www.maltatoday.com.mt/author/ pippa_ma ei/2/. 51. John Debono, Trade and Port Activity in Malta: 1750–1800. Malta: BDL Books, 2000, 83. 52. Desmond Gregory, Malta, Britain, and the European Powers, 1793–1815. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, 26; Chris Hunt and Nicholas C. Vella, ‘A View from the Countryside: Pollen from a Field at Mistra Valley, Malta’. Malta Archaeological Review 7 (2004/2005), 57; Joseph Cachia, personal communication, 1 November 2013. 53. Frederick W. Ryan, Malta. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910, 144. 54. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, Vol. 2. London: Routledge & Kegen Paul, 1962, 2104 10.7. 55. Anon., ‘Maltese Malta’, The Graphic (18 May 1889), 538. 56. Sidney W. Mintz and Christine M. Du Bois, ‘The Anthropology of Food and Eating’, Annual Review of Anthropology 31(2002), 109. 57. Peter J. Atkins, ‘The History of Food Exchanges: A New Agenda’, Food and History 7(1) (2009), 116. 58. Ioannis Ionas, Traditional Po ery and Po ers in Cyprus: The Disappearance of an Ancient Cra Industry in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000, 80, 125–26. 59. Ionas, Traditional Po ery and Po ers in Cyprus, 125. Ionas finishes the sentence with ‘plates’, which is appropriate neither for the Maltese context nor the situation he describes in Cyprus. 60. Joanita Vroom discusses the fragmentation of communal eating practices in the Byzantine Empire, suggesting that individualism occurred much earlier in elite Mediterranean contexts: ‘The Changing Dining Habits at Christ’s Table’, in Leslie Brubaker and Kallirroe Linardou (eds), Eat, Drink, and Be Merry (Luke 12:19) – Food and Wine in Byzantium: Papers of the 37th Annual Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, in Honour of Professor A.A.M. Bryer. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, 191–222. 61. Alasdair Brooks, An Archaeological Guide to British Ceramics in Australia, 1788–1901. Melbourne: Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, 2005, 59. 62. Peter J. Atkins and Marco Gastoni, ‘The Maltese Food System and the Mediterranean’, GeoJournal 41(2) (1997), 135. 63. Jonathan G. Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy. Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1989, 321. 64. Patrick Roberts, Sam Weston, Bastien Wild, Ceridwen Boston, Peter Ditchfield, Andrew J. Shortland and A. Mark Pollard, ‘The Men of Nelson’s Navy: A Comparative Stable Isotope Dietary Study of Late 18th and Early 19th Century Servicemen from Royal Naval Hospital Burial Grounds at Plymouth and Gosport, England’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 148 (2012), 9. 65. House of Commons Papers 80, 1821. ‘Corn and Flour Contracts Made by the Victualling Board for the Purchases of Foreign Wheat and Flour’, 4. 66. Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850, 349. 67. Charles Savona-Ventura, ‘Victualling of Malta Based Navies’, 2009, 6. Retrieved 19 February 2020 from h ps://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/bitstream/123456789/ 24769/1/victualling.pdf. 68. Coad, The Royal Dockyards 1690–1850, 277–84. 69. William Tallack, Malta, under the Phoenicians, Knights, and English. London: A.W. Benne , 1861, 86–88.

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70. House of Commons Papers 82, 1901. General Abstract of the Cost of Provisions, Victualling Stores, and Seaman’s Clothing (Hair Beds), at His Majesty’s Home and Malta Victualling Yards for the Year 1899–1900. London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1901, 7, 29, 11. 71. In 1894–95, the total raw flour used by the three British victualling yards and Malta was 1,545,361 lbs. Malta’s contribution was 466,689 lbs, totalling 30.2 per cent (House of Commons Papers 82, 1901); Government of Great Britain Government, General Abstract of the Cost of Provisions, Victualling Stores, and Seaman’s Clothing (Hair Beds), at His Majesty’s Home and Malta Victualling Yards for the Year 1894–1895. London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1896, 11. 72. Cassar, Fenkata, 23. 73. Anton Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2003, 141. 74. Victor Mallia-Milanes, ‘Society and the Economy on the Hospitaller Island of Malta’ in Emanuel Bu igieg and Simon Phillips (eds), Island and Military Order, c. 1291–c. 1798 (London: Routledge, 2013), 244; Joseph F. Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Hyphen 2 (1979), 54. 75. Godfrey We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2002, 363. 76. J. Quentin Hughes, The Building of Malta during the Period of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, 1530–1795. London: Alec Tiranti Ltd, 1956, 151. 77. Joseph F. Grima, ‘The Order of St John’s Galley Squadron at Sea’, Storja 1 (1978), 25–26. 78. Mauro Bondioli, René Burlet and André Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, in Robert Gardiner (ed.), The Age of the Galley: Mediterranean Oared Vessels since Pre-Classical Times. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1995, 194. 79. Simple ‘eating’ bowls comprise 9 per cent of thirty recovered. 80. George French Angas, A Ramble in Malta and Sicily, in the Autumn of 1841. London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1842, 76. 81. Bondioli, Burlet and Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, 194. 82. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, 363; Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, 57. 83. Liam Gauci, In the Name of the Prince: Maltese Corsairs, 1760–1798. Malta: Heritage Malta, 2016, 109. 84. Bondioli, Burlet and Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, 194. 85. Grima, ‘The Order of St John’s Galley Squadron at Sea’, 26. 86. John H. McManamon, ‘Maltese Seafaring in Medieval and Post-medieval Times’, Mediterranean Historical Review 18(1) (2003), 49. 87. Ferdinand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structure of Daily Life. London: HarperCollins, 1981, 369. 88. Excluding a sherd of nineteenth-century stoneware, vessels for the use of preparing and storing food account for a third of the ceramic assemblage (MNV 101, 31.7 per cent), of which almost half (MNV 49) is interior-lead-glazed redware from Sicily (Pa i ware). 89. Russell Palmer, Simona Raneri, Paolo Mazzoleni, Nicholas C. Vella, Germana Barone and Wim De Clercq, ‘Neighbourly Ties: Characterizing Local and Sicilian

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90. 91.

92. 93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

Po ery in Post-medieval Malta’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 19 (2018), 585. Sandra Scicluna, ‘The Prison in Malta: 1850–1870 and 1931–1951’, PhD dissertation. Leicester: University of Leicester, 2004, 90. Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2001, 488; Kenneth Gambin, The Inquisitor’s Palace, Vi oriosa. Malta: Heritage Books, 2003, 36. Evans and Cheevers, Short Relation, 5, 19, 25. Evans and Cheevers, Short Relation, 16. Blue Books 1864, 364. NAM/GMR/64. N. Zammit, Medical Report of the Corradino Prison for the Year 1850. Malta: F.W. Franz, 1851, 3; Command Papers 3961-I, 1867–68. Prison Discipline in the Colonies: Digest and Summary of Information Respecting Prisons in the Colonies. London: HMSO, 1867, 60. Blue Books 1895, T6. Scicluna, ‘The Prison in Malta’, 57. Evans and Cheevers, Short Relation, 19, emphasis in original. Blue Books 1864, 367. Salvatore Grima was a second-class constable, number 115, in the Interior Police from 16 March 1871, although he had been employed by the colonial government in some capacity since 16 August 1868 (Blue Books 1871, M 176); for all other references regarding Corradino’s cooks, see ‘Civil Establishments’ in the annual Blue Books for years 1850 to 1905. Philipp von Merode, Die Reise des Philipp von Merode na Italien und Malta 1586– 1588. Das Tagebuch, ed. Hans J. Domsta. Münster: Waxmann, 2007, 122. Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798, 145; Gauci, In the Name of the Prince, 109. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 371. Palmer et al., ‘Neighbourly Ties’, 586. Alessio Piatanesi and Stefano Tinti, ‘A Revision of the 1693 Eastern Sicily Earthquake and Tsunami’, Journal of Geophysical Research 103(B2) (1998), 2749–50. Gauci, In the Name of the Prince, 106; Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798, 145. Hughes, The Building of Malta during the Period of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, 1530–1795, 151. Grima, ‘The Order of St John’s Galley Squadron at Sea’, 24; Gauci, In the Name of the Prince, 110. Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798, 147. William Zammit, ‘A Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Balance Sheet of a Galley of the Order of St. John’, in Toni Cortis and Timothy Gambin (eds), De Trirembus: Festschri in Honour of Joseph Muscat (Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2005), 533. Grima, ‘The Order of St John’s Galley Squadron at Sea’, 25. Grima, ‘The Order of St John’s Galley Squadron at Sea’, 24. Zammit, ‘A Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Balance Sheet of a Galley of the Order of St. John’, 533. Quintano, The Maltese-Hospitaller Sailing Ship Squadron, 1701–1798, 95. Thomas Freller and William Zammit, Knights, Buccaneers, and Sugar Cane: The Caribbean Colonies of the Order of Malta. Malta: Midsea Books 2015; Gauci, In the Name of the Prince, 110–12.

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116. Susan Bagdade and Al Bagdade, Warman’s English and Continental Po ery and Porcelain: Identification and Price Guide, 4th edn. Iola, WI: KP Books, 2004, 188. 117. Zammit, ‘A Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Balance Sheet of a Galley of the Order of St. John’, 533. 118. Maxine Berg, ‘Luxury, the Luxury Trades, and the Roots of Industrial Growth: A Global Perspective’, in Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 186, 188; Alida Clemente, ‘Luxury and Taste in Eighteenth-Century Naples: Representation, Ideas and Social Practices at the Intersection between the Global and the Local’, in Johanna Ilmakunnas and Jon Stobart (eds), A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe: Display, Acquisition and Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 61. 119. See William Zammit, ‘Stemming Vice: A Proposal for Hospitaller Virtuous Living in Ancien Régime Malta’, in Giovanni Bonello (ed.), A Timeless Gentleman: Festschri in Honour of Maurice de Giorgio (Malta: Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti, 2014), 365–72. 120. Ryan, Malta, 158–59. A falde a is a black shawl or hooded cloak worn ubiquitously by Maltese women. It was the defining garment of female national costume in Malta and Gozo before the Second World War. 121. NAM/LGO/3870/1942/A. Plan of the Inquisitor’s Palace, Vi oriosa (1918). The building was no longer used by the army at this time, but li le had been altered. 122. Command Papers 3207, 1863. Report of the Barrack and Hospital Improvement Commission on the Sanitary Condition and Improvement of the Mediterranean Stations. London: HMSO, 1863, 17. 123. The positioning of the range in a room denominated on plans as a scullery may also suggest uses other than food preparation, such as boiling water for cleaning. 124. Command Papers 3207, 1863, 355. 125. T. Fraser, ‘On Personal Equipment of Officers on Active Service’, Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 23 (1880), 100. 126. ‘Skilly’ is a thin gruel. See R.J. Dickinson, Officers’ Mess: Life and Customs in the Regiments. Tunbridge Wells: Midas Books, 1973, 17. 127. Cecilia Leong-Salobir, ‘“Mem” and “Cookie”: The Colonial Kitchen in Malaysia and Singapore’, in Ishita Banerjee-Dube (ed.), Cooking Cultures: Convergent Histories of Food and Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 93–94. 128. James Anton, Retrospect of a Military Life: During the Most Eventful Periods of the Last War. Edinburgh: W.H. Lizars, 1841, 392. 129. W.N. Hutchinson, Standing Orders Issued to the Two Ba alions, XXth Regiment. London: Printed by W. Clowes & Sons, 1845, 69. 130. Command Papers C.2032, 1878, 12. 131. Advertisement. The Daily Malta Chronical and Garrison Gaze e (11 August 1896), 8. 132. Anon., ‘A Subaltern’s First Impressions of Malta’, The Graphic, Supplement (25 April 1891). 133. The section entitled ‘Material Networks’ in Chapter 6 further explores glass containers from the messhouse. 134. Slade, Turkey, Greece and Malta, 107. 135. George Percy Badger, Historical Guide to Malta and Gozo. Malta: P. Calleja, 1869, 213; George Nelson Godwin, A Guide to the Maltese Islands. Malta: Printed by Paolo Bonavita, 1880, 182; 40.4 per cent of all glass finds relate to wine bo les or the consumption of wine. 136. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 360. 137. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 358. 138. Daily Malta Chronicle (1 July 1896), 1.

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139. London Gaze e (7 May 1872), 2207; A.T. Mitchel, Rugby School Register. Vol. III. May 1874 to May 1904. Rugby: A.J. Lawrence, 1904, 165; Michael Refalo, ‘Commercial Partnerships in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Malta’, Journal of Maltese History 1(2) (2009), 59. 140. Other beer bo les were recovered, including examples with lightning closures, although they are devoid of makers’ or brewers’ marks. 141. Paul Knepper, ‘A Few Detectives Would Be Very Useful: Crime, Immorality, and Policing in Valle a, 1881–1914’, Journal of Social History 43(2) (2009), 385. 142. Anon., ‘Maltese Malta’, 538. 143. ‘A Subaltern’s First Impressions of Malta’, The Graphic, Supplement (25 April 1891), n.p.; MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 352. 144. Gauci, In the Name of the Prince, 111; Zammit, ‘A Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Balance Sheet of a Galley of the Order of St. John’, 531–33. 145. Water supply and the development of water management systems in Malta have recently been explored in detail in Keith Buhagiar, Malta and Water (AD 900 to 1900): Irrigating a Semi-arid Landscape, BAR International Series 2829. Oxford: Bar Publishing, 2016, in particular Chapters 4–6, which cover the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries. 146. NAM/GMR/195. A. Ghio and G. Gulia, Preliminary Reports of the Mortality and Sanitary Condition of Valle a and the Three Cities. Malta: Government Printing Office, 1875, 11. 147. Caruana Galizia, The Economy of Modern Malta, 52. 148. Rebora, The Culture of the Fork, 7.

c5 MATERIAL ROUTINES

Until 1879, prisoners sentenced to execution by the civilian BritishMaltese courts were hanged publicly, immediately outside Corradino prison. Public hangings involved a procession to the prison of the Brothers of SS. Rosario e della Misericordia from Valle a, two miles away, and drew great crowds. The gallows entailed no drop and the English press described the spectacle as ‘disgusting and inhuman … not to say barbarous’.1 Open not only to public gaze, ‘all the inmates of the prison, a few at a time, were allowed to see the hanged man through the gratings of the gate’.2 By confronting felons with the ultimate punishment, the colonial authorities presented the hangings as a deterrent, in much the same way as public execution had functioned in the era before the new prisons. Yet public executions also had another purpose. Foucault observed that under the ancien régime, the spectacle of public execution demonstrated the power of the sovereign over his or her subjects.3 Within the context of nineteenth-century Malta, the local sovereign is the colonial governor, so by extension, public execution was a dramatic display of colonial power over the population, even if it was found to be tasteless by imperial visitors. However, power is not only enacted though monumental acts and performances. This chapter focuses on the scale of everyday practices to explore how institutions constituted power and how the institutionalized responded. Institutional and institutionalized rules, rituals and regulations comprise more o en than not codified material practices that necessitate the presence of certain objects, spaces or images. In the previous chapters I have focused on the roles of space, labour activities and foodways in the creation and maintenance of unequal power relationships. The current chapter revisits the spatial environments introduced in Chapter 2, focusing squarely on life within institutions. More specifically, it examines how seemingly innocuous aspects of everyday material practices facilitated the political – and sometimes colonial – ambitions of some, while providing relief and coping mechanisms for others.

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Material routines are enmeshed not only in their institutional se ings, but are constituent of those institutions and, ultimately, what we refer to as institutional power. By contrasting the same selection of military and carceral institutions as in previous chapters, the four examples expose the complexity of institutional practices and how they are enacted through everyday material culture. Beginning with those denounced to the Inquisition, we return to the Inquisitor’s prison. Through an exploration of inmate graffiti, I argue that the acts of carving and ‘reading’ graffiti provided coping mechanisms and spaces of introspection that have le traces literally carved into the walls. Moving from a prison with few rules to a modern prison in which the regulation of staff and inmate practices was woven into the warp and we of the institution’s fabric, we return to Corradino civilian prison to investigate the underlying use of architecture and material culture in the execution of a codified schedule based on classification. On board the Order’s galleys, I propose that everyday smoking and gambling paraphernalia provided the opportunity for the cynical regulation of rowers, before uncovering the superficiality of the power so frequently a ributed to British army officers. Turning the tables on the imperial invaders, I demonstrate how mess rituals served in helping to make compliant colonial agents.

Coping The Inquisitor’s prison provided li le in the way of officially established routine. Despite the presence of limited opportunities for employment seen in previous chapters, work was by no means part of the institutional routine. Rather, it fell largely to inmates to manage their own time, the passing of which could be self-monitored by using a sundial or by observing the hourly tolling of church bells (see Figure 5.1). Sundials painted onto walls were still commonplace in the early twentieth century and an earlier carved example survives high up on the southwest wall of the prison courtyard.4 During the night, prisoners could tell the time from the moon and stars, if they could see them, something that was still in common practice, especially in agricultural se ings.5 Superficially innocuous, church bells marked not only the course of the day but also aurally revealed Christian dominance in the land and an affront to Islam: Muslim corsairs o en took bell ropes during land slave raids in accordance with the command of the Prophet Muhammad against the ringing of bells.6 At 6 am and 2 pm, the gaoler completed his daily visits to the cells, while a Mass marked the beginning of each week.7 In between ques-

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Figure 5.1. Sundial high on the southwest wall of the prison courtyard, Inquisitor’s Palace, mid-eighteenth century. Image by the author.

tioning, torture and visits, prisoners o en found themselves le to their own devices, especially if they had already been tried and were serving a sentence. Quaker missionary Katherine Evans spent her days of captivity largely in prayer and contemplation. However, the majority of prisoners were Roman Catholic, or at least claimed to be, and would therefore not have had the same notions of directly speaking to God. In Catholicism, images and set prayers feature more prominently, and it is through carving graffiti into the stone walls of the prison that inmates have le a visualized record of their incarceration. Despite destructive early twentieth-century interventions, the surviving prisons are li ered with stone carvings scratched into the walls with metal implements, such as iron nails eased loose from the stonework or buckle tongues. While some graffiti intersect, indiscriminate overlapping does not occur, contrary to carving practices in the civilian gaol in Gozo.8 Well dispersed among the walls, over half stand between one and two metres from the ground, in part a consequence of much of the lower walls being cut directly into bedrock and therefore providing a damp and less appropriate canvas.9 Of the 588 graffiti I sampled, 359

Material Routines • 181

or 61 per cent relate to the Inquisition period, of which 47 per cent consist of lines or groups thereof, 18 per cent geometric shapes, 10 per cent maritime-related themes, 8 per cent crosses, another 8 per cent pi ing (bored ‘dots’), 5 per cent text, 2 per cent plant and 1 per cent each of anthropomorphic and miscellaneous graffiti (see Figure 5.2). Clustered and single straight and vertical lines constitute the most numerous identifiable category.10 Most clusters contain between five and twenty lines, with many bordered by or crossed through with horizontal bars. In a carceral environment, such markings are frequently associated with counting the number of days of incarceration or to release, forming a type of testimony and marking an individual’s presence.11 In a prison designed ostensibly to incarcerate Catholics, such scratch marks may have also taken the place of beads in prayer cycles, some clusters corresponding to the five or fi een decades of Hail Marys repeated in the rosary. Other sources place rosary beads in the prison, suggesting that they were permi ed items, but this does not imply that everyone had access to one.12 A few elaborate examples resemble cross-hatching and their composition would have provided a significant time of amusement or distraction. Similarly, circles appear repeatedly in complex associations, or occasionally interlocking, with other circles. A number comprise several internal semi-circles that form a rose e inside the circle. Circles have symbolic value in most religions and popular belief systems. Christians used the endless line of the circle as protection against evil or as a symbol of infinity, and a graffito consisting of a triangle of four interlocking circles is comparable to those found in early magic books.13 Another series of interlocking circles resembles a graffito in the Great Mosque at Divriği, Turkey, thought to represent the geometric symmetry of Islam. Moreover, the similarity between rose e graffiti and ornamentation found on Muslim ships strengthens the Islamic interpretation.14 Carved crosses also reflect religious practices and range from simple vertical lines crossed by a horizontal bar to eight-pointed Maltese crosses and representations of processional crosses. The first type occurs most frequently. Seemingly with obvious Christian (Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox) connotations, such easy interpretations conceal other possibilities, including conspicuous cross-carving by apostatizers or repenters, whether genuine or not in either case. Graffiti carving thus becomes a performative act of display to be observed by others. Genuinely devotional crosses also embody affectual qualities that result from sensorial engagement between the agent and the stone canvas. The frequency of carved crosses within window recesses strengthens the notion of contemplative, personal and deliberately solitary behaviour,

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Figure 5.2. Prison graffiti from the Inquisitor’s Palace. Top: Angelo Rooca (ANGEeLo RUcoo); middle le : two examples of roses, the upper accompanied by a tulip; middle right: triple circle and rose e; bo om le : rose e; bo om right: hand. Images by the author.

