Letters to the editor - September 6, 2022

Colonial arrogance and superiority

My list of recommended books on the British Empire seems to have irked Alan Cooke. Instead of focusing on the subject, he preferred to bring in French colonialism, which Malta did not experience and, therefore, is not that relevant to national academic research.

Once mentioned, however, it is good to remember that French influence (together with Italian and Spanish ones) in Malta left a legacy of arts and fine architecture, a chivalric profile that imbued the island’s capacity for outdoor celebration and traditions, besides administration, military, naval and medical competency and the basis of academy, librarianship and governance.

Following this patrimony left by the French-inspired Order of the Knights (1530-1798) – on which we have built most of our identity and tourism – the brief but crucial period of French republicanism (1798-1800) must also have sparked the first notions of liberty, so challenging to medieval Malta and Europe. 

A recent special number of the French history magazine L’Histoire, focusing on the Algerian tragedies leading to independence in 1962 and after,

I have no problems with Englishness, being born and bred in a...