1919 – Consequences of Imperial Conceit

by Joseph M. Pirotta

published by Midsea Books

Professor Joseph Pirotta is pulling down the curtain on his fruitful writing career – not with a soft adieu, but with a thunderous tour-de-force. He spent a working lifetime manically researching and writing modern history to build himself the ‘monument more everlasting than bronze’ with his hefty four-volume Fortress Colony: The Final Act, which spanned the convoluted political journey of Malta in the post-war years right up to independence.

The book I am reviewing is a last surprise he kept in store.

‘I am reviewing’ is not quite correct. I do not review books. I just jot down some, mostly haphazard, thoughts that occur to me while reading them. I do not even attempt to summarise the works’ contents or their programmes.

Books glorifying colonialism – “the civilising mission” behind empire-building – were once all the rage, to be read with Rule Britannia as background music. That fits well with my own experience at university. The one and only textbook we students were prescribed for our course in history disguised a squalid attempt at raping innocent minds – Ideas and Ideals of the British Empire, by Sir Ernest Barker. Institutionalised brainwashing lives, OK?

Zaghlul takes on John Bull in an Egyptian colonial cartoon.

This was inevitably followed by a wave of other writings which carried nationalism to the other extreme, an age in which the monuments to colonial exploiters were toppled, and all vestiges, material and moral, of colonialism ended in the scrap heap of infamy. Malta went through both extremes with abandon – from religious veneration for our colonial owners, to incandescent debate whether we should ditch the George Cross from our national flag and why a marble Queen Victoria is still lording it over our main city square.

The Maltese never really embraced a tradition of rebellion against foreign rulers, benign or oppressive. When the notables of Mdina in 1426 felt they had enough of Consalvo Monroy, they did not risk their lives to assert their rights; they just dug into their considerable savings and “purchased” their freedoms for cash from King Alfonso V – a solemn undertaking that Malta would not in future be enfeoffed again to feudal overlords.

The certainty that in Malta money buys everything, even intangibles like constitutional rights and freedoms, was not born yesterday. And, when a hundred years later, Charles V broke that promise by giving the islands to the Order of St John, no one organised armed resistance. The main reaction was – so we’ll ask for our monies back.

An empire-wide recruitment poster in which Britain calls its empire to come to its aid.

The same indifference to perceived national oppression showed up starkly in the two conspiracies against the Order plotted by some discontents towards the end of Hospitaller rule – the so-called ‘Rebellion’ of the Priests of 1775 and the uprising of Mikiel Anton Vassalli in 1797. Both flopped resoundingly through total popular disinterest – the overwhelming majority of the local population just couldn’t care less.

And the year 1848 was the year of endemic revolution throughout most of Europe. Virtually all nations subject to foreign dominion rebelled against the distant yolks. All Europe caught fire, an almost universal upsurge of nationalist pride and the yearning for good governance. Universal, but not in Malta, where apathy and subservience reigned, oblivious of the nuisance of the seismic upheavals all around them. Save for some delicate grumblings by rare discontents, business as usual.

The annals of Malta record just two isolated instances of genuine popular outrage at tyranny – the uprising of the people against the troops of Napoleon and the Sette Giugno riots of 1919. Plenty of excellent academic analysis has already been thrown at both. But judging by the carnival of uninformed, skewed and pitiable popular comments which usually pollute every article on these subjects in the press, very little has sunk in.

Gandhi mobilising the masses.

Pirotta has taken it upon himself to be one of the shining-armour crusaders against historical indifference, disinformation and ignorance. His latest book traces the almost inevitability of violence and bloodshed in the ethos of empire, through four almost contemporaneous failures on the fault lines of British colonialism – firstly the Easter rising in Ireland, which resulted in almost 500 dead, 2,600 wounded, innumerable atrocities and 16 executed after farcical trials – truly the Land of Rope and Gory.

Followed by the barbaric massacre of Amritsar in India, during which British troops in one afternoon butchered to death almost 400 totally peaceful and unarmed people taking part in a political festival; and then the repression of the independence movement in Egypt in which a thousand are reported to have been killed, to balance out fairly the 30 British soldiers who lost their life.

The empire is no longer with us. But neo-colonialism has proved more difficult to rub off than colonialism

The Sette Giugno riots did not happen in a vacuum – they were the predictable consequence of the imperial syllogism – exploit, ransack, abuse, despoil the natives of dignity and make sure to deprive them even of the illusion of determining their own fate.