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thus creating a kind of privacy where there is none,15 and asserting physical and mental control in a situation that denies overall freedom. The small size of most simple crosses makes it unlikely that they were used in any group worship, unlike the processional crosses that ordinarily require the intersession of a cleric, who uses them in ceremonies or carries them at the head of a procession on saints’ days and other holy days: their presence hints at some kind of communal worship, such as recreating the Mass or less doctrinal rituals, again related to hope, freedom and perhaps forgiveness. Conversely, Maltese crosses embody both religious and secular meanings. At once an implicit Catholic symbol and the ubiquitous sign of the Order, representations occur on armour, clothing, flags, jewellery and more besides. As such, many instances can be interpreted as outward expressions of allegiance to the Order and the secular sovereignty of the Grand Master, instead of or even in opposition to the Church per se. However, gaolers appear to have made li le a empt to erase them. The idea of a Muslim slave carving the sign of the men who have enslaved him – whether a simple, Maltese or processional cross – does not seem immediately plausible when only considered in terms of stringent religious usage, yet such carving of crosses may have sufficed as a signal of acquiescence and acceptance among other inmates, just as the employment of carved Maltese and processional crosses enables group re-enactments of Christian ritual that engender solidarity. All of this provides further instances of coping with prison life. The sea plays an important role in any island community and for non-Maltese among the Inquisition’s prisoners, it provided the means by which they had arrived in Malta, whether freely as traders and sailors or forcibly as captives and slaves. It is therefore unsurprising that nearly 10 per cent of the sampled graffiti depicts ships (see Figure 5.3). In order to move beyond overly simple associations of ships and maritime life, one must consider ship depictions more broadly.16 They have a long history in Catholicism and are o en regarded as offerings to particular saints for a safe voyage, either prophylactically or in gratitude, when depicted in places of worship.17 In other Mediterranean countries, churches not uncommonly display model ships or large ‘hanging ships’, although this ritual was rare in Malta.18 Instead, a practice of donating ex-voto maritime-themed paintings existed, in which a saint is also depicted. Less official, yet socially acceptable, versions exist carved into the exterior walls of small churches. In both kinds of rendering, a side-on view of a ship, as seen in the Inquisition graffiti, features rarely and scholars do not generally consider ship carvings found in secular locations, such as prisons and fortifications, as exvoto, asserting instead that graffiti renderings of ships display intimate

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Figure 5.3. Ship graffiti from the Inquisitor’s Palace, demonstrating oared and rigged vessels. Photographs and drawings by the author.

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knowledge of the vessels and their workings, signifying that all ship graffiti were the work of sailors.19 This unduly precludes the prevalence of ex-voto artworks (paintings or graffiti) in sacred locations as an alternative prototype for depictions in prisons, whether or not they adopted Christian connotations. The profusion of popular religion that mixed doctrinal with ‘heretical’ practices may well have enabled prisoners of all religions to consider ship graffiti as votive offerings. For captive galley rowers-cum-prisoners, ships represented both their future prisons and their only way to freedom and possibly home, thus necessitating complicated relationships with their representations. For these men, the votive connotations could be very real, with ship carving a materialization of the hope for a be er future forged through the isolating experiences of imprisonment and forced labour. In such circumstances, ship graffiti become a material strategy of coping with prison life and a material manifestation of affect that need not be confined to the carver. While votive offerings appeal to supernatural beings,20 a person’s acts remain earthbound and bodily, with touching, including kissing (given the association with ex-voto paintings), and vision enabling sensorial interaction with a ship graffito. Writing one’s name on a wall indicates a more individualistic practice that is well a ested in Malta. Most textual graffiti in the Inquisitor’s cells is wri en in the Latin alphabet and limited to names, dates or combinations of the two. Identifiable examples include ‘LEONARDO PALOMBO’, a Neapolitan prisoner condemned to row on the Order’s galleys (see Figure 5.1).21 Arrested for sorcery on 17 December 1750, the Tribunal punished his heretical offences with shaming, though he spent seven and a half months under interrogation and trial in the Inquisitor’s prisons. Angelo Rooca, another Neapolitan forzato arrested for sorcery, spent ten months incarcerated in 1761.22 Angelo appears to have carved his name at least twice on a single stone block (see Figure 5.2). More elaborate instances in Arabic script o en quote from the Qur’an and occur with Islamic iconography. The relatively advanced literacy of an O oman subject schooled in reading the Qur’an, compared to that of a Christian sailor, limited to writing his name, mirrors the differences in complexity between Latin and Arabic graffiti.23 Arabic inscriptions and associations with Islam accompany some of the most detailed carvings, as is the case for two impressively carved roses. Frequently interpreted as the Rose of Muhammed, Arabic inscriptions and extra flowers adorn both, suggesting that educated hands – for instance, those of male Muslim slaves imprisoned for apostasy or sorcery – created them (see Figure 5.2).24 Around the prison, they share an eastwards orientation, facing towards Mecca. Similarly,

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three upraised, open-fisted hands with upper forearms occur on the southwest wall of the same cell (P2; see Figure 2.2) and their roughly equal size points to the potential of the same limb providing a template for all examples (Figure 5.2). Upraised hands make common subjects for graffiti around the world and survive on church and other prison walls in Malta and Gozo.25 As with ships, archaeologists and historians have based their interpretations on the institutional se ings of the graffiti, viewing hands on church walls as limbs held in supplication and therefore ex-voto and Christian in nature, with those on prison walls interpreted as either the product of Muslims or simply as a memento.26 Such location-based interpretations preclude more complex situations. Within Islamic tradition, the hand is frequently interpreted as the talisman of the Hand of Fatima, the holy family, or the five Pillars of Islam. Rather than highly stylized representations of the Hand of Fatima that o en appear in religious art (in accordance to Islamic conventions), the graffiti renders hands naturalistically and life-sized, implying that they were traced around living limbs and involved direct contact with the stone surface; a tactile act that may have included more than one individual – one to carve and another to provide the template limb. Other anthropomorphic graffiti are limited to some haloed figures, a hanged figure and a crucifix. The haloed figures are naïve in appear-

Figure 5.4. Painted figures on northwest wall of cell M2. Image by Jeroen De Reu.

Material Routines • 187

ance and echo those painted on the plastered wall of one of the cells (see Figure 5.4).27 Could these also have been votive offerings to saints? The hanged figure not only demonstrates anthropomorphic representation, but also reflects events that actually took place. The Order hanged civilian convicts and the graffito may represent a blurring of the civic and religious authorities in the minds of inmates. Equally, it may record the death of Demtrio, a Muslim prisoner who in 1735 hanged himself in one of the cells.28 The graffito thus materially engenders an affective mnemonic act: the recording of an unse ling event by a witness. The architectural developments instituted by Inquisitors Pannellini and Messerano demonstrate a concerted effort to create a centralized prison block, which afforded limited, though increased, surveillance. Graffiti on cell walls and in the prison courtyard suggest a high degree of mobility for many inmates that in turn implies free association, although the relative lack of graffiti in the corridors equally suggests that inmates spent time either in the courtyard or in their cells rather than wandering around unchecked. The idea of fully controlling a prisoner’s activities, encouraging work and producing useful citizens, as developed from the late eighteenth century onwards in the North Atlantic, had not yet taken hold. The use of architecture to routinely isolate individuals does not seem to have played a part in a normal prison sentence, with torture and chaining to walls restricted to individuals under investigation. Ironically, the confining architecture presented the most salient canvas for distraction and self-expression, as well as communication between former, present and future inmates. The mass of graffiti indicates that, on some level, imprisonment was a shared experience. Rather than isolated and distinct, as it may seem today, graffiti constituted a valid part of the communicative apparatus available to prisoners and was part of a broader visual culture that encompassed paintings and sculptures in churches and mosques, printed images on notices, and symbols on shop signs and ships’ hulls and sails. Graffiti served as a vehicle for communicating despair, hope, one’s presence or simply as a distraction from prison life and whiling away the hours. In each case, the physical activity and perseverance exerted in carving into stone created meaning and purpose for a while in days that were otherwise potentially devoid of structure. The religious and reflective facets of many graffiti also suggest contemplation, which presumably applied to their ‘reading’ as much as to their production. While one may detect subversion and relief in the Islamic graffiti carved by slaves or crosses carved by potential apostatizers and sorcerers, some clearly found the experience so awful that they felt the need to find a way out. Records chart several a empted suicides, from

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cu ing one’s throat with a piece of iron bar to poisoning with lime or hanging. It remains unclear whether the prison conditions or the prospect of being sentenced to the galleys drove these unfortunate souls to suicide, but in 1798 the Inquisition was forever removed from Malta, as the French and subsequent British regimes brought new ideas of imprisonment and societal control, epitomized by the civilian prison system developed in the nineteenth century.

Classification On admission to Corradino male prison, the chief warder called an inmate’s name and took him to the receiving room, locking the door behind them both and confiscating his property.29 The infirmary warder instructed the inmate to undress and oversaw the shaving of his head and beard. The chief warder issued a set of items to the prisoner, including clothes comprising one pair of trousers and a belt, a shirt, a neckerchief, a waistcoat and jacket, as well as a cap, a handkerchief and a pair of shoes. Inmates also received bedding in the form of a hammock, a ma ress, a pillow, a blanket and a rug. In addition, each inmate received a numbered cell plate that served to identify him at all times, either hung on his cell door or carried with him.30 Once issued with all items, the chief warder escorted the prisoner to the superintendent’s office for admonishment, before taking him to his cell, where he read to the prisoner the printed regulations hanging on the wall.31 From the moment a convict entered the prison, authorities contrived to control a prisoner’s time through an apparatus of codified regulations and material routines. Wri en regulations imposed idealized conditions to be provided by prison staff that the physical limitations of the building and confines, as well as subversive inmates, frequently undermined. Building on previous discussions of prison architecture, convict labour and inmates’ foodways, what follows investigates prison routines and the ways in which they combined to build up an all-encompassing regime intended to orchestrate the actions of inmates; what Erving Goffman referred to as a ‘total institution’.32 The discussion will focus on male imprisonment at Corradino civilian prison and female incarceration at the Ospizio prison ward. Diet and physical labour constituted activities that were important to the development of prison routine in the nineteenth century. The morally fortifying properties of ‘productive labour’ and the careful development of prisoners’ diets, both supported by religious instruction, aimed at transforming inmates into useful and reformed citizens.33

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Differences existed in terms of the kinds of work issued to men and women, differences largely consistent with the then current genderascribed work of men and women in broader society. Similarly, the food system in operation at the Ospizio entailed inmates preparing their own food from ingredients, whereas the men at Corradino received ready-cooked meals. Nevertheless, the prescription of set mealtimes and worktimes formed the backbone of both prison systems, along with a classificatory system. Corradino’s five-class system of ‘graduated severity in separation, labour and diet’ for criminal inmates ranged from A, the ‘Separate System’, wherein inmates’ cell doors were unlocked for only one hour daily in order that they could exercise in the separate and silent exercising yards, to E, the ‘Relaxed System’, which afforded inmates greater comfort and a lock-up time of 13.5 hours per day.34 The principle of isolating inmates from the outside world and its influences resulted not only in an extreme 23, 22 and 20 hours of seclusion for the severest three classes respectively, but also denied them rights to receive le ers or visitors. From 1861, the regulations relaxed slightly, offering each class an extra hour daily with an unlocked cell door and graded access to the outside world: System B could correspond with and receive visits from friends every two months, Systems C and D every month, and System E each 20 days, while those on System A remained isolated.35 Each class ordinarily lasted six months, with progression to the next, slightly more lenient group until E, in which the prisoner remained until his term of imprisonment ended. The progression signified not only a gradual return to freedom but also mimicked the supposed contrite and rehabilitating nature of imprisonment, as the convict progressed ever closer to being welcomed back into the society that had previously excluded him. The classificatory system bore no relationship to an inmate’s status in the outside world, but resulted in noticeable material differences within Corradino. Creating a broadly homogeneous appearance, a barber shaved prisoners’ faces every second day and kept their hair short. A le er emblazoned on his uniform signified the system to which an inmate belonged and the colour of his uniform provided a further visual demarcation between hard labour inmates (grey) and those simply incarcerated (blue).36 At a glance, a warder could discern a prisoner’s class and thus evaluate whether or not the prisoner should be where he was, thereby increasing security. Such glaring material differences do not appear in the prisoners’ uniforms at the Ospizio. Operating under Detention, Imprisonment and Hard Labour, the three-class system differentiated through architecture

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and work, rather than clothing.37 Each women received three gowns, shi s and pe icoats on entry, along with bedding, which, unlike the men, demonstrates that women slept in beds, not hammocks.38 In a prison much smaller than Corradino, containing fewer inmates and spatially far simpler, the matron would have known each inmate by name and face, negating the need for le ered uniforms or identification number plates. However, their absence from the Ospizio also reduced the impact of surveillance on the individual and the degrading elements of removing one’s name. The ubiquitous institutional material culture issued to the women nonetheless restricted processes of self-fashioning and individualization. As in Corradino, the material conditions provided sought to limit expressions of individuality and independence, seeking instead to organize inmate behaviour through the very clothes they wore, the beds (or hammocks) they slept in and their eating patterns, all of which compounded the monotony of an unchanging daily routine. In Corradino, a bell woke inmates at 6 am, initiating a 30-minute period in which they had to ‘open cell windows, make beds, clean cells, wash hands and faces, [and] comb [their] hair’.39 Making their beds entailed folding their hammocks in military style and the cleaning duties involved polishing all the brass and tin objects in their cells, including their number plates. The purposeful organization of exercise times meant that as few prisoner classes as possible were out of their cells at any one time, reducing the possibility of prisoners from different classes meeting. The movement of classes around the prison, the opening and closing of different classes’ cell doors, and specific activity times detailed in Table 5.1 demonstrate the material basis of the routinized actions of the prison. Regulations prescribed not only when but also how inmates should move around the prison, with warders expecting inmates to walk in single file, not turn around and maintain a distance of 10 feet (3.05 m) between each other. All activities ceased at 5 pm in the winter and an hour later in summer months, when warders locked the prisoners’ cell doors for the night. Between times to work and eat, the prison also made provision for worship and religious instruction. All classes a ended worship at the prison chapel in the morning (6.30 am). Systems B to E also a ended in the a ernoon, and, a er 1861, System E a ended for a third time in the evening. The chaplain held extra services on Sundays and holidays, which enforced the religious element of rehabilitation and provided some presumably welcome disruption to a monotonous daily routine. The dominance of Catholicism across the islands delayed the addition of a Protestant chapel until 1872 (see Chapter 2, under the heading

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Table 5.1. Routine of Corradino civilian prison, reconstructed from Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 4–5 by the author. System

1854 Regulations

1861 & 1872 Regulations

23 hours seclusion;

As 1854 but:

1 hour exercise in the yard (morning);

1 hour extra with cell door unlocked.

Compulsory occupation in the cell; A: Separate System

Moral and religious instruction in the cell; Chapel a endance on Sundays and holidays (morning); Diet of the A section; 15 minutes light at night.

B: Separate System Relaxed

22 hours seclusion;

As 1854 but:

1 hour exercise in the yard (morning) or a endance at School (morning) or Chapel (a ernoon) if preferred to exercise;

1 hour extra with cell door unlocked;

Compulsory occupation in the cell;

2 more hours outside (not exercise);

Cell door open for 1 hour in the a ernoon;

Can see friends, send and receive le ers once every 2 months.

Chapel a endance Sundays and Holidays (morning and a ernoon); Diet of the B section; 20 minutes light at night.

C: Medium System

20 hours seclusion;

As 1854 but:

Liberty to communicate restrictedly with fellow prisoners, whilst out of the cell;

Silent association with others in yard for 3 hours;

Instruction in trades;

1 hour exercise, walking along the wall of the yard, one a er another;

Occupation in cell with open door for 2 hours in the a ernoon;

Can see friends, send and receive le ers every month.

Chapel a endance Sundays and Holidays (morning and a ernoon); Privileges a ainable by good conduct; Diet of the C section; 25 minutes light at night. (continued)

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Table 5.1 Continued System

1854 Regulations

1861 & 1872 Regulations

18 hours seclusion

As 1854 but:

Free association and communication with fellow prisoners whilst out of the cell;

Silent association with others in yard for 3 hours;

Occupation in cell with open door for 2 hours in the a ernoon;

1 hour exercise in the company of another prisoner ‘Designated by the Superintendent’ to converse in a low voice;

D: Medium Chapel a endance Sundays and System Relaxed Holidays (morning and a ernoon); Extra Chapel every evening; Employment as assistant to cook, barber, store keeper or infirmary warder;

Can see friends, send and receive le ers every month.

Privileges a ainable by good conduct and industry; Diet of the D section; 40 minutes light at night.

E: Relaxed System

13.75 hours seclusion;

As 1854 but:

Free association and communication with striped prisoners;

13 hours seclusion;

Chapel a endance Sundays and Remaining, allowed to associate Holidays (morning and a ernoon); with others, and talk; Privileges a ainable by good conduct and industry;

Extra Chapel every evening

Diet of E section;

Can see friends, send and receive le ers every 20 days.

1 hour light at night.

‘Civilian Imprisonment’). At the Ospizio, the Catholic chaplain of the asylum conducted separate Masses on Sundays and festivals for female prisoners, although he rarely visited the prison. Less part of the system at the Ospizio, a empts at instruction of all kinds were minimal and the women received no Bibles or books.40 Although low literacy rates prevailed, making books somewhat redundant, the matron had no remit to provide schooling. Conversely, literacy and numeracy education, as well as training in the trades, slowly became incorporated into the Corradino system for more relaxed-class prisoners. Whether in chapel or

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school, each activity came with its own set of designated behaviours. In chapel inmates had to kneel, sit and stand as directed, while in school they ought not to slouch, but ‘stand erect’.41 Abiding by the rules resulted in very real benefits. The initial system of up to nine good conduct stripes was a er 1861 simplified to five and bestowed on inmates not only extra food, wine and gratuities for working, but also increased access to visitors and le ers, as well as a sentence reduction of up to two days for each week.42 Nevertheless, many broke the rules. Prohibited auditory communication by way of whistling, singing, reading aloud, knocking on walls and floors, and ringing their bells unnecessarily represented minor offences.43 Inmate resistance usually manifested itself in acts of vandalism to their cells, clothes and furniture.44 On 25 August 1881, a fire destroyed a provision store, which may or may not have been the result of inmate vandalism.45 Violence against staff was a problem, which moved one superintendent to propose a stone-based stool that could not be picked up and used as a weapon.46 Inmates frequently fought one another, with fighting the most o en-cited reason for punishment in 1860, followed by unauthorized communication, smoking and possession of tobacco.47 Superintendents struggled to control the flows of illicit materials. In the prison’s first year, an inmate smuggled a carpentry tool into his cell and hid tobacco in a hole he had made, while in 1860 a run of incidents prompted the superintendent to initiate a police search of each cell.48 Illicit material o en found its way into the prison through warders and other staff, fuelling a potential prison economy of barter and gi exchange, which at times may have included sexual ‘gi s’ in exchange for tobacco or liquor, as has been the case at other colonial prison sites and caused great concern for the governor of Gibraltar’s convict prison.49 At Corradino, prisoners occasionally a empted to leave of their own accord. While no instances are recorded at the Ospizio, escapees from Corradino made it into British newspapers: suspected murderer and notorious thief Giuseppe Ebejer broke free in 1860 by removing the iron grate from his cell window and climbing along the tops of walls; and in 1871, fourteen prisoners managed to escape, including convicted murderers.50 However, the ultimate rebellious act within a prison environment was suicide, the resort of Thomas Ahorne, aged twenty-two, who in May 1860 hanged himself ‘by the neck with the rope of his hammock, which he a ached to the iron bar of his cell’.51 For those who remained within the prison confines, punishment for transgressing its rules came in a number of forms. Physical restraints used in cases of violent prisoners included stocks (prisoners used sim-

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ple handcuffs to damage their cells) and occasionally gags, although the use of irons ceased a er 1885.52 By this time, complete solitary confinement (regardless of prisoner class) and refractory cells had taken over as the chief form of punishment alongside admonishment: punishments designed to affect, or ‘discipline’, the offender psychologically rather than physically. Solitary confinement denies the inmate communication with others, inducing a state of isolation and sensorial deprivation. In the dark and quiet of the refractory cell, an inmate is reduced to a largely tactile relationship with her or his surroundings, compounded by a heightened awareness of her or his own bodily noises and relieved only by the affectual and mnemonic associations of eating bread and drinking water. Other common punishments included reduction of class and loss of good conduct stripes, which problematically only applied to those with stripes and ruled out the lowest prisoner class. Female inmates received lighter punishments, consisting only of half rations and solitary confinement in 1845. The Ospizio prison was for most of its life without a designated refractory cell, a lumber room replacing the solitary cell built in 1864. Instead, an inmate was confined within a room during the day, but was released again at night.53 In 1872, the matron issued only six punishments, all of which consisted of a half-reduction of rations, suggesting a move away from solitary confinement as a mechanism of punishment in the female prison.54 The general trend of increased admonishments may reflect the type of the punishment given to female inmates. It is possible that the matron employed unofficial, and therefore unrecorded, forms of punishment by allocating an inmate heavier work, such as pumping water or washing, rather than a ending the sick. Conditions at Corradino served to foster a work ethic and good behaviour through a system of enticements and rewards, as well as limited access to education. However, the judiciary consistently undermined the system by issuing short sentences unsuitable to habit-formation.55 Unruly inmates necessitated a system of penalties. Reduction in the number of physical punishments coincides with an increase in psychological punishments and demonstrates a commitment to the ethos underpinning the architectural planning, classification, daily routine and prescribed movements around the building. Lighter punishments are observed in the Ospizio, where the segregation of an inmate for punishment was disbanded a er the removal of the solitary confinement cell. In both institutions, codified rules, regulations and reports remained incomplete, dependent upon the physical presence of the prison and its inhabitants in order to transform abstract ideals into material practices.

