A rushed and resentful review

Mark Camilleri It is customary for academics to review the work of their peers with a critical eye. They do this in the spirit of debate, a cornerstone of Western academia. When, on the other hand, their aim is not debate but total refutation, they tend to proceed methodically, mercilessly stripping the target argument of its supporting structures, undermining its foundations till the whole edifice (hopefully) comes tumbling down. These are familiar modes of critical reception. What is decidedly alien to the world of academia is the weighing of personal grudges in critical reviews from people who clearly have an axe to grind.

A case in point, Mark A. Sammut’s review of my latest book is a prime example of the fact that personal grudges and academic work make very poor bedfellows. He betrays his grudge against me right from the start with the suggestion that my work is very similar to IlMixja tal-Ħaddiem Lejn il-Ħelsien also published by SKS and penned by his late father, Frans Sammut; the implication of course is that I have been influenced by his father’s work without acknowledging the debt. Honestly and truly I must ask: what debt? The truth is that, apart from the fact that the late author would have been saddened no end by the comparison since he looked down on my work to the extent that he would not have wanted me even as a pale imitator, our respective academic interests point in different directions. Frans Sammut’s sallies into history never saw him out of literary terrain. He never subscribed to a school of thought, less adopted a methodology of historical analysis. The suggestion that I should use his work, or reference him in any way is preposterous – in historical research we make use of sources that employ some (recognized) methodology.

This is not to say that Sammut does not attempt a total refutation of my work. He does but, sadly, he seems to believe that the proper way to do that is not by attacking the central thesis – the theories of poverty and dependency at the kernel of the argument, which he does not even mention – but by scratching away at details of narration by matching those details with accounts from alternative sources, whose authority it seems is just something we have to trust him on. The result is a haphazard list of alleged errata, hastily and randomly put together in lieu, as it were, of the methodical dismantling of supporting ideas that I mentioned above. In short he just ran a search of anything that might contradict just about anything that I claim in the book and crossed fingers. There is no method and no system.

This haphazardness has also the effect of leading Sammut to reference sources without due attention to questions of context and relevance. Just to mention one – he claims it is not true that living standards in Malta in the 19th and 20th century were worse than those in their core-European counterparts (core here meaning non-peripheral, unlike Malta or the Italian Mezzogiorno.) He seeks to endorse this with a quote from Paul Caruana Galizia’s latest work, an article published last year when I had already finished my research and was drafting the text.

Let me start by pointing out that any claims I make concerning the living standards of the Maltese dur- ing this period is based on research which is clearly referenced in the book – Charles A. Pace, BowenJones-Fisher and the MowattChalmers Commission report. The latter explicitly claims that prior to World War I, living standards in Malta were bad even in comparison with their North African cities! As for Caruana Galizia’s study, a light skimming of the article, which I have not as yet had time to scrutinise properly, shows that the conclusions he reaches regarding the living standards of the Maltese under British rule are drawn from highly theoretical and abstract arguments working from undissected macroeconomic data. This is in stark contrast to the hard empirical evidence preferred by historians.

For example, Caruana Galizia makes reference to the high volume of trade Malta experienced in the latter half of the 19th century, a phenomenon known to us historians as the Port Boom. Then Caruana Galizia uses an abstract model linking macroeconomic data of real wages with exports, defence and government expenditure to conclude that trade in Malta must have made a more significant contribution to the development and wealth of the country than defence and imperial government expenditure. However, his abstract model remains what it is: an abstract model and not an accurate presentation of facts. We have data of the strictly empirical kind – even if not as much as would be desirable – that attests to the state of Malta’s economy and wealth in the 19th century. It is provided by various sources, including the British Commission reports. For instance, we know how much and what people actually ate and we have clear data indicating a decrease in real wages accompanying cuts in defence expenditure. We can see how much the value of wages depended on defence expenditure when we consider welldocumented instances of correlation between the two, such as the completion of the Valletta break-water in the early 20th century and when the British ships were leaving Valletta for the North Sea prior to the First World War. More importantly, one key argument in my book is that despite the increasing high volume of trade in the late 19th century, most of the economic gains from this trade were absorbed by the merchant elite, to be eventually monopolised as capital in the hands of a very small number of families. Mark A. Sammut, however, tends to ignore key arguments even when his blind shooting lands him serendipitously on top of them.

Sammut also contests my description of women in Maltese history as second-class citizens who were deeply exploited and whose sexuality was used as an extension of the wealth of the family. To be exact, he counters that this might have been only the case in the early 20th century. He quotes several notarial acts of the Late Middle Ages which show that, in particular, some women even enjoyed the right to property. And is that, I ask, proof of equal treatment? The evidence we have of the mistreatment of women is so overwhelming I will not even bother go into it. As for the Middle Ages, it is true we lack data but one can check Godfrey Wettinger’s paper “Honour and Shame in Late Fifteenth Century Malta” to confirm what I wrote on how Maltese society viewed and used women. In his paper Wettinger recounts the story of two men who were forced to marry women or pay a hefty fine to their family after having allegedly had sexual contact with them.

I could go on criticising Sammut’s points forever, but then I would also be guilty of not seeing the forest for the trees. Sammut made so many different points as he hastily sought to refute my work by drafting a makeshift list of errata that answering them would lead us well outside the scope of the book and the argument. If Sammut was really interested in making a proper critique, he would have opted for a strong critique of the methodology and the main theories underpinning the argument, which argument he does not even once address.