To compare the historian Joseph M. Pirotta to Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is, in a sense, unfair to both men. Poirot has a magnificent moustache; Pirotta’s is more like Commissioner Jim Gordon, as played by Gary Oldman. Poirot, worn by ill health, closed his last case while his indefatigable near namesake, Pirotta, seems nowhere near done.
In another sense, however, the comparison is fitting. When Pirotta marshals the evidence, paying attention to every government document and marginal note, he weaves the tiny details into a narrative as mesmerising as Poirot’s drawing-room revelations.
Illusion and myth are destroyed. Justice is done to the dead. Their heirs get on with their lives but not before being confronted with some home truths. As for the readers, they sigh: “So that’s how it was.”
In a week in which we’ve commemorated Sette Giugno, it’s worth turning to Pirotta’s new book on the subject: 1919 – Consequences of Imperial Conceit (Midsea). It offers a global background against which the events of June 7-8, 1919 must be understood, since, before considering the case of Malta, Pirotta examines the brutal British actions in India, Egypt and Ireland, which happened in the same period.
Pirotta’s account draws on all available archives in the UK as well as Malta in order to answer the question: was Sette Giugno a revolution – as the standard nationalist account goes – or a riot, as the British treated it?
Pirotta’s answer: it was a riot but that’s no reason to divest it of national (and patriotic) significance.
To understand why, we need to go right to the beginning of British rule. It was a takeover based on betrayal of an understanding that Malta would be granted self-government.
Early on, British leaders understood the strategic importance of Malta for the empire and that, whatever it cost them, Malta would yield (in the words of one official) four times as much.
Malta was administered as a fortress subordinated to imperial needs. Maltese taxes subsidised British interests. The economy was structured to suit London. Cycles of boom and bust were shaped by British policy, just like employment opportunities. If cultural domination called for eliminating Italian, it didn’t matter that this would affect Maltese trade.
It only mattered if reforms generated resistance. As a sop, constitutions were intermittently offered – in 1835, 1849, 1887 and 1903, prior to 1921.
It’s no coincidence that the first followed a post-plague depression. The second was in response to the Sicilian rebellion against the Bourbons. The third was offered in the context of a ‘reform’ of tax and language policy.
Real power was never ceded to elected politicians. They could always be over-ruled. Their claims to be popular representatives were undermined by the British policy of treating the bishop as the ‘first citizen’.
The nationalist politicians were hampered by three factors. One was fragmented organisation. Another was their emphasis on the ‘Italian-ness’ of Malta – an uneasy fit with the language of popular mobilisation.
The insistence on ‘italianità’ had a patriotic purpose: to establish that the Maltese nation was to be treated in a manner befitting its European identity. It was an anti-racist argument that was fully aware that the colonial rulers would treat the Maltese as “Asiatics” if given the chance. Awareness of the stratagems of empire was not restricted to the colonisers.
The spilling of blood in the streets may have been accidental but the consequences were not- Ranier Fsadni
But to insist on high culture to promote nationalism was also to forego the mobilising force of popular culture. Maltese politicians always spoke of political rights but often neglected the interests of the working classes.
As June 1919 approached, the British already were planning to grant a constitution. The riots didn’t force their hand. Indeed, had the riots seriously threatened British power, the response would have been more explosive (as we know from British reaction elsewhere).
Four men were killed – accidentally but thanks to a chain of incompetent, belligerent command. Two inquiries were held, which predictably got those responsible off the hook, not least with the help of Maltese collaborators with an eye on top jobs.
But something had changed. As in 1835, there was the combination of economic bust and disease (the Spanish influenza). But, unlike 1835, in 1919 the unrest included laid-off dockyard workers and clerks, each with an articulated sense of self-interest and a special, complicated relationship to the British.
This was the first time that Maltese middle-class politicians found common interest and solidarity with workers. Pirotta shows how the combination made a crucial difference in mobilisation. The spilling of blood in the streets may have been accidental but the consequences were not. The four victims became martyrs. The politicians formed a “national committee” to collect money for the dead and wounded, paying for funerals and family maintenance.
The funerals were national events. The money paid for a monument in Addolorata Cemetery, where the centrepiece is the maternal figure of Malta, recognising her sons and their ultimate sacrifice.
The committee only stopped operations five and a half years later. Its money was not collected as ‘charity’ but to express national solidarity.
Pirotta doesn’t say so but perhaps this chain of events – the killings and, as it were, their cultural afterlife – gave Maltese nationalism the possibility of articulating itself in a language that bridged high and low culture, which was more congruent with early 20th-century patriotism than “italianità”, with its 19th-century civilisational rhetoric, even if that continued to be used.
What began as a political riot became a cultural icon that enabled the protagonists and their followers to see themselves reflected in a new light.
We might read Pirotta and think – reading of protests, fragmented opposition, constitutional reforms and stratagems to preserve power – that some things never change. Pirotta shows they can.
First, we must break the spell of our own myths and learn a new language of solidarity. Then we can look back and say, of ourselves: “So that’s how it was.”