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Distraction In an act similar to Corradino’s chief warder reading the prison rules to new admissions, naval ordinations were read aloud on each galley as soon as it le harbour. Both acts a empted to ensure that no one was in any doubt of their position or what was expected of them. Reading regulations symbolized the start of a new set of rules and the initiation of institutionally prescribed behaviours, the contravention of which were punishable. On board the galleys, rule-breakers of all levels were punished. The Order ejected knights and sentenced novices to death for taking up arms against a fellow shipmate. For the largely immobile rowers, the routine and physical exertion of rowing provided the mechanisms of bodily discipline. Rowers underwent a gruelling system of bodily and psychological conditioning, with the Order’s galleys serving as a form of maritime incarceration in which the gaoler inflicted physical chastisement. Slaves were property and if abused to the point of impairing their ability to row, the culprit owed the owner (usually the Order) compensation. Nevertheless, it remained a commonly held belief that one must beat a slave in order to get him to row hard, and records a esting to many a murdered galley slave demonstrate that sailors and soldiers, as well as knights, targeted them.56 Treated as machines, power on board operated through an extreme regime: the explicit colonization of rowers’ bodies through the repetitive action of rowing and the violent routine of galley life. Yet the overt physical cruelty of galley life too frequently overshadows the psychological trauma experienced through bodily abuse and loss of liberty. As David Wheat has noted, ‘the involuntary and oppressive nature of galley slavery in the early modern era is difficult to overemphasise’,57 and some would go to great lengths to avoid rowing, including cu ing off their own hands. In response, the Order punished slaves suspected of self-harming from the 1670s with whipping for a first offence, cu ing off their nose for a second and hanging for a third.58 Many slaves served for long periods, extraordinarily up to fi y years, with some receiving pensions.59 Discipline on board relied not only on force and routine, but also on the careful and detailed accounting of people, goods and time. Roll-calls occurred every three months, during which time the chief bombardier inspected dispensed arms, shot and gunpowder, while the purser kept records for the Order’s treasury.60 Morning, midday and evening prayers, in addition to the distribution of food rations, marked daily time, and weekly Masses and observance of saints’ days punctuated the calendar of all on board,

196 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Figure 5.5. Pipes and dice: (a–c) tobacco pipes; (d–e) three-hole grated ‘hashish’ pipes; (f) worked bone; (g) eleven bone and two stone dice (far right). Images by the author.

regardless of their religion. Ironically, though, for a group whose sole purpose was to provide labour, the unpredictability of enemy encounters provided many hours of idleness. Similar to the situation in the Inquisitor’s prison, the idea of occupying the time of inmates or rowers with labour and programmed routine, such as that at Corradino prison, did not exist. Instead, gaolers pacified slaves with hashish, deprived them of sleep and encouraged the use of opium through which rowers escaped their lot. The ramifications are materially manifested in the ordinary objects of maritime life, but especially in the dice and smoking paraphernalia of the galley crew. The Order permi ed everyone on board their galleys to smoke tobacco, which is confirmed by seventy-two chibouk, or ‘Turkish’-style, pipe bowls contained in the Dockyard Creek assemblage (see Figure

Material Routines • 197

5.5).61 The mostly partial nature of the pipe bowls suggests that they were broken before being tossed overboard or dumped into the harbour during maintenance and careening.62 On Maltese corsair ships, captains commonly bought tobacco for their crews and, given the presence of tobacco and pipe reeds on lists of victuals, it would seem that a similar practice occurred on the Order’s vessels.63 Although the most commonly inhaled substance, tobacco was not the only drug to be imbibed. Knights found opium on searching a galley a er the slave rebellion of 1749 and a er the death of several slaves from overdoses and suicides, they prohibited its use.64 The reason for the ban related not to the smoking of opiates per se, but rather the ill effects it had on the economy and finances of the galleys: a dead slave needed replacing and entailed a cost. Opiates have a subduing effect, as does the smoking of hashish. At least one of the pipe bowls recovered from Dockyard Creek is suited to smoking hashish.65 It is perhaps too easy to read the smoking of hashish and opium from a twenty-first-century perspective and interpret it as an act of free will or defiance, and while slaves may have partaken in hashish and opium for recreational purposes, gaolers and officials also dispensed them cynically to the rowers in a bid to keep them mollified at times of unrest or prolonged inactivity. The use of mind-altering drugs demonstrates the complex and contradictory relationships at work. While officially prohibited by the Grand Master and the Order’s council, their use was at least institutionally tolerated, if not facilitated and encouraged, by those in charge at sea, in which case, the subversion is that of the knights and officials rather than the hashish- and opium-smoking rowers. When relaxing, smoking – perhaps tobacco rather than opiates – crews engaged in other pastimes, such as playing games. The Dockyard Creek assemblage contains no less than thirty-four dice, including four of stone that are slightly larger than the rest, which are fashioned from bone. A popular argument that they were thrown overboard by crew caught, or nearly caught, gaming when in harbour when they should have been working on maintenance is entirely possible and would account for their presence in the harbour deposit. Yet, it is equally likely that, as small items, players lost the dice on board and that they washed into the bilge, only to be pumped out during maintenance, just like broken pipe bowls. Several partially carved bones exhibit knife marks and demonstrate that the dice were carved from long bones, the ends being squared off to a rectangular shape, each producing multiple dice,66 a process that in itself would have consumed many idle hours (see Figure 5.5).

198 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

Neither the Order nor the Inquisition outlawed gaming as such, although it o en led to blasphemy and brawling, for which individuals were tried and sentenced. Regardless, gaming was commonplace.67 It is an activity that forges association and regular playmates may have resulted among the benches of rowers, providing the material conditions for negotiating relationships with others and one’s own place within a group through choosing to play or not, or the exclusion of individuals by others. Despite peer pressure to join in, as two of the few noncompulsory activities to take place on a galley, tobacco smoking and gaming offered opportunities to enact free choice largely without repercussions, making them surprisingly empowering activities that facilitated rower agency. When the day’s work was over, it was time to sleep. The extremely limited space on board meant that all but the knights and officials had barely enough room to sleep properly.68 For a rower, this meant sleeping with his four bench-mates in a space no larger than 2.3 metres long by 1.25 metres wide.69 Despite the ‘by any standards, atrocious’ work conditions,70 sleep deprivation was perhaps the worst aspect of galley life.71 Combined with the physical exertion of rowing, daily routine structured around food and prayers, and drug use, sleep deprivation formed part of an institutionalized lifeway. Even if not officially sanctioned, the mechanisms of control employed the officially authorized power structures of the Order to expose ultimately captive subjects to repetitive and limited routines that induced bodily discipline and the creation of compliant seamen. In light of such conditions at sea, the return to Malta and a spell on land, albeit in a bagno, may not have seemed such a gloomy prospect for slave rowers. For the paid crew, it may have meant returning to their families, but also potential unemployment, such was the seasonal work of the navy. Under British control, slavery was abolished in Malta and the military institutions of the Order gave way to the larger military institutions of the British Empire, the rituals of which, though less obviously violent, served to contrive desired behaviours and norms.

Compliance As in all British army messhouses, rules and regulations governed behaviour at the officers’ mess housed in the former Inquisitor’s Palace. Knowledge of the rules guarded inclusion and made events such as mess dinners socially impenetrable to those with no understanding of formal Victorian dining. A commi ee governed the mess, headed by a

Material Routines • 199

president and vice-president, roles that rotated weekly among the officers independently of military rank.72 Officers need not dine in every evening, but choosing to eat elsewhere required signing the ‘dining-out book’ in advance in order to avoid a fine.73 However, frequent Inspection and Guest Nights compelled a endance. On Inspection Nights, the commanding officer of the ba alion dined with his officers, which was especially important if he lodged away from the messhouse, as was o en the case in Malta. Guest Nights consisted of two sorts: to one, officers extended invitations to guests of the regiment, such as Captain A. Ross, who celebrated thirty-four years’ service with ‘his brother officers at their mess room at the Inquisitor’s Palace’ on 22 July 1871;74 and to the other, officers invited personal guests. Officers sported full regimental uniform and, if present, the occasion required the equally formal a ire of a dress coat and white tie from civilian guests. That rulebooks only stipulate male forms of dress indicate the prohibition of female a endance. Indeed, it was customary – or at least encouraged – not even to mention the names of ladies or, for that ma er, to discuss military ma ers.75 A bugler, such as Irishman Samuel Sherlock, whose regiment billeted at the site sometime between 1828 and 1836, announced dinner.76 Before the final bugle, officers gathered in the ante-room, mingling yet refraining from smoking for the half hour preceding dinner. The senior officer, or on Guest Nights, the guest and his host, then led them into the dining room.77 Some regiments also had chants to call officers from the ante-room to the dining room, which o en demonstrated a more bullish and less paternalistic a itude towards the ‘men’ and those of lower social rank than the army officially encouraged.78 There were no fixed dining places, except for the president and the vice-president, who occupied the head and foot of the table respectively.79 If late, it was to the closer of the two to whom an officer had to apologize before a mess servant, who also served dinner and was a soldier of the regiment, seated him. The president led a standing toast to the monarch’s health and, when present, the regimental band played the national anthem.80 The dining room contained not only a table and chairs, but also a sideboard, an essential piece of furniture used for storing drinks, serving food and displaying the regimental silverware.81 Scuffed ceramic furniture casters and worn ceramic door knobs found archaeologically enliven our image of rooms fi ed out with Victorian interiors. Ceramic remains relating to food consumption provide a good impression of dining in the messhouse and amount to 390 vessels.82 They include the remains of 181 refined and 101 tin-glazed vessels, that is,

200 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

white-bodied ceramics not dissimilar to those used only a couple of generations ago in many parts of the world, and (light) red-bodied ceramics covered with a glaze that makes the vessel appear white. Plates and dishes make up the bulk of the tin-glazed tableware, most of which is either plain or decorated with monochrome designs around the border, but some are brightly decorated polychrome maiolica examples that are Mediterranean in origin (see Figure 5.6). It is possible that some date back to the late eighteenth century and were reused relics from the time of the Inquisition; however, due to their deposition with nineteenth-century British ceramics, I interpret them as pieces available at local markets during the early to mid-nineteenth century, especially before a supply of British crockery had started to accumulate in the messhouse. Plainer items may not have made it to the mess table, instead being reserved for less formal occasions and use by the mess servants. Similarly, some of the brightly coloured Mediterranean maiolica may have functioned as fruit bowls or had decorative functions and contrast starkly with British ceramic designs of the time. Most of the formal diningware present comes from Britain and consists of three-quarters whiteware, around a tenth pearlware (white-glazed, beige-bodied ceramic) and only two examples firmly categorized as creamware. The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed a transition from cream-coloured ‘creamware’ and white-glazed ‘pearlware’ to more colourless glazes and whiter bodies (whiteware), so the relative lack of cream-coloured wares and the dominance of whiteware characterize the archaeological remains as typically Victorian. Frequently used items, such a plates, are the most likely to get broken and they therefore occur most frequently in the archaeological record, with 126 examples represented at the site, fi y-seven of which are plain and another fourteen decorated with blue- or green-impressed scallop-edging (see Figure 5.6). Variation in plate size suggests that over half were used as dinner plates, with a range of side plates and larger plates, or pla ers, used for serving and displaying foods both on the table and on the sideboard. The gradual change from laying out all courses together to serving courses individually occurred in British middle- and upper-class society during the mid-nineteenth century; nonetheless, plating a mess dinner required servants to bring large quantities of food to the mess table and dispense it from large vessels, such as pla ers, serving dishes and soup tureens, all of which travelled with the regiments and therefore leave relatively fewer examples archaeologically.83 Also carried by a regiment, highly decorated and expensive messwares frequently displayed a regiment’s mo o and some

Material Routines • 201

Figure 5.6. Dining at the Inquisitor’s Palace. Ceramic plates: (a) whiteware with moulded rim; (b) plain whiteware; (c) green scallop-edged pearlware; (d) blue scallop-edged pearlware; (e) blue on white transfer-printed whiteware; (f) gilt and polychrome porcelain; (g) blue on white transfer-printed whiteware; (h) whiteware with relief-moulded marly. Glass: (i) castor or condiment container; (j) stemmed wine glass; (k) dessert dish. Images by the author.

202 • Captives, Colonists and Cra speople

regiments even had their own pa ern painted or printed onto crockery (Figure 4.5). When not in use, the regimental crockery and silverware remained safely stored in the plate room, which was conveniently located near the mess room, but also securely behind three locked doors (see Figure 2.9). Other mess room items include glass dessert dishes and table condiment sets. Smoking o en accompanied a er-dinner drinking, with the president duty-bound to order (possibly Maltese) cigars and cigare es to the table.84 Wine and port were the most common drinks: 40.4 per cent of all glass finds relate to wine bo ling and consumption, while wine drinking is evidenced by the presence of stemmed goblets or ‘wine glasses’.85 A wine cellar dug in the early 1830s and the designation of one on a late nineteenth-century plan (see Figure 2.9) also suggests that during the mid- to late nineteenth-century wine was an important beverage and the principal drink consumed at the officers’ dining table.86 Regiments ran a wine and cellar account, with each drink entered into a ‘wine book’, ensuring each diner paid for what he and his guests drank.87 Officers could ordinarily get up from the table once the wine had circulated twice, but leave to withdraw on Guest and Inspection Nights came only a er the senior officer and all guests had retired.88 The material conditions – objects, furniture, spaces and people – not only enabled mess dining and reiteration of its experience, but were constitutive of the practice. From the architecture and mess china to the wine and uniforms, all colluded to create repeatable occasions that brought the officers together with the sensory efficacy necessary to induce feelings of togetherness and of ‘home’. Reconfiguration of the space within the building complex in Birgu was crucial. The army converted former prison cells into wine cellars, constructed a rackets court and installed modern toilet facilities. Spatial analysis suggests that the organization of interior space located the plate room at the heart of the building, protecting the precious silver and ceramic messware that identified the regiment. Routinized material practices employed mess silverware and china, which meant they accompanied the regiment wherever it went. While they were highly prized regimental possessions, messwares were essential to the recreation of mess dinners. Mess rooms provided spaces in which communal activities, including dining, took place – activities that were vital to the good functioning not only of the mess but also the regimental esprit de corps. As much as rules governed dining, the consumption of copious amounts of wine and other alcoholic drinks maintained a high-jinks atmosphere, including games and antics that harked back to boarding

Material Routines • 203

school. Richard Harrison recalled an evening in his early career when two senior officers used the ‘well-polished mahogany table in our anteroom’ for a ‘cock-fight’: two senior officers of the garrison, in Generals’ shell jackets, were trussed as cocks and pi ed against each other, while we juniors stood round applauding and encouraging one or the other of the combatants until the defeated one rolled backwards and was picked up and set on his legs by his admiring backers.89

Officers’ uniforms at once announced to each other and themselves their shared membership of a regimental family and a broader imperial class, while mess dining brought English crockery onto a table at which mess servants served familiar smelling and tasting dishes. Grand levels of etique e refined the dinner to a show of allegiance, deference and subservience not only to those of superior military rank, but also to Crown and Empire. Whether from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales, the routine and ritual of the dinners sought to unite officers through collective memories of a single mythic mother country.90 Not only did the frequency of these dinners serve to reaffirm officerly identity, but the material practices involving familiar crockery and food presentation also reiterated a shared connection with an imagined Britannic homeland. Regardless of differences in officers’ backgrounds, the ritualized practices enacted material routines necessary to the maintenance of the shared ‘social vison of their homeland’ that officers reproduced throughout the empire.91 *** The central role of religion in Malta has arguably dominated many aspects of life for the last six centuries. The knights, the Inquisition and the clergy all represented Catholic authority. Even under the rule of the Protestant British, Catholicism and Catholic ritual continued to permeate and structure daily life for most inhabitants. However, a focus on religious doctrine and on its materialization through ritualized practices does not provide the whole story, which has been evident in the institutional situations discussed above. Far from being separate or irrelevant, religious rituals, themselves governed usually by sets of codified rules, provided part of an entangled web of religious and secular everyday practices. In all the above institutional cases, religious practices served to structure time, from Catholic observances on board the Order’s galleys through which all crew at least sat through, even if they did not actively partake, to the forced a endance of Catholic or

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Protestant worship at the chapels in Corradino prison. The absence of a codified and enforced daily schedule beyond that loosely informed by religious observance le inmates of the Inquisition with an abundance of time to fill, in which they created, shared and maintained their own routines. The practice of graffiti carving blurs conventional categories of organized religions, with examples representing Christian and Islamic iconography, as well as those that suggest popular beliefs. Rather, carving provided a coping strategy founded on improvised takes on organized religious observances and introspective spiritual experiences through physical contact with their stone environment and the material practice of graffiti marking. An important part of any coping strategy is wilful psychological escape. On board the Order’s galley, this took the forms of smoking a range of substances – some more mind-altering than others – and dice play: the one providing a potentially very introspective means of psychological separation from the material realities of the surrounding hardships, and the other actively communal and solidarity building. The communal and highly ritualized affair of mess dining also demonstrates a certain need to escape. Through the enactment of the mess diner with familiar material culture, the ritual not only served to bond the officers together in a shared image of Britain and its empire, but also to escape for a short period the realities of a mobile existence and dislocation from the motherland. By distracting oneself from the immediacies of one’s environment, one is also compliant with the overriding regime. Such methods of coping and distraction as seen by the Order’s galley slaves, the Inquisitor’s inmates and British army officers also made them relatively trouble-free and acquiescent. While initially not so overt in the case of British officers, who are normatively characterized as imperialists, these supposedly ‘powerful’ men were also ‘colonized’ through the routine and ritual of mess life. Each institutional context had its methods for dealing with noncompliant souls or, to evoke Foucault’s term, non-docile bodies: court martialling for British officers, whipping or worse for galley slaves, and a range of corporal punishments for those sentenced by the Inquisition. At Corradino prison, records provide information about the acts of subversive inmates and their punishments, although a discussion of subversion now would pre-empt that of the next chapter. More important here are the ways in which the material culture and spatial layout of Corradino constituted a codified system of punishment-enforced classification that underpinned the workings of the new model prisons. While classification systems existed in all of the institutional contexts discussed in this chapter, from the military hierarchies of the Order’s

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navy and the British army to the less sophisticated separation of the Inquisition’s male and female inmates, at Corradino the classificatory system bu ressed a daily schedule that dictated where and when one was at any given point of the day, made possible through the architectural design and later modifications, as well as the material routines of admission, eating, exercise, work and sleeping. The single-file movements of prisoner classes around the site echo routines of the army drill yard and the precision folding of prisoners’ hammocks mimic the order and discipline demanded of barracked soldiers. Yet classification extended beyond inmates to the prison staff, who followed codified role descriptions and who were themselves under the surveillance, both figuratively and literally, of the superintendent. By concentrating on the scale of the everyday and on the material routines that constituted institutions, I have not always explicitly drawn a ention to the ways in which these institutions formed the apparatus by which foreign rulers enacted power and governed. Yet each provides institutional contexts run by groups of people who were not Maltese, but institutions tasked with the appropriation and coercion of bodies, labour and resources for the good of the foreign ruling regimes. Each institution impacted on the lives of islanders and people from other territories, whose own actions contrived to further the advancement of others. The next chapter turns specifically to drawing together the thematic threads dealt with so far, from spatial practices to flows of objects and from cash-cropping to subversive behaviour, in order to examine how institutionalized material routines, labour, foodways and space operated on multiple scales, from the local to the global.

Notes 1. Anon., ‘Public Executions at Malta’, Evening News (27 April 1878), 3. 2. Anon., ‘Public Executions at Malta’, 3. 3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 1991 [1977]. 4. A. Cremona, ‘Weather and Husbandry Lore in the Isles of Malta’, Archivum Melitense 6(11) (1922), 6. 5. Harriet Nash and Dionisius A. Agius, ‘The Use of Stars in Agriculture in Oman’, Journal of Semitic Studies 56(1) (2011), 167–82. 6. Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 40. 7. Frans Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2001, 489–92.