The potentates bragged that one small white nation had reduced one quarter of the whole world in thrall. They boasted they ruled an empire on which the sun never set. The historian John Newsinger has a different take on that: they ruled an empire on which the blood never dried.

1912 Unionist propaganda poster.

The fates of India, Egypt and Ireland obviously followed different stars, had distinct prequels and had been charted by wholly diverse national antecedents, all explored in fascinating detail by Pirotta. In fact, I rather believe his is the only work that unifies in one holistic canvas the narrative of four WWI anti-British policy movements that ended in bloodshed.

The four horrific episodes occurred during and in the immediate aftermath of the first world war; a war which Britain, mother of all ironies, had bravely fought and won in the name of freedom from oppression, of democracy, liberty and human rights.

Notwithstanding the inherent diversity of the four subservient states, the success of empire depended ultimately on two complexes – a superiority complex on the part of the colonisers, who honestly believed in their racial pre-eminence and that this gave them some sort of right to exploit, pillage and abuse the rest of inferior mankind – that effortless sense of entitlement said to come with an Eton upbringing. But that success also depended on an inferiority complex of many of the colonised – they failed to question whether the British were really born with superior DNA or whether they should be accepting servitude in their own homes.

A detachment of British soldiers in front of the courthouse in Valletta as a crowd looks on. Photo: Giovanni Bonello Collection

Malta shamed itself more uniquely than other colonies when it prostrated itself and advertised worldwide a humiliating subservience to the superior race: our local rulers actually begged for Malta to be absorbed by its master, if the price was right – the lapdog that licks your hand happily when you kick it. No other colony had ever pleaded to self-efface in the womb of its owner. Only Malta did.

The inevitable end of empire starts when either, or both, of the certainties of these two dogmas – God-gifted superiority and God-ordained inferiority – began being undermined. This should in no way be read as singling out the British empire in so far as ignominy is concerned. There are innumerable pages in its history that had best have not been written at all, there are lootings and inhumanities that make Genghis Khan look like Mother Teresa.

But surely the grading of horrors is totally irrelevant. Empire – the dominion of one nation over another – is amoral in itself, however benevolent and materially beneficial the dominant nation wants it to appear. This intrinsic stain on humanity that no histori­cal detergent can ever wash away, informs Pirotta’s book.

Despicable are not so much some specific episodes of horrid, senseless inhumanity but the entire philosophy of empire-building that, as the invasion of the Ukraine shows us, does not seem to accept to die. A wry cynic reminded us that the only thing history teaches us is that it does not teach us anything.

The empire is no longer with us. That sun has waned in a blood-red sunset. But neo-colonialism has proved more difficult to rub off than colonialism. It lingers on. The natural default position of everything in Malta is still almost invariably British.

Barricades in the street during the Irish Easter Rising. Photo: John O’Sullivan

Did the British colonial interlude leave anything positive behind in Malta? The first that comes to mind is undoubtedly language. The Maltese are divided into three, those who speak English, those who believe they speak English, and those who don’t care either way. Sadly, the last two categories now predominate. Many Maltese today speak Maltese like those well-meaning Englishmen who have lived six months in Malta and speak English like those Maltese who dumped school before school-leaving age.

What else? The colonial masters left us a constitution, a sense of democracy, of the rule of law and of good governance that only work in the hands of politicians with integrity. They energised the red-light district, taught us to queue and to drink whisky, beer and tea. Otherwise, they left very little to show for a century-and-a-half of serfdom. Certainly not in the built environment, except for some self-serving barracks, a few forgettable churches and an Opera House they built for their own entertainment.

Pirotta proves himself again a riveting storyteller who can balance adroitly the academically precise and detailed recording of events without deadening their inherent drama. OK, when you are recounting massacres, political intrigue, conspiracies, diplomatic treachery and atrocities, it would be a feat to lose your reader halfway through, though some historians, against all odds, manage to do just that. Co-conspirator is the lively and scintillating foreword by the sociologist Mark Anthony Falzon.

The four massacres recounted in this book, over time, ultimately served to straighten the path to nationhood for Ireland, India, Egypt and Malta. Not, in some cases, without further blood and tears. These peoples had to have recourse to violence, proclaimed in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be the human right of last resort, when peoples deprived of their fundamental freedoms are left with no peaceful means to obtain them.