Description
This book is in the form of a collective work which has drawn together a team of 17 specialists, including contributions from Great Britain, Holland, and Australia. Together they seek to explore, through their essays, the extent to which Maltese Society, in some of its major aspects, has been modified by the impact of its long British colonial experience – the 164 years that separated the end of the revolutionary upheaval in 1800 (against the French Administration of General Vaubois) from the island’s attainment of Independence in 1964.
Change is therefore the overall theme of the book – the slow departure from old habits, a small Mediterranean island society yielding, in imperceptible stages, to a perhaps unintended process of Anglicization. The topics discussed range from the origins of Maltese nationalism to the structure of everyday life and patterns of behaviour at various stages; from Church – State relations and the nature of the local economy to the question of identity and nationhood; frm Malta’s fate within the British imperial decolonization to her developing art, literature, architecture, and other dimensions.