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8. Joseph Muscat and Joanne Cassar, ‘The Gozo Prisons Graffiti’, Melita Historica 11(3) (1994), 243–44. 9. For details regarding graffiti sampling, cataloguing and quantitative analysis, see Russell Palmer, ‘An Archaeology of Comparative Colonialism: Material Culture, Institutions, and Cultural Change in Malta, c. AD 1530–1910’, unpublished PhD dissertation. Ghent: Ghent University, 2017. 10. Included in this category are groups of loosely associated lines, a group comprising graffiti I believe to be intentional and possibly incomplete (unfinished, defaced, or eroded), yet worthy of counting. 11. Eleanor Conlin Casella, ‘Enmeshed Inscriptions: Reading the Graffiti of Australia’s Convict Past’, Australian Archaeology 78 (2014), 109. 12. Ciappara notes that prisoners were permi ed to walk around the prison block ‘with the rosary in their hands’ (Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 490). 13. Ma hew Champion, Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England’s Churches. London: Ebury Press, 2015, 27; Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 314. 14. Ömür Bakirer, ‘The Story of Three Graffiti’, Muqarnas 16 (1999), 42–45; Dionisius A. Agius, ‘Decorative Motifs on Arabian Boats: Meaning and Identity’, in Janet Starkey, Paul Starkey and Tony J. Wilkinson (eds), Natural Resources and Cultural Connections of the Red Sea (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007), 106. 15. Richard. E. Wener, The Environmental Psychology of Prisons and Jails: Creating Humane Spaces in Secure Se ings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 115–16. 16. For instance, the simplistic association promoted by Ad de Vries, Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1976, 13. 17. Joseph Muscat, ‘Graffiti on the Exterior Walls of St. Paul’s Shipwreck Church, Wied il-Qliegha, Mosta’, Melita Historica 12(22) (1997), 180. 18. Guiseppe Restifo, ‘Hanging Ships: Ex-Voto and Votive Offerings in Modern Age Messina Churches’, Rivista dell’Instituto di Storia dell’Europa Mediterranea 4 (2010), 411–23; A.H.J. Prins, In Peril on the Sea: Marine Votive Paintings in the Maltese Islands. Malta: Said International Ltd, 1989, 4. 19. Muscat and Cassar, ‘The Gozo Prisons Graffiti’, 241. 20. Prins, In Peril on the Sea, 5. 21. Recorded as ‘Leonardo Palumbo’ in Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 525. 22. Ciappara, Society and the Inquisition in Early Modern Malta, 531. 23. Literacy rates in Malta were very low for the majority of the population until a er the Second World War. The 1931 census records 142,117 (78 per cent) of 181,754 inhabitants of Malta and Gozo as illiterate (Government of Malta, Census of the Maltese Islands, Taken on Sunday, 26th April, 1931, under Ordinance XI of 1930. Malta: Malta Government Printing Office, 1932, 80). 24. David Pickering, The Cassell Dictionary of Folklore. London: Cassell, 1999, 250. 25. Darrell Lewis, ‘The “Outback Archive”: Unorthodox Historical Records in the Victoria River District, Northern Territory, Australia’, Australian Archaeology 78 (2014), 71; Muscat, ‘Graffiti on the Exterior Walls of St. Paul’s Shipwreck Church’, 181. 26. Muscat and Cassar, ‘The Gozo Prisons Graffiti’, 245. 27. The paintings have prompted Ma hew Balzan, among others, to suggest that the room was used as a chapel, although it was built with toilet facilities, so it is unlikely that its intended or initial use was religious worship. Furthermore, neither the date of the painted figures nor the use of the room a er the Inquisition periods are known with any certainty (‘From Pannellini to Messerano: The Quest for a

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28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

secure Prison Complex at the Inquisitor’s Palace’, in Kenneth Cassar (ed.), The Inquisitor’s Palace: An Architectural Gem Spanning Centuries and Styles (Malta: Heritage Malta, 2013), 56). Russell Palmer, ‘Religious Colonialism in Early Modern Malta: Inquisitorial Imprisonment and Inmate Graffiti’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20(3) (2016), 557; Kenneth Gambin, The Inquisitor’s Palace, Vi oriosa. Malta: Heritage Books, 2003, 36. Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison/Regolamenti per la Prigione de Corradino. Malta: Printed at the Government Press, 1854, 38; Government of Malta, General Regulations for the Corradino Prison/Regolamenti Generali per la Prigione de Corradino. Malta: Nella Stamperia del Governo, 1861, 6. Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 13. Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 38. In Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Chicago: Chicago: Aldine, 1962, Erving Goffman popularized the term, referring to institutions in which many people were cut off from the rest of the outside world in an environment in which events and the organization of time is pre-arranged by those ruling the institutions (at 11–17). See Christine Davies, ‘Goffman’s Concept of the Total Institution: Criticisms and Revisions’, Human Studies 12 (1989), 77–95 for a revisionist account. Eleanor Conlin Casella, The Archaeology of Institutional Confinement. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2007, 61. Government of Great Britain, Prison Discipline in the Colonies: Digest and Summary of Information Respecting Prisons in the Colonies. London: HMSO, 1867, 60. Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison; Government of Malta, General Regulations for the Corradino Prison (1861); Government of Malta, General Regulations for the Corradino Prison (1872). Government of Malta, General Regulations for the Corradino Prison (1861), 6. When female prisoners moved to Corradino, they also adopted the five-class system. Blue Book 1864, 364. Bedding and clothing were supplied by the Great Prison until the removal of male prisoners to Corradino, when the task fell to the Comptroller of Contracts for Civil Supplies (Blue Book 1850, 319). Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 5. Blue Book 1845, 254. Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 6. Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 8–9; Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison (1861), 15. Government of Malta, Regulations for the Corradino Prison, 5–12. Blue Book 1857, 369. Blue Book 1881, H6. Sandra Scicluna, ‘The Prison in Malta: 1850–1870 and 1931–1951’, unpublished PhD dissertation. Leicester: University of Leicester, 2004, 67 and 102. Scicluna, ‘The Prison in Malta’, 100. Scicluna, ‘The Prison in Malta’, 97. See Eleanor Conlin Casella, ‘Bulldaggers and Gentle Ladies: Archaeological Approaches to Female Homosexuality in Convict-Era Australia’, in Robert A. Schmidt and Barbara L. Voss (eds), Archaeologies of Sexuality (London: Routledge, 2000), 143–59; Command Paper C.1346, 1875. Report of the Directors of Convict Prison on the Discipline and Management of Millbank and Pentonville Prisons, and of Borstal, Brixton,

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50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

Chatham, Dartmoor, Pankhurst, Portland, Portsmouth, and Woking Prisons for Male Convicts, with Fulham and Woking Prisons for Female Convicts; also the Convict Establishments at Gibraltar and in Western Australia, for the Year 1874. London: HMSO, 1875, 528. Anon., ‘Daring Escape from Corradino Prison, Malta’, Falkirk Herald (11 October 1860), 4; Anon., ‘Escape of Prisoners from Corradino Gaol’, East London Observer (18 November 1871), 6. House of Commons Papers 535, 1861. Return of Trials for Murder and Manslaughter at Malta, 1840–60. London: HMSO, 1861, 51. NAM/GMR/64. J.B.H. Collings. Reports of the Inspector, Superintendent, Deputy Superintendent, and Chaplains of the Corradino Prison for 1850, Malta: F.W. Franz, 1851, 4. Blue Book 1845, 255. Blue Book 1872, AB13. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 122. Godfrey We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2002, 355–61. David Wheat, ‘Mediterranean Slavery, New Word Transformations: Galley Slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, 1578–1635’, Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-slave Studies 31(3) (2010), 334. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 353–34. Joseph F. Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, Hyphen 2 (1979), 60. Grima, ‘Gente di Capo on the Galleys of the Order in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century’, 55–56. Chibouk pipes are typical of the O oman style of smoking tobacco through a reed a ached to a bowl at one end and a mouthpiece at the other. These could be elaborate and fashioned from precious metals, or cheaply produced in earthenware, as is the case of those found in Dockyard Creek. For an examination of the pipe assemblage, see John Wood, ‘Tobacco Pipes from Dockyard Creek, Birgu, Malta’, Clay Pipe Research 3 (2008), 7–18. Timmy Gambin, ‘A Window on History from the Seabed’, Treasures of Malta 10(1) (2003), 76. Liam Gauci, In the Name of the Prince: Maltese Corsairs, 1760–1798. Malta: Heritage Malta, 2016, 106. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 547. Wood, ‘Tobacco Pipes from Dockyard Creek, Birgu, Malta’, 9. Gambin, ‘A Window on History from the Seabed’, 76. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 551. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 340. Mauro Bondioli, Réne Burlet and André Zysberg, ‘Oar Mechanics and Oar Power in Medieval and Later Galleys’, in Robert Gardiner (ed.), The Age of the Galley: Mediterranean Oared Vessels since Pre-Classical Times (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1995), 192. John H. McManamon, ‘Maltese Seafaring in Medieval and Post-medieval Times’, Mediterranean Historical Review 18(1) (2003), 49. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, 76. Frank Levray, ‘Etique e in the Mess-Rooms of the British Army’, The Lotus Magazine 10(3) (1919), 108. E.G. MacKenzie, Notes of Mess Etique e. London: Heath Cranton Ltd, 1919, 11–13. Army and Navy Gaze e (19 August 1871), 5.

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75. Levray, ‘Etique e in the Mess-Rooms of the British Army’, 107–9. 76. Samuel Sherlock hailed from Middleton, County Cork and served in, among others, the 74th Regiment. Between September 1828 and March 1836, he carved his name on a wall in one of the old prison cells at the Inquisitor’s Palace, while his regiment was billeted in Malta. See Russell Palmer, ‘Graffiti as Historical Data: The British Army and the Inquisitor’s Palace’, Melita Historica 17(2) (2017), 48. 77. Levray, ‘Etique e in the Mess-Rooms of the British Army’, 108. 78. See, for example, the chant previously discussed in Chapter 4. 79. MacKenzie, Notes of Mess Etique e, 10. 80. Levray, ‘Etique e in the Mess-Rooms of the British Army’, 108–9. 81. Julie Banham, ‘Dining at Endcliffe Hall’, in James Symonds (ed.), Table Se ings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700–1900 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 59. 82. This figure includes eighty-two small unglazed bowls that were more likely utilized in the kitchen rather than in the dining room. The bowls are the same form that in other contexts I have interpreted as eating bowls. 83. David Barker, ‘Producing for the Table: A View from the Staffordshire Po eries’, in Symonds (ed.), Table Se ings, 13. 84. MacKenzie, Notes of Mess Etique e, 11. 85. The majority of wine bo les are made of dark olive glass, o en referred to as ‘black glass’, which raises the prospect of them having originally contained beer and other beverages, yet within the context of an officers’ mess site, wine is the most plausible contents. 86. George Percy Badger. Historical Guide to Malta and Gozo. Malta: P. Calleja, 1869, 213; George Nelson Godwin, A Guide to the Maltese Islands. Malta: Printed by Paolo Bonavita, 1880, 182. 87. W.N. Hutchinson, Standing Order Issued to the Two Ba alions, XXth Regiment. London: Printed by W. Clowes & Sons, 1845, 156. 88. Levray, ‘Etique e in the Mess-Rooms of the British Army’, 108–9. 89. Richard Harrison, Recollections of a Life in the British Military during the La er Half of the 19th Century. London: Smyth, Elder, & Co., 1908, 123. 90. Here I invoke the use of tradition and constructed shared memories to create group bonds and common identities among disunified groups, as described by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. 91 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Penguin, 2001, 66.

c6 GLOBAL INTERSECTIONS

The early modern Mediterranean was a vibrant theatre of trade and transfer, and although the Atlantic may have taken over its ‘heart of world-economy’ status from the seventeenth century onwards,1 it nevertheless persisted in its connectedness. Far from constituting separate spheres of interaction, long-distance trade routes to the Middle East linked the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, as did naval ba les, pirates and migrants. British dominance of the Mediterranean for much of the nineteenth century created a largely conflict-free arena that through trade and colonization became entangled within the tendrils of informal and economic empire, and became more intensely affected by global pa erns of trade, mobility and communication.2 The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought the strategic importance of Malta’s harbour facilities to the fore, and for many historians, the new sea route connecting Britain with its imperial jewel marked not only the inclusion of Malta into the British imperial network, but also a transformation of its harbour from primarily merchant-based to navalbased.3 While there is no doubting the importance of the Suez Canal to Malta’s harbour development and, by extension, its economy, I argue that Malta was by that time already incorporated in and dependent upon networks that reached far beyond Europe and the Mediterranean. It makes sense, therefore, to consider the ways in which the people and material cultures discussed in previous chapters intersected with broader currents of interaction. Some of these pa erns demonstrate politicoreligious or colonially bound networks of movement and trade, forged not only by financial interests, but also by social and cultural aspirations.4 Other pa erns and webs transcend the normal operations of the Order or the British Empire, making their way into global flows of people, goods and information. As part of the colonial exchange, nineteenth-century Malta, like many other colonies, also impacted the imperial homeland and other metropoles. Through the philanthropic intervention of a titled British

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lady, the production of elegant vases and figures made from Maltese limestone began, many of which were later exported to Europe and America, and exhibited alongside copperwork and silverwork in imperial exhibitions.5 However, the impact of Malta did not restrict itself to commodities alone; ideas also flowed in both directions. A good example comes from the way in which Maltese regulations governing prostitution became involved in the argument over the Contagious Disease Acts in Great Britain during the 1860s. The Order had subjected Malta’s many prostitutes to periodic examination by police surgeons and kept venereal wards. Under British rule, compulsory examination of prostitutes continued with the exception of two years in the 1860s,6 which Ordinance IV of 1861 legally sanctioned. At this time, a lock hospital was built next to the Central Hospital in Floriana, before being moved to the Poor House at Mghietet in 1910, where it continued to function until its closure in 1930.7 Although challenged in 1859, the law enabled Maltese authorities to enforce inspections of prostitutes by a police surgeon thrice monthly and detain them if they were contagious. London commentators considered Governor of Malta Sir Henry Stork’s implementation of the regulative system so successful that it was claimed Malta was virtually free from venereal disease in the 1860s. Stork’s regret that he could not also inspect soldier’s wives clearly demonstrates that such activities, as elsewhere, aimed at improving the health of the military rather than the civilian population. Nonetheless, a continuance of what was seen as the Order’s regulation of prostitutes became a commonplace reference point for advocates of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Great Britain.8 Malta also impacted other colonies. With the increase in potato farming, the majority of seed potatoes came from Ireland. In the season of 1894/95, a kerfuffle developed because of the measures taken by the Governor of Malta to halt the importation of seed potatoes from the United Kingdom on the grounds of disease, which saw consignments from Ireland shipped back.9 With the north of Ireland having shipped between £6,000 and £7,000 worth of seed potatoes to Malta over the previous four years, the potential hit to the region’s agricultural producers was significant. The Coleraine Town Commissioners denied any inferiority in the crop and released the following statement: That the Board, being informed that the Colonial Department have referred the alleged existence of disease in potatoes to the Irish Office, it is hereby resolved that the Town Commissioners of Coleraine request the Chief Secretary for Ireland to make the necessary investigation at once, as the season for shipment is a short one; and that this Board is satisfied that the potatoes to be shipped to Malta for seed this year are of be er quality than in recent years.10

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The early season crop that Malta produced from Irish seed potatoes and sold principally to England had grown into an important source of trade. Some Maltese were quick to spot the opportunities, inserting themselves into the intercolonial trade. By the onset of the First World War, import and export merchants such as Walter Briffa had developed supply chains in order to furnish Maltese growers with seeds of all sorts and export the mature produce, which included onions and cumin, as well as potatoes.11 However, disruption to supply chains such as that of seed potatoes from Ireland affected those in both island colonies and demonstrates the intercolonial connection between Malta and Ireland. The following sections further explore the global intersections of Malta and its inhabitants, ‘global’ referring to recent a empts to look beyond purely colonial-, religious- or state-bound interactions.12 The first section focuses on two particular types of manufacture that played important roles in the lives of Malta’s inhabitants and through which it is possible to explore the underlying networks of people, as well as their relationships to each other and to Malta’s political regimes. Sicilian po ery remained important in the foodways of our period and its presence in archaeological assemblages demonstrates significant pa erns of a changing relationship of reliance, whereas British-made bo les and jars provided colonial entrepreneurs with commercial opportunities that were otherwise not present on the islands. Their newly forged business relationships rested on the mobility enabled through steam travel and enhanced communication technologies developed during the nineteenth century. An exploration of human mobility and communication forms a second focus before the chapter concludes by considering institutional relationships and power more broadly through a empts of subversion. The intersections of the global with differing religions and nationalistic divides are highlighted through examples of Muslim slaves and Irish Home Rule-sympathizing officers.

Material Networks Wherever there is trade, connections are made between producer and consumer. These connections need not be direct and in many cases the producer and consumer never meet, the transportation and packaging of the product being carried out by a countless array of faceless intermediaries in a process that can be summarized as ‘commodity chains’. Take the fashionable French porcelain brought to Malta for resale by a knight on one of the Order’s galleys (discussed in Chapter 4, under the heading ‘Captain’s Table’). It is unlikely that the knight – let alone who-

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ever bought it in Malta – ever met the lowly factory po er who produced the porcelain. Such opportunistic events, however potentially lucrative, are rarely lasting or especially organized. Even the recurrent supply of goods such as sugar, which became an everyday luxury for wealthier eighteenth-century inhabitants, varied enormously from year to year. Alternatively, material networks constitute sustained relationships of supply that are institutionally reinforced and more readily found in mundane goods.13 Archaeological evidence from Malta provides two types of product that constituted material networks and influenced the consumption pa erns of her inhabitants through the centuries. The first is ceramics: pots and pans, jugs and jars that we have already met in terms of foodways. The second is packaging in the forms of glass and stoneware bo les and jars,14 which dominated long-distance liquid transportation in the age of steam. Archaeological evidence bears out the Order’s reliance on Mediterranean goods. Aspirational knights of the eighteenth century may have followed the fashions of the French court – in addition to frequently finding posts within the French navy and buying up French colonies in the Caribbean – but the everyday decorated ceramics on their galleys were Italian, as were the pre-British decorated ceramics from the Inquisitor’s Palace. The brigantine trade that took Maltese co on to Spanish destinations brought many goods back to Malta, o en spending weeks trading in Marseilles, Genoa, Livorno, Naples and Sicilian ports, before reaching home.15 A reliance on coastal navigation supports a route from Liguria and other northern Italian ceramic-producing centres southwards towards Sicily and on to Malta. In his study of the eighteenth-century Maltese brigantine trade, Carmel Vassallo does not list ceramics as an article of trade bought or sold, although he is not exhaustive in his listings of commodities.16 Archaeological examples from Malta demonstrate that maiolica from the northern po eries of Liguria or southern copies from Campania, along with a group of yellow and green lead-glazed basins bearing strong parallels to those produced by southern Italian po ers,17 all found markets on the islands. While hailing from all over Italy, the overwhelming majority probably reached Malta via Sicily. As well as making its own tin-glazed wares (maiolica), Sicily had good links to all the major Italian po ery production centres, especially those in Campania.18 It is therefore probable that Italian pottery found in Malta came via Sicilian ports, especially Messina.19 The papal connection of the Order, ties through the Inquisition and the lingua franca of Italian used by Maltese elites and merchants would have played their role, but perhaps the most significant reason for the

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preponderance of Italian ceramics results from the Order’s reliance on Sicily as a larder – a conduit supplier of most, if not all, things. Traffic ferrying between the islands dominated local shipping and the knightly endorsement of the relationship came in the form of the Order’s own bakeries, suppliers and victualling yards – one might call it a colony – at Augusta. A closer look at the archaeological remains reveals that during the Order’s reign, around half of all ceramics originated from either Malta or Sicily. The dark red cooking ware I have referred to in previous chapters has been chemically and mineralogically located to workshops in the Messina Straits area of northeastern Sicily, and historical accounts a est to ‘jars and utensils’ exported from Pa i in ‘very large quantities to Malta’.20 Although the po ery is present at all sites and historical contexts, there are marked quantitative differences across the assemblages. On board the Order’s galleys and in the Inquisitor’s prisons, that is, in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contexts, ‘Pa i-ware’ comprises 16 and 15 per cent respectively of the number of vessels recorded, but drops to 9.5 per cent during the later nineteenth-century British period.21 Clearly, the Sicilian cooking vessels continued to have importance in relation to Maltese foodways throughout our period, with the nineteenthcentury reduction a ributable to both the British army’s use of moulded metal pans and skillets, as well as the fact that the only available evidence comes from a British-dominated rather than ‘Maltese’ site. Many decorated ceramics originate from Syracuse, but again, their spread is not even. On board the galleys, they comprise over one-third of all ceramics, whereas in the same centuries on land, they account for only 8.8 per cent. During the British period the figure reduces further to below 3 per cent. The proximity of Syracuse to Augusta is important: it is not so surprising that the region surrounding the Order’s Sicilian victualling station supplied many of the items taken on board the galleys. Unlike cooking wares, decorated ceramics from Sicily appear to lose significance for Malta once the Order departed, signalling a potential reorientation of Malta’s market for ceramic consumables. In the British period, Mediterranean, Italian and Sicilian imports are still clearly important, with local and imperial merchants making use of links with major Mediterranean ports such as Genoa to import Italian po ery to the islands,22 in addition to the continued trade in Sicilian cooking ceramics. Yet British imports start to take hold. Most of the recorded British items come from the officers’ messhouse period at the Inquisitor’s Palace and amount to 263 vessels, of which 94 per cent are mass-produced refined earthenwares (creamware, pearlware

Global Intersections • 215

and whiteware), plus a few examples of ironstone, white granite and porcelain. The assemblage comprises nearly three-quarters tableware, alongside a much smaller group of teawares. The presence of British tableware is important, as it indicates a different way of eating from the traditional Maltese style. In eighteenth-century Britain, food consumption became increasingly separated from its preparation, which affected not only the implements used to eat food, but also the configuration of space within dwellings, as rooms were designated for ‘dining’.23 Through the importation of British ceramics, aspects of British culture penetrated deep into the rural hinterlands through a shared culture of consumption. Along with the mass exportation of tablewares, the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in processed goods, largely facilitated by new methods of packaging. Technological developments turned glass into a highly malleable and versatile container material suitable for the storage and transportation of not only beverages, but also a staggering range of consumables and household goods. Together with moulded ceramics, glass containers became packable, stackable and perfect for transnational shipment. The glass assemblages from the messhouse period contain 105 bottles and jars.24 While this includes a mass of generic olive-green bo les, so thick and dark that they are frequently referred to as ‘black glass’ and o en contained wine or beer, other examples had very specific and identifiable contents. Several items related to health, such as small pill jars and a bo le of Guy’s Tonic, which cured ‘habitual weakness of the stomach’.25 Ready-made creams and tonics were ideal for the globally mobile and available in an array of hygiene solutions, including dental care, to which an opaque white (milk) glass flask originally containing tooth powder – the forerunner of toothpaste – and a ceramic lid from a pot of Areca Nut Tooth Paste, produced by Commons in Bath, both a est. Glass bo les also contained toiletries and nonhygiene-related substances, ranging from Florida Water (a type of American cologne popular with both sexes) to Arconaut straw hat dye.26 Mostly, though, the contents implied by surviving glass bo les and jars were edible. Two examples demonstrate the importation of English processed foods. The first comprises two jars made by Bagely and Co. Ltd, a Yorkshire glassworks specializing in manufacturing glass containers. One is embossed with ‘MELLINS FOOD’ on its shoulder, indicating that the jar originally contained baby food, and dates from the turn of the twentieth century.27 Mellin’s Food Company had a depot at the premises of Collis and Williams, wholesale and retail chemists and

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aerated water manufacturers who had outlets in Valle a and Sliema, as well as a factory in Marsa.28 The second example is a square-profiled bo le that has the word ‘MASON’ moulded onto its front, which refers to Mason’s O.K. Sauce, a popular condiment in the late nineteenth century.29 A further sauce bo le demonstrates the increased introduction of American processed foods in later nineteenth-century British contexts, although given the decline in direct shipping from the United States entering the Maltese port in the late nineteenth century, it is likely that this early variety of Heinz Ketchup made its way to Malta via the United Kingdom. Some drinks also had their own specialized containers. Two nonalcoholic bo led beverages became extremely popular: carbonated, or ‘aerated’, water and ginger beer. Manufacturers frequently marketed carbonated waters in aqua-coloured Codd-style bo les, which contain a glass ball to form an airtight closure and are instantly recognizable (Figure 6.1(b)–(f)).30 These were produced extensively in Britain and the United States, although all examples from the messhouse come from British factories, the maker’s name generally moulded onto the rear of the bo le. William Barnard and Sons produced four of them in their London glassworks before 1902, when they dissolved their partnership.31 One is moulded on the front with the name ‘CARMELO CUTAJAR GUDIA’, suggesting that Cutajar bo led carbonated water in Gudja, a small village south of the Grand Harbour. Another two display the name of Charles Julious, an entrepreneur who successfully exploited the market provided by British military personnel, residents and visitors. A well-connected individual, his initiation into the Grand Lodge of Freemasons in Ireland on 2 January 1872 suggests his origins, and by the 1890s, he also belonged to the Malta lodge, marking him as one of the island’s colonial merchant class.32 Around that time Julious commissioned bo les branding his name from England and filled them with carbonated water at his premises in Valle a.33 In addition to working with William Barnard and Sons, he imported Codd-style bo les from Manchester glassworks Bratby and Hinchliffe, which may represent a change in his business relationships and implies his ability to choose the most suitable or cost-effective suppliers for his business. As a producer of carbonated waters, he had the necessary equipment to make other carbonated beverages and he did. Two incomplete stoneware bo les bear his name that, together with advertisements of the time, confirm that he also produced ginger beer.34 Julious was not the only Irishman making use of British bo les; Stannus Geoghegan, the brewer from Dublin mentioned in Chapter 4 (under the heading ‘Beverages’), bo led his stout in British bo les.

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Figure 6.1. Nonalcoholic beverage bo les: (a) Charles Julious stoneware ginger beer bo le; (b)–(c) Charles Julious codd bo les made by William Barnard and Sons, London; (d) Charles Julious codd bo le made by Bratby and Hinchliffe, Manchester; (e) Codd bo le ‘Glorious Malta’; (f) Codd bo le ‘Carmelo Cutajar’; (g) stoneware ginger beer bo le of J.E. Mortimer & Co. Images by the author.

Geoghegan and Julious marketed their goods primarily to the military and other ‘British’ residents, with Julious specifically advertising himself as ‘Manufacturer to the Garrison’.35 Some entrepreneurs went a step further and tendered for contracts to supply army canteens. Noted as ‘Army and Navy Contractors’ and ‘General Merchants’, Messrs J.E. Mortimer and Co. had an active presence in Malta from at least 1880 until the early twentieth century.36 Concentrating on supplying British military and allied populations in the Mediterranean region, they

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also had offices in Alexandria, Cairo and Crete. In Malta, they positioned their office on the most prominent street in Valle a and had several army and navy canteens.37 The partners formally registered their business under the provisions of the Partnership Act 1890, dissolving it shortly before Joseph Edward Mortimer’s death. From 1905, the remaining partner, Henry Cecil Mortimer, carried on trading under the business name. The same notice of dissolution describes Joseph as residing in Aberystwyth, suggesting that he had retired from London to his home town in Wales.38 One of J.E. Mortimer and Co.’s ginger beer bo les from the messhouse assemblage bears a black eagle and the words ‘Eagle Works’ and ‘Marsa’ (Figure 6.1(g)), indicating that Eagle Works operated as a bo ling factory based in Marsa.39 Mortimer and Co. also supplied a wide range of alcoholic drinks to the garrison, including beer. Writing in early 1883, Mr Nash, a salesman from Sco ish brewer William Younger and Co., observed that Joseph Mortimer was in Cairo and his son Henry was running the Malta business. Nash also minuted Mortimer’s distrust of his presumably Maltese clerks, noting that ‘Mr Mortimer does not wish his clerks in Malta to know the net price. Invoices are always made out gross for Malta’.40 Another British brewery, H. & G. Simonds Limited, had an agent in Malta from 1875 and in 1890 opened a branch office. Eventually, Simonds would merge with Farsons and again with the Maltese Export Brewery (Cisk), two Maltese breweries that started business in the late nineteenth century.41 Maltese businesses developed alongside other colonial ventures and in some cases joined their fellow colonial subjects from other parts of the empire in catering for the needs of the ‘British’ population in Malta. Antonio Despo , the business partner of Geoghegan, was Maltese, as was aerated water seller Carmelo Cutajar. Active participation in increasingly globalized networks by these entrepreneurs reiterates their aspirational identities and their willingness to rise in the colonial and capitalist hierarchy in which they lived. It was clearly preferable to procure bo les from British factories rather than closer Mediterranean ones, despite the large quantities of goods still procured from the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century: Britain was not the obvious choice for all products, and global trade, especially emanating from America, slowly crept into Maltese consumer culture. However, one must be cautious in equating Malta’s status as a British colony with its involvement in global trade. The island’s role as the empire’s Mediterranean military fortress, coaling station and free port certainly entangled Malta deeper into colonial and global networks than it might otherwise have been, but it is also important to acknowledge that the material evidence comes from the second half of the nineteenth cen-

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tury, a ‘watershed’ period in which ‘markets for widely used commodities – especially foodstuffs – and for labor became globally integrated’.42 During the first half-century of British control, the infiltration of British goods appears more limited and the sphere of interaction in the trade of mundane goods more concretely Mediterranean, as it was before 1800. The configurations encountered in the institutional assemblages broadly echo the ceramics collected as part of the Maltese Survey Project, which suggest that the material culture available under the Order was enmeshed within the political, trade and cultural institutions through which it sought control. Furthermore, the bias towards Italian products materially articulates the Order’s connection to the Vatican over knights’ individual national or economic ties to either Spain or France. Therefore, the knights constituted part of and were subject to a cultural and economic influence emanating from the Vatican, which had just as profound an effect on daily consumption in Malta as the direct rule of the Order itself.

Mobility and Communication The early modern Mediterranean was an arena of mobility facilitated by the sea and the arrival of the Order ushered in a new era of mobility in Malta.43 We have already seen that the knights themselves were highly mobile, aided through the exploits of their own navy and by captaining French vessels, but by se ling on the island, the Order, as an supranational institution enmeshed in the wider Catholic world and engaged in wars against Muslim forces, brought new political significance. By establishing the ports, a navy and a slave market, they opened up the possibilities of international trade and encouraged the mobility of those associated with catering to their needs. The international composition of slave populations, though mostly Muslim, necessitated culture contact and exchange within the islands.44 Many slaves plied trades on the islands, either at their own behest or that of their masters. At the same time, the Order’s development of the islands defences and a quarantine station (lazzare o) exponentially increased the importance of the islands main harbours, beginning Malta’s role as a shipping conduit between European powers and North African territories. The port drew an ever-increasing array for foreigners to Malta’s shores, with eighteenth-century shipping originating mostly in the Mediterranean – French, Greek, Ionian, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Ragusan, Turkish and Venetian – in addition to a limited Flemish and English trade.45 In the years a er the American Revolutionary War, the port became

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important to American trade as a stopover for many vessels, including the Roxann, which arrived from Boston in June 1810 laden with coffee and sugar destined for the Levant.46 In the nineteenth century, Russian and Turkish agricultural products flooded the Mediterranean. The Suez Canal halved the time a steamship took to sail from London to India, pu ing Malta on the most important imperial shipping lane a er it opened. With its bonded warehousing and coaling facilities, Malta was well placed to facilitate the overseas trade of ‘huge amounts of the wheat, rice, co on and coal’ that marked nineteenth-century commerce.47 The second half of the nineteenth century saw a reduction of ships entering harbour registered in the traditional northern European trading states of France and Holland, but increases from newly formed Germany and, while shipping from the Italian states (including Naples and Sicily) remained fairly static, shipping from Greece and Turkey dipped towards the end of the century.48 However diverse transitory crews may have been, census reports conclude that the majority of the more permanent foreign population in Malta originated either from Britain and its empire or from Mediterranean North Africa, Italy, Egypt, Greece and Turkey.49 Trade was not the only factor that brought Maltese islanders into contact with foreigners. While the local boats ferrying across the harbour and keeping ‘up hourly communication’ complimented the boats plying between Malta and Gozo,50 the proximity of Malta to Sicily and the constant flow of traffic between the two islands meant that many Sicilians frequently spent time in Malta and vice versa. Generally this caused few problems, but, with each island having separate legal systems, Malta became a ‘refuge of many criminals from either of the Two Sicilies’ in the mid-nineteenth century, sparking new ordinances permi ing the extradition of criminals.51 However, most visitors were welcome, especially the vast numbers of the empire’s military personnel. Military populations are unusual in that they comprise mostly men and are extremely mobile: nineteenth-century regiments commonly spent over 60 per cent of their time posted throughout the empire.52 Notwithstanding the permanency of an army presence in Malta, it is important to appreciate that few regiments stayed long, with most visits countable in months rather than years. The postings of the service ba alion of the 53rd (Shropshire Light Infantry) Regiment demonstrate the transient life of a regiment: in a 35-year period, it was stationed across countries in five continents, from Canada and the Caribbean to India and Hong Kong. In the 1880s, the same regiment spent over six years in Malta over two unusually long visits: one for twenty-three months and another for over four years.53 In 1865, the Prince of Wales’

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Royal Canadian Regiment camped under canvas at Fort Manoel a er relocating from Lower St Elmo Barracks, and during the British expedition to Egypt in 1882, Fort Chambray on Gozo served as a hospital for wounded troops.54 In the summer of 1878, 7,000 troops of the Indian expeditionary forces landed55 and in 1896, the British Prime Minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury, caused a stir by summoning a regiment of the British-Indian Army to Malta.56 Such extraordinary occasions brought many more soldiers to the islands and meant increased engagement with global military populations for locals, especially in the case of Indian troops. Interaction did not always pass harmoniously. An event that made the pages of the London press involved a group of garrison officers playing a ‘cruel practical joke’ on some Gozitan boys: ‘For the amusement of an idle hour they adopted the not very original expedient of throwing hot copper coins from the windows of the Imperial Hotel, to be scrambled for by a crowd of boys’.57 Nevertheless, such interactions did not discourage Maltese migration to Britain. In his standard account of Maltese emigration, Charles A. Price calculates the number of Maltese net emigrants, accounting for returning Maltese and abnormal return due to plague in Tunis or a er the Crimean War, to an average of only 951 migrations per annum between 1862 and 1870, a negligible number considering Malta’s booming population.58 Furthermore, the places where these migrants se led were limited. By the turn of the century, around 5,000 Maltese had se led in England, Scotland and Wales, with a further 617 in Gibraltar and thirty-two in Cyprus. Australian colonies housed 270 Maltese migrants across their vast territories and India was home to another 100. A few hundred Maltese migrants could be found sca ered over the rest of the empire, but, as in previous centuries, Maltese migration remained focused closer to home. Eighteenth-century trading populations had developed in Cadiz and other major ports,59 yet the predominant destination for Maltese emigrants was neighbouring North Africa. Maltese immigrants, mostly rural day labourers, made up two-thirds of the European population of Tunis, which numbered between 9,000 and 18,000 in the midnineteenth century, alongside smaller yet significant numbers se led in the coastal towns and islands of the Tunisian Regency.60 Side-by-side emigrations to British colonies and North Africa continued throughout the nineteenth century, demonstrating the very incomplete allure the imperial network offered.61 Followers of Napoleon’s army initiated a Maltese ‘colony’ in Egypt that survived in the Nile Valley, recurrently replenished with new emigrants into the twentieth century.62 Such human mobility

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and communication streams ran outside of colonial networks. Instead of operating among the literate merchant elite and British populations, such networks comprised those from the rural villages and can be seen to an extent as a countercurrent of people, goods and information. The inmate graffiti in the Inquisitor’s prisons has demonstrated that communication could be pictorial and representative rather than written and textual, while highlighting that historical non-elite visual literacies that are difficult for modern scholars to access or reconstruct should not be dismissed as irrelevant or peripheral. However, literacy provided a powerful means of codifying rules and controlling the movement of people and things. The Inquisition kept careful records of each investigation and trial, and Katherine Evans recorded that a friar repeatedly deprived her of her ‘inkhorns’ in an effort to curb her evangelizing and external wri en communication.63 In the eighteenth century, the Order’s administration became increasingly bureaucratic, which the introduction of printed forms facilitated.64 Multiple kinds of paper are listed as victuals taken on board a galley, including ‘black paper’ used for making carbon copies of forms and ledgers necessary for keeping the ship’s log. In the nineteenth century, the British army became desperately bureaucratic, with most actions requiring the completion of printed forms, from cleaning to changing of the guards.65 The trend continued in the officers’ mess, the organized administration of which was viewed as integral to a well-run regiment.66 Up-to-date accounts covered all manner of expenses, including a ‘plate and glass’ account, into which all purchases and breakages were entered, and a le er book, into which ‘every le er wri en by the Commi ee on subjects connected with the mess shall be clearly copied’.67 One ceramic and seven glass ink bo les provide evidence of the administration carried out at the messhouse site. Empire-wide and local communication operated through institutionalized print and manuscript cultures. The Daily Malta Chronicle and Garrison Gaze e printed lists of residents and visitors, mostly English and military, so that one could resume acquaintances or make new ones, but the lists also served to augment the notion of a shared British world or ‘imagined community’ of colonial subjects. The imperial media highway had benefited from the increased speed afforded by steamships, which facilitated both postal communication and the transmission of printed media, including newspapers. In 1860, the installation of electric telegraph wires in Malta added the final element of the nineteenth-century ‘communications revolution’.68 It created a communication link between eleven strategic military buildings, including the officers’ messhouse at the Inquisitor’s Palace, which also connected the

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messhouse with the international network that, over the next twenty years, extended to the military prison and grew to be truly global.69 Finds from the nineteenth-century officers’ mess provide evidence for a more detailed, small-scale examination of these global connections in practice. Stimulated by the mobile army and navy while in port, the market provided by military institutions a racted many would-be businessmen, who were prepared to deliver goods and services to canteens and officers’ messes alike. Beverage supply in particular appealed to colonial entrepreneurs. Stoneware ginger beer bo les and glass carbonated water bo les were ordered from manufacturers in England, as we have already seen. Importantly, Maltese businesses did not order generic bo les, but those bearing the names and logos of their companies and partnerships. It is notable that many of the firms represented were not English, but Irish, Sco ish, Welsh or Maltese. Charles Julious was proactive in his choice of business partners, commissioning glass bo les from two English foundries. Furthermore, he drew on the international networks of the Freemasons, which provided the network within Malta necessary to carry out business with the resident British and colonial population. Like Julious, fellow Irishman Geoghegan moved to Malta in the 1890s and set up there for life. Geoghegan’s story demonstrates how global networks supplied opportunities for some, encouraged by Britain’s colonial policy of free trade. From starting his working life as a brewer’s assistant in Dublin, the success of his business in Malta enabled his fi h son, Norman Meredith, to a end Rugby School, one of England’s oldest and most prestigious public schools.70 The degree of intergenerational social mobility he accomplished for his family he achieved through his financial success, the paths to which were thoroughly enmeshed in British imperial networks. Likewise, the Maltese merchant class, who perhaps started out selling whatever colonial products they could, also founded partnerships with fellow colonial subjects, such as Despo and Geoghegan, or set up on their own, like Cutajar. On a more international scale, the Mortimers did not confine themselves to producing specific products, but saw in the Mediterranean an army of men who needed feeding and watering. Supplying army canteens in Malta and Egypt, the Welshmen drew supplies from around the empire, including from the Sco ish brewers, Younger and Co., while employing locals in their offices and facilities. As non-English citizens in the British Empire, each of the businessmen (and presumably their wives and families) managed to exploit his own subjugation as a means of be ering his and his family’s position. Those from outside the empire also took advantage of the opportunities provided by British expansionism, such as the Greek and Macedonian

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cigar manufacturers discussed in Chapter 3 (under the heading ‘Wage Labour’), who set up successful enterprises in Malta.

Power and Subversion An agricultural focus on the cash crop of co on, coupled with a reliance on externally produced provisions, enabled the Order to benefit doubly by realizing profits through the sale of co on yarn and levying duties on imported goods. The encouragement of co on production at the cost of building up other industries constitutes a type of purposeful underdevelopment of the islands. In world-systems analysis, ‘underdevelopment’ refers to a process in which the distribution of surplus value is directed away from the periphery and towards the core. In the case of Malta, cores and peripheries are best conceived of as factors determined by socioeconomic groups rather than in terms of geography. Therefore, the Order and its members constitute a core and Maltese islanders the periphery, rather than contrasting the rural countryside with the urbanized, harbour district. Largely complicit in their role, the Maltese peasantry contributed to an industry that lined the pockets of their foreign rulers, who harvested their labour in a bid to produce profit. The example highlights the abusive power relationship and although it may be argued that the Order had no reason to underdevelop what it considered its own islands, Malta was not the homeland of any knight, but the base of their operations and a land to be exploited for their own purposes. The processes involved are not dissimilar to others that have been termed ‘feudal’ by some and ‘internal colonialism’ by others.71 Later British rulers did not encourage a range of local production industries either. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the acquisition of a series of maritime bases in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries consolidated the hegemonic position of Britain in the world system.72 The imperial role of Malta was to provide the ‘grand military depot of the south’ in times of need, such as the Crimean War or the Egyptian Expedition,73 and a station from which the produce of other parts of the empire could enter the European market.74 The ethos of British free trade thrust upon all the empire’s nineteenth-century colonies encouraged entrepreneurial aspirations and the commercial lines taken by beverage bo lers and cigar rollers,75 rather than stimulating production from local raw materials, as already explored in the case of earthenware makers, but is also apparent in failings to support a empts

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at manufacturing cement tiles or expanding Maltese viticulture. British customs duties provided severe impediments to developing new local industries,76 with low- or zero-duty foreign imports sometimes making foreign products cheaper to buy in Malta than in the country of manufacture, such as Sicilian wine.77 Furthermore, the introduction of work as a mechanism of control and reform in prisons and other charitable institutions served to increase competition for those employed in traditional trades, such a broom making, needlework and ma ing. The situation was not unique and had precedents in England,78 yet the effect in Malta added to the disease epidemics, unemployment and famine experienced in poorer communities, and explains why some inhabitants le their homes for extremely low-paid work in North Africa.79 Under the Order and the British, deliberate policies ensured the dependency of poorer, especially rural, communities. Despite the security and relative peace both regimes brought to the islands, it is li le wonder that, from time to time, they experienced revolt. As an institution that relied on large numbers of enslaved individuals to function effectively, the Order lived with the constant threat of rebellion. Separated from their masters by religion rather than any other factor, slaves maintained a weak position in the power dynamic, but were not entirely powerless. Subjection of the slave’s body was incomplete, just as deployments of power always are,80 and slaves found ways to contradict and subvert the control of their masters. Some found refuge in their trade contacts, which were not only useful to galley captains in need of fresh water supplies, but also allowed slaves to conduct their own business transactions, while others escaped through the use of mind-altering drugs and others still through more mundane acts, such as eating together. In the worst-case scenarios, slaves maintained bodily control through acts of self-harm and even suicide, an approach also seen in the prisons and officers’ mess. Such severe and desperate acts highlight the effects of institutional power: enforced (im)mobility and separation, restricted choices and the ceaseless demands of routine employed in a empts to create docile and compliant bodies to benefit others. Nevertheless, the threat from slave rebellion was real, especially at sea, where slave and convict rowers outnumbered the free crew. In 1548, the navy lost the Galera Caterine a due to a slave revolt,81 and in July 1570, the enslaved oarsmen ceased rowing in anticipation of liberation when corsair Uluç Ali a acked the squadron.82 On land, slaves found themselves outnumbered, yet they nevertheless a empted frequently to escape, albeit mostly unsuccessfully. As part of the vigilance instituted by the knights, coerced fishermen kept their vessels

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constantly guarded from slaves under the threat of five months’ galley service if they did not.83 In 1749, the Order uncovered a large conspiracy involving hundreds of slaves and with the aim of taking Valle a. This resulted in the investigation of 150 individuals and the execution of thirty-eight.84 The use of military force to quash rebellion continued under the British, when troops of the 42nd Regiment dispersed a riot protesting against the banning of the Ash Wednesday fiesta. The military apparatus was also unleashed in the most famous Maltese rebellion on 7 June 1919 (‘Se e Guigno’), when British troops opened fire on a gathering of the Maltese National Assembly, whose supporters were demanding independence, and again a month later, when Royal Marines broke up a riot at Corradino civilian prison, in which prisoners set stores alight.85 However, it is noteworthy that the last two events occurred a er our period and that, under the Order and the British, Maltese uprisings were rare incidents and when they did occur, the price of bread or pay and working conditions were usually the cause, as in the case of the coal labourers’ strike at the dockyard in 1899.86 Much more common than outright resistance were subversive activities that operated on the scale of everyday activities. In Corradino civilian prison’s first year, Inspector Collings observed that ‘towards the end of June the spirit of insubordination developed itself to such an extent that it became necessary to abandon the rule of mercy and adopt stringent measures’,87 which he achieved by lengthening separate confinement punishments. The warders held powerful positions that they could manipulate, but were themselves governed by rules and regulations enforced by the superintendent. As imprisonment increasingly became the dominant form of punishment across in the nineteenth-century world, military institutions including the British army mirrored the trend.88 The British military was part and parcel of the British colonial establishment, yet rank-and-file soldiers and sailors frequently became both the bu of satirical cartoons and the needy beneficiary of charitable and philanthropic activities. The association of soldiers with the ‘demon drink’ in particular caught the public imagination. In 1891, a poem penned under the pseudonym of ‘A. Victim’ appeared in the Daily Malta Chronicle and Garrison Gaze e, describing the lot of a soldier confined in Corradino military prison.89 In ‘A Dream on Corradino’s Prison’, the author draws to the reader’s a ention social problems associated with the army at the time, particularly the popular characterization of ill-disciplined, alcohol-dependent troops – ‘The drunkard’s den ’tis named’ – and laments the stigmatization that accompanied imprisonment for a soldier:

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Stone walls of eighteen feet stand round A yard of good dimensions Within these prison iron bars For discipline and subjection. The military prison or what is worse The drunkard’s den ’tis named This place it is by many cursed But still by Smith and other Provost tis famed. The prisoner is but a homeless waif Perchance a drunkard too Is either sent to be kept safe All praises to our C.O.’s due. To work the prisoner goes at noon To toil at what he is told The work is light save carrying shot It tames a spirit bold. When he’s released he looks for his staff job But how fruitless is his a empt, Where’er he pleads all do him skirk He’s treated with contempt. For once within these high stone walls An outcast he’s proclaimed No more for him compassion calls No more is he e’er named. What do Bible readers preach That we are brothers all Then Christians practise what you preach. Let not the drunkard fall.

In his call to reassess the problems of the lowly soldier, the author questions the colonial system, casting himself and other prisoners, past and present, as victims. Rather than gratefully accepting charitable aid, he chastises middle-class would-be philanthropists, ‘Then Christians practise what you preach’, suggesting instead that it is the lack of societal forgiveness that prohibits the successful rehabilitation of ex-soldiers into society. At the other end of the military hierarchy and social scale, pursuing a career as an officer was for an educated man praiseworthy and very o en one of the few financially viable paths for many second or third sons not suited to the clergy or clever enough for the professions. The

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army’s practice of recruiting from around Great Britain and Ireland, as well as the empire more generally, resulted in a heterogeneous officer class bound on the one hand by a shared type of education and social class, yet on the other hand separated by religious, political and geographical allegiances. Agitation and subversion were complete enemies of military discipline and the army prohibited any unauthorized meetings.90 Exemplifying the tensions felt by many officers is a Gladstone tobacco pipe found at the officers’ messhouse, which raises questions of nationalism and anticolonialism in the late nineteenth-century empire. William Ewert Gladstone, four-time Liberal Prime Minister of Great Britain, was actively in favour of Irish Home Rule in the 1880s.91 The presence of pro-Gladstonian paraphernalia within a military context suggests that some officers in Victoria’s army were less than wholly commi ed to the British colonial project, however much they may have been part of and party to it. Pro-Home Rule symbols in the officers’ mess point to Irish sympathizers among the inhabitants, which may have reached beyond Irish-born officers. The pipe provocatively embodies anticolonial sentiment that went against that expected of colonial military officers, signifying the entangled web of political, national and occupational affiliations that an officer in Victoria’s army had to negotiate. Infighting between different factions had already dashed several a empts for home – though not independent – rule in Malta,92 and by the late 1880s, Maltese nationalism had started to emerge.93 Advocating Malta as a test ground for Home Rule, Gladstone drew comparisons between Ireland and Malta, with some criticizing him for using the Maltese example as a ‘stalking-horse in his pet policy of Home Rule’.94 The presence of anticolonial, pro-Home Rule symbols conflates officers’ sympathies for Irish Home Rule with that of Maltese home rule, advocating Gladstone pipes as a site for Maltese protonationalism. There is no direct evidence that Maltese inhabitants used Gladstone pipes, but it is not unreasonable to suggest that at least urban communities were aware of the anticolonial struggle in Ireland and were reciprocally sympathetic. As Stefan Goodwin argues, ‘as Europeans, the Maltese could sympathize with European colonialism. At the same time, Maltese nationalists were hostile to it because of the colonial suffering of people such as themselves and the Irish under British rule, many of whom were Roman Catholic as well as European’.95 The pipe demonstrates the multiple layers of meaning, or ‘hidden transcripts’,96 embodied in the material culture of daily life and a refusal to acquiesce to the hegemony of the British Empire in Malta and in Ireland. It also highlights how global networks of affiliation cut across the colonial, political and religious.

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Notes 1. Michel Fontenay, ‘The Mediterranean, 1500–1800: Social and Economic Perspectives’, in Victor Mallia-Milanes (ed.), Hospitaller Malta, 1530–1798: Studies on the Order of St John and Early Modern Malta (Malta: Mireva Publications, 1993), 70. 2. For a detailed treatment, see Robert Holland, Blue-Water Empire: The British in the Mediterranean since 1800. London: Allen Lane, 2012. 3. John Chircop, ‘Evolution of a Harbour Infrastructure: From Mercantile to Naval Control’, Melita Historica 12(2) (1997), 210. 4. David Lambert and Alan Lester, ‘Introduction: Imperial Spaces, Imperial Subjects’, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12. 5. Alexander G. Chesney, Historical Records of the Maltese Corps of the British Army. London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1897, 76; Thomas MacGill, A Hand Book, or Guide, for Strangers Visiting Malta. Malta: Printed by Luigi Tonna, 1839, 23; ‘Paris Exhibition of 1867’, London Gaze e (27 November 1866), 6476. 6. Fred W. Lowndes, ‘The Prevention of Venereal Disease’, British Medical Journal 2(2026) (1889), 1227. 7. Charles Savona-Ventura, History of Gynaecology in Malta. Malta: Department of Obstetrics-Gynaecology, University of Malta, 2010, 19–23. 8. Philip Howell, ‘Prostitution and Racialized Sexuality: The Regulation of Prostitution in Britain and the British Empire before the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Environment and Planning B: Society and Space 18 (2000), 326. 9. Anon., ‘Irish Potatoes in Malta’, Freeman’s Journal (16 February 1895), 7. 10. Anon., ‘Exportation of Irish Potatoes to Malta’, Northern Whig (21 November 1894), 6. 11. Allister MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, & Resources. London: W.H. & L. Collingridge, 1915, 326. 12. Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, trans. Dona Geyer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005, 19. 13. Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, 22. 14. Stoneware bo les are usually made from thick and heavy, hard-fired ceramic, making them very sturdy containers. 15. Carmel Vassallo, Corsairing to Commerce: Maltese Merchants in XVIII Century Spain. Malta: Malta University Press, 1997, 89. 16. Vassallo, Corsairing to Commerce, 115. 17. Russell Palmer, ‘An Archaeology of Comparative Colonialism: Material Culture, Institutions, and Cultural Change in Malta, c. AD 1530–1910’, unpublished PhD dissertation. Ghent: Ghent University, 2017, 74–76; Angelofabio A olico and Simona Catacchio, ‘La Ceramica Rivisita da Mensa dell’Insediamento dell’ex gravina di San Giorgio a Gro aglie: La “Cisterna 2”’, Albisola 45 (2012), 291. 18. Valentina Caminneci, ‘Sicilia,’ Archaeologia Postmedievale 16 (2012), 225–26. 19. John Debono, Trade and Port Activity in Malta: 1750–1800. Malta: BDL Books, 2000, 89. 20. Russell Palmer, Simona Raneri, Paolo Mazzoleni, Nicholas C. Vella, Germana Barone and Wim De Clercq, ‘Neighbourly Ties: Characterizing Local and Sicilian Pottery in Post-medieval Malta’, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 19 (2018), 586;

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21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

E. Blaquiere, Le ers from the Mediterranean, Containing a Civil and Political Account of Sicily, Tripoli, Tunis, and Malta, vol. 1. London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1813, 397. Palmer et al., ‘Neighbourly Ties’, 586. Michael Refalo, The Maltese Commercial Class, 1870–1914: Business, Families, Networks. Pisa: Edizioni Plus-Pisa University Press, 2010, 182. David Barker, ‘Producing for the Table: A View from the Staffordshire Po eries’, in James Symonds (ed.), Table Se ings: The Material Culture and Social Context of Dining, AD 1700–1900 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 13. For a detailed breakdown of the glass assemblages, see Russell Palmer, ‘A Functional Analysis of Glass from an Officers’ Mess, Malta’, Malta Archaeological Review 11 (2016), 41–50. Aberdeen People’s Journal (8 April 1905), 8. Catherine Sullivan, ‘Searching for Nineteenth-Century Florida Water Bo les’, Historical Archaeology 28(1) (1994), 84. Bill Lockhart, Beau Schriever, Carol Serr and Bill Lindsey, ‘Bagley & Co.’. Retrieved 4 February 2020 from h p://www.sha.org/bo le/pdffiles/Bagley&Co.pdf. MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated, 320. Mason’s described their brown sauce as ‘piquant and appetising’, Sheffield Evening Telegraph (12 April 1905), 2; Lorraine Mepham, ‘By River, Fields and Factories: The Making of the Lower Lea Valley Archaeological and Cultural Heritage Investigations on the Site of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games (Section 2)’, 2012, 20. Retrieved 7 February 2015 from h ps://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/ archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-1175-1/dissemination/pdf/PDFA-SpecialistReports/2_Olympic_Glass-PDFA.pdf. Codd-bo les were of a patented design, though many similar variations existed, hence I use the term ‘Codd-style bo les’. London Gaze e (3 February 1903), 710. Grand Lodge of Freemasons of Ireland Membership Registers, 1733–1923, vol. V: 1860–99. Accessed through Ancestry.co.uk, 12 September 2016. 42 Triq Zekka, Valle a. Daily Malta Chronicle & Garrison Gaze e (8 July 1897), 7. Daily Malta Chronicle & Garrison Gaze e (8 July 1897), 7. Mortimer and Co. advertised Bossward’s Orient Tooth Powder in a nonpaginated advertisements section bound into George Nelson Godwin’s A Guide to the Maltese Islands. Malta: Paolo Bonavoa, 1880; see also the partnership’s similarly nonpaginated advertisement bound into Eustace Alfred Reynolds-Ball’s Cairo of To-Day: A Practical Guide to Cairo and its Environs. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1898. The office of Mortimer and Co. was at 252 Strada Reale (Triq ir-Repubblika), Valle a. Egyptian Gaze e (7 December 1882), 1. Anon., ‘Notice’, Daily Malta Chronicle and Garrison Gaze e (4 September 1888), 8. London Gaze e (19 May 1905), 3630. Denis Darmanin, ‘The Malta Mounted Infantry in the Second Anglo-Boer War’, The Times of Malta (15 December 2013). Retrieved 4 February 2020 from h ps:// timesofmalta.com/articles/view/ The-Malta-Mounted-Infantry-in-the-Second-Anglo-Boer-War.499554. SBA/WY/7/6/7 1882–1883. Notes of Sales in Malta and Egypt (William Younger & Co.). Kenneth Thomas, ‘The Adventures of H & G Simonds Limited in Malta and East Africa’, Business Archives: Sources and History 62 (1991), 41–45. Farsons Groups is today the leading brewery in Malta.

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42. Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, 16. 43. Monique O’Connell and Eric R. Dursteller, The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016, 239–40. 44. David Richardson, ‘Involuntary Migration in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800’, in David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), The Cambridge World History of Slavery. Volume 3: AD 1420–AD 1804 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 567. 45. For a detailed account of eighteenth-century shipping, see Debono, Trade and Port Activity in Malta: 1750–1800, 73–90. 46. LCP/McA/MSS/009, Box 1, Folder 39, f. 7r. 47. Osterhammel and Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, 67. See Michael Refalo’s The Maltese Commercial Class, 1870–1914 for a detailed discussing of Maltese coal merchants. 48. Compare, for instance, the shipping recorded in the Blue Books of 1855 (298–99), 1874 (X6) and 1899 (R6–R7). 49. Government of Great Britain, Census of the British Empire, 1901, 54–55. 50. John Hennen, Sketches of the Medical Topography of the Mediterranean: Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and Malta. London: Thomas and George Underwood, 1830, 462. 51. Command Papers 3113, 1863, Ordinance and Correspondence respecting Extradition of Criminals between Italy and Malta, 1861–63. London: Printed by Harrison and Sons, 1863, 1–2. 52. Lawrence A. Sawchuk, Stacie D.A. Burke and Janet Padiak, ‘A Ma er of Privilege: Infant Mortality in the Garrison Town of Gibraltar, 1870–1899’, Journal of Family History 27(4) (2002), 400; Trevor May, Military Barracks. Princes Risborough: Shire Publications Ltd, 2002, 12. 53. TNA/WO/379/11. ‘Stations of Regiments’. 54. Anon., ‘Our Troops at Malta’, Illustrated London News (23 September 1865), 299; Anon., ‘The Hospital at Gozo’, Illustrated London News (30 September 1882), 345. 55. Havildar, ‘The Indian Expeditionary Force, 1878’, Royal United Services Journal 97(588) (1952), 544–49. 56. The implication was that by summoning Indian troops to Malta, the Prime Minister circumvented Parliament’s role in determining the number of soldiers maintained by the Crown in England. See National Observer (23 May 1896), 39. 57. Anon., ‘A Stupid Frolic’, Punch (20 September 1862), 120. 58. Charles A. Price, Malta and the Maltese: A Study in Nineteenth Century Migration. Melbourne: Georgian House, 1954, 224–25. For a more recent treatment of Maltese emigration and migrant populations, see Andrea L. Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Se lers in Algeria and France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. For an account of Jewish emigration from Malta, see David Mallia, ‘Cross Currents in Emigration: Corporal A. M. Benscher and the Proposed Maltese Se lement in the Holy Land’, Proceedings of History Week (2009), 107–36. 59. Catia Brilli, Genoese Trade and Migration in the Spanish Atlantic, 1700–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 48. 60. Andrea Smith, ‘Murder in Jerba: Honour, Shame and Hospitality among Maltese in O oman Tunisia’, History and Anthropology 15(2) (2004), 112. Julia A. Clancy-Smith puts the number of Christian Maltese in Tunis in 1847 at 6,000 in Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011, 40.

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61. Sakis Gekis, ‘Colonial Migrants and the Making of a British Mediterranean’, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 19(1) (2012), 83. 62. See Nicholas D. Chircop, A Transient Colony in the Valley of the Nile: The History of the Maltese Colony in Egypt throughout the 19th and 20th Century. Melbourne: Published by author, 2015. 63. Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, This is a Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths Sake) of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, in the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta. London: Printed for Robert Wilson, 1662, 13. 64. William Zammit, ‘A Late Eighteenth-Century Printed Balance Sheet of a Galley of the Order of St. John’, in Toni Cortis and Timothy Gambin (eds), De Trirembus: Festschri in Honour of Joseph Muscat (Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2005), 529. 65. Joseph Bonnici and Michael Cassar, Malta and British Army Infantry Regiments. Malta: BDL Publishing, 2009, 27–29. 66. ‘Few things are more essential to the comfort of the Officer, and to the respectability of the Regiment, than a well organised mess’. W.N. Hutchinson, Standing Order Issued to the Two Ba alions, XXth Regiment. London: Printed by W. Clowes & Sons, 1845, 154. 67. Hutchinson, Standing Order Issued to the Two Ba alions, XXth Regiment, 156. 68. Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Dissolving Distance: Technology, Space, and Empire in British Political Thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History 77 (2005), 543. 69. Anon., ‘Electric Telegraph at Malta’, The Times (30 August 1860), 10. 70. A. T. Mitchel, Rugby School Register. Vol. III. May 1874 to May, 168. 71. Suzanne Spencer-Wood and Stacey Camp, ‘Introduction to Historical and Archaeological Perspectives of Gender Transformations: From Private to Public’, in Suzanne Spencer-Wood (ed.), Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations: From Private to Public (New York: Springer, 2013), 8–9. 72. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s. New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1989, 112. 73. Anon., ‘The Army at Malta’, The Lady’s Newspaper (22 April 1854), 243. 74. Debdas Banerjee, Colonialism in Action: Trade, Development, and Dependence in Late Colonial India. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1999, 134. 75. MacGill, A Hand Book, or Guide, for Strangers Visiting Malta, 25. 76. Command Papers Cd. 6280, 1912–13. Royal Commission on the Finances, Economic Condition, and Juridical Procedure of Malta. Minutes of Evidence. London: HMSO, 1912, 406. 77. Adolphus Slade, Turkey, Greece and Malta. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837, 107. 78. Séan McConville, English Local Prisons, 1860–1900: Next Only to Death. London: Routledge, 995, 254. 79. Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe, 90. 80. Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 123. 81. Godfrey We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812. Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group Ltd, 2002, 341. 82. Noel Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World. London: Allen Lane, 2015, 115. 83. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 136; see also Chapter 5 for a discussion of successful and a empted escapes. 84. We inger, Slavery in the Islands of Malta and Gozo, ca. 1000–1812, 149.

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85. Jacqueline Azzopardi Cauchi and Paul Knepper, ‘The Empire, the Police, and the Introduction of Fingerprint Technology in Malta’, Criminology and Justice 9(1) (2009), 77–78; Anon., ‘Malta Riots’, Exeter and Plymouth Gaze e (3 July 1919), 4. 86. Tozer, Kemselet and Fisher (Limited), ‘The Coal Labourers’ Strike at Malta’, London Evening Standard (2 August 1899), 3. 87. NAM/GMR/64. J.B.H. Collings, Reports of the Inspector, Superintendent, Deputy Superintendent, and Chaplains of the Corradino Prison for 1850. Malta: F.W. Franz, 1851, 4. 88. Edward. M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992, 74. 89. A. Victim, ‘A Dream on Corradino’s Prison’, Daily Malta Chronicle and Garrison Gaze e (10 April 1891), 6. 90. ‘No meeting or assembly of Officers, Non-commissioned Officers or Soldiers, is ever to be held for the purpose of discussing any subject, without the Commanding Officer’s sanction.’ Frederick Farquharson, Standing Order and Regulations for the Royal Fusiliers. Malta: Government Press, 1834, 37. 91. Paul Reckner, ‘Home Rulers, Red Hands, and Radical Journalists: Clay Pipes and the Negotiation of Working-Class Irish/Irish American Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paterson, New Jersey’, in Sean M. Rafferty and Rob Mann (eds), Smoking and Culture: The Archaeology of Tobacco Pipes in Eastern North America (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 255. 92. George Cassar, ‘Politics, Religion and Education in Nineteenth-Century Malta’, Journal of Maltese Education Research 1(1) (2003), 96–118. 93. Nicholas C. Vella and Oliver Gilkes, ‘The Lure of the Antique: Nationalism, Politics and Archaeology in British Malta’, Papers of the British School of Rome 69 (2001), 354. 94. George Baden-Powell, ‘Mr. Gladstone and Malta’, National Review 16(93) (1890), 289. 95. Stefan Goodwin, ‘National Identity, and Selected Issues of Race in Malta’, in John Chircop (ed.), Colonial Encounters: Maltese Experiences of British Rule, 1800–1970s (Malta: Horizons, 2015), 90. 96. James C. Sco , Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Conclusion

The periods of Malta’s past ruled by the Order and the British exhibit many commonalties, differences and international entanglements. Many facets of life inaugurated under the Order continued into the period of British rule and, as such, played a role in the development of Malta as a British colony. Enduring practices based on knightly connections and interventions permeated into society and became part of daily life. Nevertheless, differences existed between the two eras, not least the historical contexts. While the Order’s rule coincided with European merchant capitalism, in which Malta’s inhabitants participated as tradespeople, exporters and consumers, the primary role of Malta in the nineteenth century, as far as its colonial rulers were concerned, was to provide a military base that contributed to the safeguarding of imperial trade routes. Of course, Malta was also the Order’s military base and was already entangled in networks that mirrored those of the European powers, stretching from the western Atlantic to the Far East. Yet the level of integration into trade networks experienced by most Maltese differed fundamentally because under the Order, the overwhelming majority of nonluxury goods came from the Mediterranean. Whether through the brigantine coastal trade along its northwestern shores, less official trade and exchange with North Africa or plunder from Levantine waters, material life under the Order was generally confined to the Mediterranean basin, which my examination of archaeological remains has demonstrated. In particular, the reliance of the Order on Sicily as a larder is manifest. The geographical position of Malta relative to Sicily affords a simple and obvious explanation for the enduring and mutual relationship between the two islands. Nonetheless, a close relationship was not inevitable and in many ways the arrival of the Order inaugurated many differences. Its systems of governance were different, the Order being almost unique in Europe at that time and, despite a shared religion, the political affiliations of Sicily meant that it came under the Spanish Inquisition, whereas the Order’s allegiance to the pope meant that in Malta, papal control was enacted

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through the Roman Inquisition. Grand, top-down issues of political history may seem a long way from sherds of broken po ery, yet I have used the high occurrence of Sicilian and Italian vessels to demonstrate the human networks that connected the islands. Conversely, as part of the British Empire, the Maltese became incorporated into networks that had not previously existed on such a scale. The global nature of nineteenth-century British colonialism came to the islands not only through new commodities, but also through the capitalist ventures that its inhabitants were encouraged to join. It replaced the restricted networks and obligations of the Order with free market trade and access to global connections. Trade with North African states grew, especially in the importation of livestock. Sicily remained important, but as the nineteenth century progressed, a growing reliance on globalized goods becomes apparent. Whether British tablewares, grain from Russia, processed wheat products from the United States, or sugar and tobacco from the Americas and Caribbean, the foodways of Malta and its inhabitants’ had become part of the globalized world, due largely to the demands of the military forces and other colonial residents. While some Maltese and other imperial subjects used colonial networks and trade opportunities to their own advantage, the chapters in this volume have demonstrated that anticolonial sentiment and the desire to be free was also present. Everyday levels of subversion became formalized and manifested themselves through items such as imported tobacco pipes. Imprisoned inmates rebelled against regulations thrust upon them through graffiti carving and by a empting to escape. Yet, as the case of British army officers has shown, binary oppositions of ruler and ruled, or colonizer and colonized, rarely existed straightforwardly in institutional contexts. British officers and the Order’s knights travelled widely, acting as ‘conduits for the flow of information’1 that connected Malta and its institutions with developments occurring in the Atlantic and northern Europe. While direct comparison with plantation life in the Caribbean is not intended, the Order similarly focused on a cash crop and harvested the labour of the local population to produce it. Not living in a vacuum, the knights were well aware of plantations in the Americas and even ran their own sugar plantation in the Caribbean for a short time. Therefore, it is not inconceivable to posit that the Order regarded Malta and the Maltese as a land and people to be exploited for financial gain in similar ways. Furthermore, slaves’ labour powered the navy’s galleys and Norman Johnston has likened their bagni to penal colonies.2 Without the source of captive labour, the navy would have never have fulfilled its economically necessary corsairing activities. Likewise, the British,

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far from merely transposing penal practices from England, developed the idea for Corradino civilian prison early on: its opening quickly followed Pentonville and preceded modern prisons in most other colonies. Rather, Corradino prison should be seen as part of an Atlantic trend that, though spreading through the British Empire, was not a product of the empire specifically, but rather a global institutional form. The intention of this book was always to highlight the materiality of power through investigations of institutions. My examination of prison conditions demonstrates that the British considered Malta more than just a fortress. The strategic importance of the islands to international and colonial trade, as well as their role as a military base, may have provided reasons for maintaining Malta, but once it became part of the empire, it was subject to other pressures. It is frequently argued that programmes of increased incarceration in garrison colonies were aimed at prostitutes and motivated primarily by a desire to protect military forces from venereal disease.3 However, in Malta the licencing and compulsory examination of prostitutes, including the existence of Magdalen asylums and lock hospitals, had long been in place, both before and a er the Contagious Disease Acts of the 1860s in the imperial homeland and unlike in the nearby garrison colony of Gibraltar.4 While prostitutes were clearly targeted as part of the moral cleansing of Valle a at the turn of the twentieth century, the number of women imprisoned was comparatively low to the number of men. Instead, the courts sentenced imprisonment for pe y crimes such as the , crimes that were concentrated around the harbour areas. The colonial response can be seen as an a empt to control a rise in antisocial behaviour brought about by a preponderance of cheap alcoholic drinks in an area that was increasingly visited by influential imperial and global travellers. Brought to the islands by steamers, for the overwhelming majority of visitors Malta would in essence consist of Valle a, with few venturing beyond the harbour area. The developments in the prison system and the building of Corradino therefore stand as a testament to the a empts of securing the safety of imperial travellers by imposing British standards of social behaviour, regardless of how successful they turned out to be. My focus on prisons has also frequently explicated the less mundane side of everyday objects, exposing their centrality to the constitution and subversion of power within institutions in both eras. For example, the Inquisitor’s prison of the eighteenth century and the Ospizio ward of the mid-nineteenth century have many parallels. Aspects of surveillance were architecturally in place, as were basic routines, but in neither case did these match the highly developed mechanisms of control

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and habit formation found at the Corradino civilian and military prisons. Rather, the loss of liberty and ability to earn was in itself a major objective of these earlier forms of incarceration. Poorly implemented classification and free association with other inmates was the norm. In these prisons, it would seem that communal food preparation and eating together afforded inmates a certain degree of solidarity. In contrast, the strict routine and architecturally reinforced isolation experienced at Corradino applied the apparatus of material routines in a empts to produce docile bodies. Notably, Catholic institutions ran the Inquisition and Ospizio; in the la er, Sisters of Mercy superintended the female prison, despite the British colonial administration overseeing operations. Obviously, there are many distinctions between the institutions. The torture and tribunal procedures of the Inquisition clearly threatened and deterred most in society from commi ing heretical acts. Imprisonment was only one among many potential sentences, yet it was a provocative example of the institution’s ability to punish. In prison, the limited routine and mandatory religious observances sought to provide guidance, but le much time for which inmates developed coping strategies that sometimes involved introspective graffiti carving. The role of the Inquisition in Malta was to provide the strict enforcement of Catholic doctrine as stipulated by the Vatican rather than the pastoral guidance issued by the local clergy. The Inquisition was a papal institution, ensuring the place of Catholicism on an island otherwise controlled by an Order with which the pope frequently found himself at loggerheads. During British rule, the Church continued to play a central role in structuring daily life for most inhabitants and institutions. Official colonial policy was one of religious tolerance and no wholesale a empts were made to convert the Maltese from Catholicism. However, the balance of political power between the Vatican and the British Empire was very different from that which had existed between the Order and the pope. As an ally of Britain, during the turbulent revolutions and wars of the early 1800s the papacy acquiesced to suspending the jurisdiction of the Inquisitor in Malta and forced the Archbishop of Palermo to relinquish his powers as the Metropolitan of Malta.5 However, commitment to Catholicism proved steadfast in the islands and during the mid-nineteenth century, the British took measures to check the power of the Church, prohibiting its purchase of any more land. A er 100 years of rule, imperial commentators observed that in religion and in many other ways, the Maltese were only ‘superficially Anglicised’.6 Christianity was also important to the British self-image, with religion featuring centrally in the justification and constitution of the

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empire. Victorian institutions such as the officers’ messhouse revolved around Anglican traditions, despite the presence of Catholic and dissenting officers. From weekly public worship to weddings and funerals, the army cemented its religious and colonial entanglement in toasts to the monarch – ‘God Save the Queen’ – who was, of course, head of both the empire and the Church of England. The institutions encountered in this study vary greatly from each other, yet the ways in which material culture and architecture underpin their functioning were at times remarkably similar. The role of prized objects ran through military institutions in the form of silverware from the Common Treasury on board the galleys and carefully maintained British regimental messwares. Likewise, the aspirations of a galley captain’s table can find echoes in mess dinners. Each galley helped enable the financial and cultural continuation of the Order just as the officers’ messhouse formed part of network of institutions that enabled London to manage its empire. The material routines and architecture of the messhouse disciplined officers in ways not u erly dissimilar to the methods observed in Corradino civilian prison. Routine became central to mobilizing power differences in military and penal institutions. The extreme example of the admission process for new inmates at Corradino civilian prison exemplifies the ways in which architecture and routine combined to terrifying effect. From entering the prison to arriving at their cells, inmates endured being stripped naked, confiscation of their property and clothes, shaving, admonishment and having their name replaced with a number. The ritualized passage of humiliation and disempowerment, which culminated in isolation, led them through many alien rooms and corridors, materially adding to the perception of physical and psychological distance from the outside world. In following Foucauldian ideas regarding penal and broader societal developments from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, it could be argued that the difference in institutional punishments enacted by the Order and the British is that bodily punishment was replaced with psychological conditioning. However, I have shown that no such easy claim can be made in Malta. Torture by the Inquisition and the use of slaves by the Order can be contrasted with the routines of Corradino and the British army, but institutional routines were also present in the lives of rowers and the Inquisition’s prisoners. Furthermore, capital punishment, forced hard labour and the chaining of prisoners were key mechanisms employed by the colonial government to maintain control over the population into the early twentieth century. The economic institutions of the two regimes played important roles in the welfare and success of the islands’ inhabitants. While it is true

Conclusion • 239

that the Order relied on incomes from corsairing, slaving and trading, co on production also earnt it significant revenues. The labour of both Maltese co on growers and captive galley rowers constituted something harvestable, yet was in need of healthy maintenance in order to realize the potential revenue. When Malta entered the British free market, a waning co on industry struggled. Specialization in and overreliance on a single principal cash crop centuries before had minimalized Maltese manufactures in other industries, which meant that during the British period of rule, the flow of maritime traffic and the development of the dockyards provided the income of many. Intensification of harbour activities and a lack of colonial ability to improve agriculture led to increased urbanisation and a gradual reduction of crop farming as a sole occupation. The relationship between the subjugated labourer, slave or convict and the Order was one of labour as resource. To the British, the Maltese needed ‘civilizing’ and incorporating into the empire, though they concerned themselves more with the strategic location of the islands. As such, the replacement of locally po ed earthenware with British-made implements did not concern the authorities. Maltese earthenware manufacturers formed the backbone of the islands’ foodways and persisted despite changes in diet, the absorption of new foodstuffs and a change in dining practices. Over the course of this book, I have painted a detailed picture of many aspects of daily and institutional life that spans three centuries. The analytical focus on institutions has enabled investigation of the relationships between ruling powers and their subjects that would not otherwise have been possible. Furthermore, by focusing on multiple kinds of institution, the book has explored the perspectives of different groups. Rather than a constant focus on rural communities or urban elites, the groups investigated have been heterogeneous in composition, yet institutionally bounded. The diversity of institutions has also afforded an examination of groups that have traditionally been overlooked or reduced to merely colonizer or colonized, feudal overlord or vassal. What has become clear is that the creation of institutions and the institutionalisation of material routines were essential for the promulgation of unequal power relationships by foreign rulers. One of the main strengths of the archaeological, or materially driven, approach taken has been the integration of multiple sources. By drawing on several different kinds of evidence, it has been possible to reconstruct the material conditions of life, as well as to recover acts and experiences of unique individuals who spent at least part of their lives on the islands. A key example comes from the graffiti carved by prisoners of the Inquisition, many of whom also spent time rowing on the

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Orders’ galleys. Such illuminations are rare and especially important in contexts where the majority of the actors le no wri en records. By studying multiple kinds of evidence across a range of institutions, I have been able to expose many previously hidden aspects of life in Malta’s past and it has become clear that no one escaped the material processes, practices and daily actions that constitute institutional power. *** On 16 September 1883, around half a year a er Jeane e’s death, her husband Captain Arthur Richard Cole-Hamilton civilly married Florence Alice Hughes in Kent. On his return to Malta, the couple had a religious ceremony in the chapel at Fort Ricasoli on 18 February 1884, where the regiment barracked and where in the officers’ messhouse hung a portrait of Grand Master Nicoló Cotoner (1608–80).7 ColeHamilton died over thirty years later from wounds received in action in the Dardanelles,8 at which time Florence retired from her ‘military’ life to live in Devon. While she must have travelled considerably with her husband and stepson, she named her retirement co age ‘Ricasoli’ a er her memories of Malta.9 Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers le their memories of Malta forever immortalized in their published text, a rare inmate account of Inquisitorial imprisonment in the islands. Their incarceration did li le to quell their Quaker fervour: the two were arrested and imprisoned again shortly a er their release in 1663, this time in Somerset.10 All four women, Florence, Katherine, Jeane e and Sarah, found themselves entangled in relationships of institutional power, unwi ingly contributing to the persistence of those institutions in Malta and beyond.

Notes 1. Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford, Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800–1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016, 103. 2. Norman Johnston, Forms of Constraint: A History of Prison Architecture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000, 164. 3. See, for example, Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire. London: Routledge, 2013; and Erica Wald, Vice in the Barrack: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–1868. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 4. Philip Howell, ‘Sexuality, Sovereignty and Space: Law, Government and the Geography of Prostitution in Colonial Gibraltar’, Social History 29(4) (2004), 451.

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5. Desmond Gregory, Malta, Britain, and the European Powers, 1793–1815. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996, 247. 6. Ralph Richardson, ‘Malta: Notes on a Recent Visit’, Scottish Geographical Magazine 22(7) (1906), 367. 7. Malta Family History, Marriages Recorded by Military Chaplains, Malta, 1824–1900. Retrieved 12 September 2016 from https://web.archive.org/ web/20180123162330/http://website.lineone.net/~stephaniebidmead/chaplains. htm; P. Fielding, ‘Lecture on the Services of the 53rd Shropshire Light Infantry’, 1884; Allister MacMillan, Malta and Gibraltar Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive Commercial and Industrial Facts, Figures, and Resources. London: W.H. & L. Collingridge, 1915, 219. 8. Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser (9 December 1915), 6. 9. Western Morning News (19 January 1931), 9. 10. Stefano Villani, ‘Cheevers, Sarah (c.1608–1664?)’, in David Cannadine (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Retrieved 5 February 2020 from http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/64776.

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Index

Aberystwyth, 218 abolition. See under slavery admonishment, 58, 181, 194, 238 aerated water, 115, 168–69, 216, 218 agency, 8, 27 agriculture, 16, 27–28, 93–94, 96–103, 109–110, 117–18, 123n9, 136–37, 170, 205, 224, 235, 239. See also co on and potato arable, 98–100, 103 cash cropping, 16, 28, 93, 101–3, 109, 114, 170, 205, 224, 235, 239 labour, 27, 93–94, 98, 110, 117–18, 235, 239 stubble burning, 98 air, 29, 57–58, 60–61, 71, 79, 159 alcoholic beverages, 52, 97, 106, 113, 116–17, 131, 142–47, 151, 154, 157, 166–68, 171n8, 176n135, 177n140, 193, 201–2, 209n85, 215, 218, 225–26, 236. See also specific beverages Alexandria, 1, 72, 218 almonds, 149, 159 Anderson, Aeneas, 101 Apostolic Delegate, 40 aquavit, 147 archaeological assemblages, 11–12, 139, 158, 160, 167, 196–97, 212–19 architectural plans, 11, 14, 53–54, 57–58, 60–61, 63, 68–69, 77–81, 84, 162–63, 202 architecture, 9, 13, 37, 50–85, 179, 187–89, 202, 238 military, 50, 68–85, 202, 238

penal, 50–70, 83–85, 179, 187–94 artefacts, 11–12, 155. See also under specific artefacts auberges, 37, 50, 72, 77, 157 Australia, 32–33, 167, 221 bagni. See slave prison bakeries, 112, 117, 133–35, 144, 146 158–59, 214 King’s (naval), 112, 133, 144 Order’s, 112, 117, 146, 158–59, 214 village, 135 banio. See slave prison Barbados, 69 Barbary, 138, 148–50, 165 barley, 93, 98–100, 131, 134. See also grain barracks, 68–71, 77, 80, 111, 165, 221. See also under specific barracks married quarters, 71, 162 Beaudry, Mary C., 14 beans, 99–100, 111, 149. See also broad beans beer, 143, 167, 177n140, 209n85, 215 begging, 117, 122, 136 Bermuda, 69, 112 beverages. See under specific beverages Birgu, 4, 12, 51, 72–73, 80, 144, 162, 202 Birkirkara, 106, 108, 167 Bishop of Malta, 7, 40 Blue Books, 14, 66 Boer Wars, 93 Boisgelin, Louis de, 45n26, 131, 137

268 • Index

Boissevain, Jeremy, 108, 110 Bormla, 71, 109, 133, 167 bo les, 104, 115, 166–69, 174n88, 176n135, 177n140, 209n85, 212–13, 215–18, 222–23, 229n14, 230n30 black glass, 209n85, 215 Codd-style, 216–17, 230n30 ink, 222 stoneware, 174n88, 213, 216–17, 223, 229n14 Bratby and Hinchliffe, 216, 217 brazier, 105–7, 139–40, 152–53, 155, 163, 167 bread, 52, 96, 101, 129, 131–36, 142–46, 150, 153–54, 157, 169–70, 171n21, 194, 226 Britain, 69, 70, 82, 98, 112, 114–15, 117–18, 132, 137, 161, 167, 200, 204, 210–11, 215–16, 218, 220–24, 228, 237 British army, 2, 7, 15–16, 32, 34–38, 42–43, 47n74, 67–72, 77–85, 88n70, 112, 130, 133, 137, 158, 161–66, 168, 179, 198–205, 209n76, 214, 217–18, 220–23, 226–28, 231n66, 232n66, 235, 238 barracks (see under barracks) esprit de corps, 38, 202 garrison in Malta, 32, 34–36, 38, 67, 70–71, 133, 137 Indian regiment in Malta, 221, 231n56 mobility (see under mobility) officers (see under army officers) recruitment, 34, 36–37 regiments, 36–37, 47n74, 68, 83, 88n70, 163, 168, 199–200, 202, 209n76, 220–22, 226, 232n66 sports, 37–38, 82, 85 British army officers, Cardwell reforms, 36, 82 families, 32, 34–36, 38, 82 married, 1, 71, 162, 240 mobility (see under mobility) unmarried, 162

British residents, 25–26, 31–33, 42, 108, 161, 163, 216–17, 222, 235 broad beans, 99, 139, 147, 149. See also beans broccoli, 98 Broodbank, Cyprian, 11 Brown, Michael, 8 Brydone, Patrick, 97 buonavoglie. See under galley rowers Burroughs, Peter, 14 Bu igieg, Emanuel, 11, 31 Bu igieg, Noel, 6 cannabis. See hashish Canada, 220–1 capital punishment, 41, 51, 177, 187, 195, 238 capitalism, 218, 234–35 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 67 Caruaana Galizia, Paul, 102, 121 Casanate, Mgr Girolamo, 116, 153 cash cropping. See under agriculture Cassar, Carmel, 7, 33 Catholicism, 31, 38, 40–41, 180, 183, 190, 203, 237 Cardwell, Edward. See under British army officers ceramics, 12, 16, 96, 104–10, 122, 134, 139–42, 152–53, 155, 157–58, 160– 61, 163–65, 167, 169, 200–202, 213–16, 238–39 British, 12, 142, 163, 200–202, 214–15, 238–39 maiolica, 12, 104, 160–61, 200, 213 Maltese, 16, 96, 104–10, 122, 134, 139–41, 152–53, 155, 158, 160, 163–65, 167, 169, 214, 239 manufacture (see also po ers), 104–10 Sicilian, 139–41, 152, 155, 157–58, 163–34, 214 cheese, 52, 131, 138, 143, 145–46, 148, 153–54 Cheevers, Sarah, 1, 116, 155, 240 child labour. See under labour Chircop, John, 7, 11

Index • 269

chocolate, 151, 157, 167 Christianity, 4, 28, 237. See also specific denominations Ciappara, Frans, 14 clergy, 31, 45n41, 69, 161, 203, 227, 237 clothing, 9, 37, 65, 69, 71, 95, 118, 183, 190, 207n38, 147, 188–90, 193, 199, 202–3, 238 coal labourers’ strike, 113, 226 cod, 138, 150, 159 coffee, 139, 151, 153–55, 160, 167, 220 Cole-Hamilton, Arthur Richard, 1, 240 Cole-Hamilton (nee Moore), Jeane e, 1, 240 Cole-Hamilton (nee Hughes), Florence Alice, 240 Collis and Williams, 115, 215 colonialism, 2, 7, 16–17, 23n76, 224, 228, 235 colonies, 6–7, 32–33, 38, 69–70, 72, 102, 117, 210–13, 214, 218, 221, 224, 235–36 British, 6–7, 32–33, 69–70, 117, 210–12, 218, 221, 224, 236 Order’s, 6, 38, 214 convicts. See prisoner coping mechanisms, 16, 178–88, 204, 237 Corfu, 69–70 Corradino prison (civilian), 42, 54–55, 59, 61–69, 83–84, 95–96, 101, 116–22, 153–56, 167, 179, 188–95, 204–5, 226, 236, 238 cook, 96, 154, 156 female prison, 55, 64–67, 83–84, 118–21, 155, 167 male prison, 42, 54–55, 59, 61–66, 83–84, 95–96, 101, 117–22, 153–56, 167, 179, 188–95, 204–5, 226, 236, 238 superintendent, 83, 95, 192–93, 205, 226 warders, 54, 61, 65–66, 68–69, 95–96, 101, 116, 118–19, 156, 188–90, 192–93, 195, 226 corsairing

Maltese, 30, 32, 39, 94–95, 97, 197, 226, 235, 239 North African, 4, 32, 138, 179 O oman, 4, 179 corso. See corsairing Cospicua. See Bormla Cotoner, Nicoló, 240 co on, 28, 93–94, 100–3, 110–11, 114, 117, 119, 121, 135–36, 170, 213, 220, 224, 239. See also agriculture cultivation, 28, 101–2, 213 export, 101–3, 239 Gozo factory, 114, 127n100 prices, 102 spinning, 101–2, 121, 135–36 weaving, 94, 101–2, 119, 136 cra speople, 103–10, 114, 119, 160–61. See also po ers credit, 97, 162 Crete, 102, 125n59, 218 crime, 40–42, 51, 65, 84, 116, 193, 195, 236 murder, 41–42, 193, 195 pe y, 42–43, 116, 236 the , 42, 116, 236 Crimean War, 34, 93, 112–13, 221, 224 cumin, 98, 100–1, 137, 212 cups, 160, 168 Cutajar, Carmelo, 216–18, 223 Cyprus, 6, 102, 141, 221 damp, 29, 61, 71, 155, 180 death sentence. See capital punishment despair, 187 Despo , Antonio, 167, 218, 223 dice, 16, 196–97, 204 dining habits, 59–60, 79, 142–43, 160–65, 198–204, 215 British, 79, 162–65, 198–204 Maltese, 142–43, 239 disease, 24–25, 30, 59, 65, 68, 71, 92, 211, 221, 225, 236 bubonic plague, 24–25, 30, 71, 221 cholera, 24–25 Malta (undulant) fever, 25, 71 smallpox, 24–25, 59

270 • Index

venereal, 211, 236 Disraeli, Benjamin, 38 Dockyard Creek, 12, 21n54, 89n83, 111–14, 133, 141, 144, 146, 152, 158–59, 166, 196–97, 208n61 excavation, 12, 21n54, 141, 146, 152, 158–59, 166, 196–97, 208n61 dockyard workers, 33, 39, 96, 110–14, 116–17, 135, 239 drugs, 197, 225. See also under individual entries drunkenness, 42, 167, 226–27 Dusina, Pietro, 40 earthenware. See ceramics earthenware makers. See po ers eggs, 98, 148, 157 Egypt, 1, 114, 220–21, 223 Egyptian Expedition, 221 electric telegraph, 69, 80, 222 England, 1, 13, 24, 32–33, 51, 70, 119, 144, 162, 203, 212, 216, 221, 223, 225, 236 entanglement, 8, 235, 238 esprit de corps. See under British army Evans, Katharine, 1, 116, 153, 155, 180, 222, 240 excavation. See under specific site ex-voto paintings, 183–86 factory workers, 96, 111, 114–116, 121, 213 family, 1, 28, 30–34, 36, 38, 95, 98, 101, 107–10, 134, 137–8, 141, 198, 223 fish, 138, 150, 159. See also under specific fish fishing, 94 Floriana, 29, 50, 59, 68, 80, 109, 154, 156, 167, 211 Floriana Barracks, 68, 80 food prices, 93, 162 Fort Ricasoli, 73, 88n76, 163, 240 Fort St Angelo, 67, 73, 80, 87n52 Fort St Elmo, 67–69, 71–73, 80, 221 Fort St George (Corfu), 69 Fort Verdala, 71, 77 fortifications, 4, 30, 37, 67–68, 70–71, 73, 92–93, 121, 132, 183

building, 4, 30, 92–93, 121 as dwellings, 37, 70–71, 73, 93 forzati. See under galley rowers fossae. See under grain storage Foucault, Michel, 8, 178, 204, 238 Freemasons, 41, 216, 223 French fashion, 159–160, 213 French Rule, 5, 24, 39, 41, 50, 52, 188 fruit. See under specific fruits galley, 13, 15–16, 35–36, 39–41, 51, 67, 72–77, 85, 96, 106, 112, 116–17, 121, 130, 143–52, 158–61, 163, 166, 170, 185, 195–99, 204, 219, 222, 225–26, 238–39 captain, 35–36, 39, 73, 77, 116, 130, 143, 145, 147, 152, 158–61, 163, 166, 170, 197, 199, 219, 225, 238 fleet, 35, 51, 72–77, 106, 112, 121, 158 Genti di Capo, 74, 75, 77, 145 rowers, 16, 39–41, 67, 73, 75–76, 85, 96, 116–17, 121, 144–47, 170, 185, 195–98, 204, 225, 239 (see also slavery) victuals, 73, 145–51, 158–59, 166, 197, 222 Galley Creek. See Dockyard Creek gambling. See gaming gaming, 16, 42, 167, 179, 196–98, 204 garlic, 131 gender, 25, 33, 116, 126n83, 189 Geoghegan, Stannus, 167, 216–18, 223 geography, 2–3, 96 geology, 4, 96, 103, 132 Gibraltar, 2, 6, 32–33, 51, 69–70, 88n62, 112, 118–20, 142–43, 193, 221, 236 ginger beer, 168, 216–218, 223 Gladstone, William Ewert, 228 Goffman, Erving, 189 golden age, 6 Gozo, 2, 6, 12, 24–26, 30, 98, 106, 108, 114, 151, 180, 186, 220, 221, 206n23 population, 6, 24–26, 30, 206n23 slave raids (see under slave raids)

Index • 271

graffiti, 11–13, 16, 72, 77, 84, 179–88, 146, 204, 209n76, 222, 235, 237, 239 prison, 11–13, 16, 84, 179–88, 204, 222, 235, 237, 239 solider, 72, 77, 209n76 grain, 27, 32, 93, 96–97, 111, 113, 129, 132–36, 144, 150, 169, 220, 235 cultivation, 93, 98–101, 132, 135 importation, 27, 32, 96–97, 111, 129, 132, 135–36, 144, 150, 169, 235 Sicilian, 27, 96–97, 129 storage, 132 grapes, 98, 159 Grand harbour. See harbour Great Prison (Valle a), 51–52, 59, 61, 87n41, 117, 120, 207n38 Great Siege of Malta (1565), 4, 73, 92–93, 143 Greek, 4, 31–32, 39–40, 97, 114, 136, 219, 223 merchants, 32, 97, 136, 219, 223 Orthodox, 31–32, 39–40 Gualtieri, Mgr Ludovico Gualterio, 153 Gudja, 216 H. and G. Simmonds Ltd, 167 haddock, 138 Halifax (NS), 69, 112 Ħamrun, 109, 133 hanging. See capital punishment and suicide Hanson, Julienne, 13, 65 harbour, 2, 4–6, 12, 16, 25–26, 28–29, 30, 32–33, 42, 50, 71–73, 75, 77, 93, 95–96, 111, 113, 115–16, 122, 130–32, 135–36, 143, 152, 158–59, 166, 195, 197, 210, 216, 219–20, 224, 236, 239 hashish, 196–7 hazelnuts, 157, 159 Hennen, John, 27, 103, 117 herring, 138, 150 Herzfeld, Michael, 9 Hillier, Bill, 13, 65 historical archaeology, 8–10, 14 archaeology of institutions, 9–10 Holy Office. See Inquisition

hope, 41, 183, 185, 187 Horden, Peregrine, 10, 39 House of Industry, 95, 118 housing, 29, 71, 73, 156 Hughes, Florence Alice. See under Cole-Hamilton humiliation, 238 identity, 13, 16, 92, 122, 139, 141, 203, 218, 228, 235 imprisonment, 40, 42–43, 51, 55–70, 84, 154–55, 179–94, 204, 226, 236–37, 240 psychological effect, 155, 194, 204, 238 (see under isolation) incarceration. See imprisonment India, 2, 6, 33, 114, 164, 166, 210, 220–21 inmates. See prisoners Inquisition, 1, 4, 12, 14–17, 39–41, 43, 51–59, 75, 84, 120, 153–57, 161, 166, 170, 179–88, 196, 198, 205, 213–14, 222, 235–40 prison, 12, 15–16, 41, 52–59, 120, 153–57, 166, 170, 179–88, 196, 214, 222, 236, 238–40 torture, 1, 41, 51, 54, 58–59, 84, 180, 187, 237–238 trials, 40, 41, 43 Inquisitor. See also under specific Inquisitors Inquisitor jurisdiction, 40 Inquisitor’s Palace (Birgu), 1–2, 52–59, 77–78, 80–82, 155, 163, 198–99, 201, 213–14, 222–23 excavation, 12, 21n54, 214–15 museum, 12, 59 officers’ messhouse (see under messhouse) prison (see under Inquisition) Istanbul, 72 institutions, 2 7–17, 27, 30–31, 34–36, 38, 40–41, 43, 50–51, 59, 64, 67, 83–85, 92, 95, 116, 121–22, 130, 143, 152, 155–57, 162–65, 169–70, 178–79, 186, 188, 190, 194–95, 197–98, 203–5, 213, 219, 222–23, 225–26, 235–40

272 • Index

archaeology of (see under historical archaeology) charitable, 30, 50, 84, 143, 225 intoxication. See drunkenness Ionas, Ioannis, 141 Ionian Islands, 6, 27, 32–33, 69–70, 97, 102–3, 151, 219. See also Corfu Ireland, 1, 32, 69, 112, 161, 203, 211–12, 216, 228 Irish, 38, 199, 211–12, 216, 223, 228 Home Rule, 212, 228 Islam, 4, 7, 39, 179, 181, 185–87, 204 isolation, 66–67, 83–84, 185, 187, 189, 194, 237–38 Istanbul, 72 Italy, 83, 97, 102, 111, 138, 148, 151, 164, 213, 220 Jebb, Joshua, 61 Jews, 32, 39–40. See also under slaves jugs, 104–5, 107, 139, 142, 146, 166, 213 Julious, Charles, 216–17, 223 kenur, 106, 139–40, 155, 163 kenur tal-fuħħar. See brazier kiln, 107–8 knights. See Order of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem kusksu, 136, 138, 147. See also pasta language Arabic, 27–28, 185 English, 28 Italian, 28 Maltese, 2, 27–28, 162 lazare o, 30, 51, 219 literacy, 28, 185, 192, 206n23, 222 livestock, 99–101, 137, 149, 158–59, 235 Livorno, 38, 117, 213 lock hospitals. See under prostitution London, 37, 52, 93, 162, 211, 216–18, 220–21, 238 Luqa, 94, 109 macaroni, 52, 136. See also pasta

MacGill, Thomas, 131 Malta Canning Works, 115 Malta Survey Project, 12, 142 Maltese ‘industriousness’, 27, 92 Maltese language. See under language Maltese migration, 33, 113, 221 Maltese Tribunal. See Inquisition Markus, Thomas A., 13, 83 marriage, 1, 30 Marsa, 115, 133, 216, 218 material culture, 2, 7–11, 14–16, 141–42, 157, 164–65, 179, 190, 204, 210, 219, 228, 238 Mauritius, 33, 69 McManamon, John, 72 Mdina, 4, 38 meat, 75, 101, 131, 137–38, 142–43, 145, 147, 149, 153–54, 157, 159, 164–65, 169–70. See also livestock Merode, Philipp von, 157 Messerano, Giacinto Filiberto di, 58, 187 messhouse, 1–2, 12, 15–16, 37, 51, 72, 77–83, 85, 162–68, 170, 198–203, 214–16, 218, 222–23, 228, 238, 240 Methodists, 31 military prisons, 43, 67–70, 84, 118–19, 121, 223, 226–27, 237 British era, 43, 67–70, 84, 118–19, 121, 223, 226–27, 237 Knights’ era, 67 mills, 103, 132–33, 135–36, 141, 170 Mistra Valley, 97 mobility, 17, 28, 33–34, 36, 38–39, 187, 211–12, 219–225 British army, 34, 36, 220–21 Knights of St John, 28, 34, 38, 219 slave, 38–39, 219 Moore, Jeane e. See under Cole-Hamilton Morocco, 165 Mortimer and Co., 162, 167–68, 217–18 Mosta, 109 Muscat, Joseph, 12, 133 music, 38, 75 Muslim slaves. See under slaves

Index • 273

Napoleon. See French Rule networks, 29–30, 41, 68–69, 112, 115–16, 130, 132, 138, 170, 210, 212–19, 221–23, 228, 234–35, 238 colonial, 115, 130, 138, 210, 214, 218, 221–23, 235 global, 116, 130, 212, 215, 218, 223, 228 material, 212–219 village, 29–30 no-neighbours model. See space syntax officers. See British army officers officers’ mess. See messhouse oil, 97–98, 105–6, 131, 138–39, 147, 151, 153, 158 onions, 99, 131, 137–38, 148, 153, 155, 212 opiates, 197 Orange River Colony, 33 Order of the Knights of St John, 2, 4–7, 15–16, 24, 27–30, 32–41, 43, 51, 58, 67, 71–73, 75, 85, 92–96, 98, 101–3, 106, 110–12, 116–117, 120– 21, 129, 133, 135, 137–138, 144–52, 157–61, 167, 169–70, 183, 187, 195–98, 203–4, 210–14, 218–19, 220, 224–26, 234–35, 237–39 Grand master, 7, 29, 35, 39, 95, 183, 197 (see also under specific Grand masters) knights, 2, 4, 6–7, 15, 32, 34–41, 58, 67, 71–72, 116–117, 137, 145, 148– 51, 157–61, 167, 170, 195, 197–98, 203, 212–14, 218–19, 234–35 navy, 5, 24, 32, 34–36, 39, 72, 112, 121, 145–52, 158–60, 198, 204–5, 220, 225, 235 (see also galley fleet) training, 35–36 vows, 35, 37, 160 Orser, Charles E., 12 Ospizio asylum, 50, 95, 118, 122, 154, 192 Ospizio prison, 30, 50, 55, 59–61, 65– 67, 83–84, 118–20, 122, 153–57, 188–94, 236, 237

Paola, 68, 109 Pannellini, Giovanni Ba ista Gori, 57–58, 84, 187 parish priest. See clergy pasta, 96, 131–32, 135–39, 147, 151, 153, 170. See also under specific entries peaches, 159 Pembroke Barracks, 70 Perello, Ramon, 95 pipe, 80, 114–5, 150, 196–7, 228, 235 chibouk, 114, 196–7, 208n61 Gladstone, 228, 235 pirates. See corsairing plates, 104, 142, 146, 155, 157, 160, 200–201, 222 Plimsoll, Samuel, 93 pope, 7, 32, 40, 72, 234, 237 population, 6, 16, 24–25, 28, 30–35, 50, 93, 98–99, 101, 109, 111, 113, 115, 118, 129–30, 134–38, 165, 178, 211, 218, 220–21, 223, 236, 238 British, 25, 34–35, 218, 223 density, 24 foreign, 25, 31–33, 220 (see also under specific nationalities) infant mortality, 25 porcelain, 160, 163, 201, 212–13, 215. See also ceramics post-medieval archaeology. See historical archaeology potato, 101, 129, 136–38, 142, 144, 164, 170, 211–12. See also agriculture po ers, 16, 96, 104–10, 122, 136, 138, 224, 239 po ery. See ceramics poverty, 6, 35, 37, 109, 136–37, 160 power, 2, 7–10, 13–17, 27, 34, 43, 51, 65–66, 77, 79, 83, 92, 95–96, 121, 129–30, 155, 169, 178–79, 195, 198, 205, 212, 224–28, 236–240 prison, 10–16, 30, 39–43, 51–70, 73, 83–85, 95–96, 101, 103, 116, 121–22, 143, 145, 152–57, 167, 170, 178–96, 202, 204–5, 223, 226–27, 236–38 diets, 143, 152–157, 170

274 • Index

punishments, 40–41, 51, 70, 193–195, 204 staff, 61, 65, 95–96, 156, 179, 188, 193, 205 work routines, 119–20 prison labour. See under labour prisoner admission, 43, 188, 195, 205, 238 prisoner classification, 13, 16, 60, 67, 84, 179, 188–94, 204–5, 237 prisoners, 1, 10, 12, 16, 27, 40–43, 50–61, 64–70, 75, 83–84, 92, 111, 116–22, 130, 145–46, 153–57, 167, 178–80, 183, 185, 187–96, 204–5, 222, 225–27, 235, 237–40. See also under individual prisons female (British era), 42, 54–56, 59–61, 64–67, 69, 84, 118–120, 153, 155–56, 167, 188, 191–94, 205, 237 male (British era), 42–43, 55–56, 59–61, 64–70, 118–20, 155, 167, 188–94, 155, 167, 205, 237 Inquisition (see under Inquisition) on board galleys (see under galley rowers) Prisons Act of 1839, 61 prisons. See individual prisons prostitution, 42, 50, 58, 167, 211, 236 lock hospitals, 50, 211 Protestant, 1, 7, 30, 32, 42, 56, 64, 182, 190, 203–4 Protestant chapels, 32, 56, 64, 190 pulses, 97, 99–100 Purcell, Nicholas, 10, 36 Qormi, 108–9, 134 quarantine, 50, 11, 119. See also lazare o Quebec, 69 Rabat (Malta), 109, 115 Rabbat (Gozo), 12 real relative asymmetry (RRA). See space syntax recidivism, 43, 154, 167 revolt, 96, 167, 197, 225–26

Rohan, Emmanuel de, 101 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Roman Inquisition. See Inquisition Rome. See Vatican Royal Navy, 32, 95, 133, 143–44 rum, 147, 167 sardines, 138, 145–46, 150 servants, 23–34, 54, 74–75, 77, 79, 82–83, 85, 157, 160–62, 164–65, 199, 200, 203 sesame, 98, 100–101 shaving, 288–89, 238 ship-building, 112, 117 Sicilians in Malta, 32, 93, 146, 220 Sicily, 2, 4, 6, 27, 32–33, 40, 94–97, 103–4, 111, 129, 137–39, 145, 147–52, 158, 163, 166, 213–14, 220–21, 234–35 Augusta, 95, 145, 148, 158, 214 Messina, 94, 139, 213–14 Pa i, 139, 152, 158, 163, 214 Syracuse, 94, 158, 214 silverware, 106–61, 199, 202, 238 Sisters of Mercy, 59, 64, 237 Slade, Adolphus, 33, 136 slave markets, 38, 116, 219 slave prisons, 39, 73, 75 slave raids, 24, 39, 93, 179 slave ransoming, 39 slavers. See also corsairing, 24, 39, 93, 138 slavery, 11, 15, 39–39, 41, 117, 195, 198 abolition, 49n131, 117 mobility (see under mobility) slaves, 2, 11, 16, 24, 27, 64, 39, 43, 51, 75–76, 93, 111–12, 117, 121–22, 144–45, 147–51, 158, 170, 183, 185, 187, 195–98, 204, 212, 219, 225–26, 235, 238 Christian, 11, 76, 145 dockyard employment, 112, 117 galley rowers (see under galley rowers) Jewish, 39 Muslim, 11, 39, 76, 147, 158, 183, 185, 212

Index • 275

Sliema, 71, 80, 109, 166, 216 smoking, 17, 115, 179, 193, 197–98, 200, 202, 204 soil, 3, 28, 96–98, 131 solitary confinement, 60, 65, 69, 194 Somerset Dock, 95 soup, 52, 131, 136, 138–43, 145–47, 152–55, 159, 164, 170, 200 South Africa, 33, 93 space syntax, 13–15, 22n72, 54–56, 58, 65–67, 79, 82–83, 85 sport, 37–38, 82, 85 St Francis Barracks, 68 stone, 4, 13, 71, 103, 106, 118–19, 132–34, 139–40, 155, 162–63, 169, 181, 185–87, 193, 196–97, 204, 227 strawberries, 148, 159 Storke, Sir Henry, 211 street cleaning, 51, 117 subversion, 8, 10, 15, 17, 187, 197, 204, 212, 224–28, 235–36 Suez Canal, 6, 94, 113, 121, 210, 220 sugar, 38, 98, 111, 151, 153, 160, 169, 213, 220, 235 suicide, 68, 88n60, 187–8, 193, 197, 225 surveillance, 58, 61, 66, 77, 79, 83–84, 187, 190, 205, 236 Tallack, William, 144 Tarxien, 109 tea, 155, 167–68 Thomas, Nicholas, 7–8 Three Cities, 29, 30, 52, 166, 169 tobacco, 103, 111, 114–115, 150, 193, 196–97, 228, 235. See also smoking factories, 114–115 imports, 103, 111, 114–115, 150, 235 tomato, 137–138, 149, 157, 159 tuna, 145, 150, 157 Tunis, 111, 165, 221 uniforms. See clothing

United States, 114, 117, 138, 169, 211, 215–16, 218–20, 235 Università, 96, 97, 132, 135 Valle a, 4, 27, 29, 33, 37–39, 41–42, 50–52, 61, 68, 73, 80, 93, 103, 109, 114–15, 117, 130, 133, 139, 144–45, 159, 166–67, 169, 178, 216, 218, 226, 236 Vatican, 4, 7, 30, 36, 40, 54, 58, 219, 237 vegetables, 28, 98–100, 115, 131, 137–39, 143, 148–49, 153, 164. See also under specific vegetables ventilation. See air Victorian society, 36, 80 viticulture, 98, 125n59, 225 Vi oriosa. See Birgu wages, 92–93, 110, 113–14 walnuts, 149, 159 water, 52, 58–59, 68, 70–73, 106–7, 117, 138–39, 142–43, 147, 151, 158, 164, 169, 194, 225 aqueduct, 30, 169 cisterns, 68–69, 169 cleanliness, 70 wheat, 93, 97–100, 103, 129, 133–34, 136, 144, 150, 220, 235. See also grain whiskey, 167 Wignacourt, Alof de, 95 William Barnard and Sons, 216–17 wine, 52, 97, 106, 113, 117, 131, 142, 114–7, 151, 154, 157, 116–8, 171n8, 176n135, 193, 201–2, 209n85, 215, 225. See also alcoholic beverages woollen manufactory, 39 work. See under labour Żebbuġ, 94, 109, 133 Żejtun, 106, 108–9, 115 Żurrieq, 94