The Maltese commercial class, 1870-1914 : business, families, networks

Abstract

The aim of the present thesis is to examine the social formation, economic activities, and modes of collective behaviour of the Maltese commercial class during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The analysis will be carried out through a triad of aspects - business, family, and networks, all intimately inter-related, and, as far as the commercial class is concerned, mutually constitutive. There is a fourth aspect, which is as significant. To what extent, and in what ways, can it be claimed that the Maltese merchants and entrepreneurs acted as agents of modernity? What exactly did the commercial class contribute to the island's slow process of modernization? It is hoped that the dissertation will seek to reach a historically plausible answer to these, and similar, questions. Each of the four concepts identified above demands a clear definition. Of these, modernization is perhaps the most elusive. It is generally held that the middle class is an urban phenomenon. Late nineteenth-century Malta was no exception. However, the small size of the island may deceive the contemporary social observer and the later historian by presenting a view - 1 - that is homogeneous and unchanging. The first chapter will argue that this is far from the truth. It should be admitted, though, that the close contiguity of the urban and suburban to the rural renders a neat distinction next to impossible. The narrow confines of the urban areas, and the consequent vicinity of the rich and the poor, of the middle and the lower class, further confound the issue. Such a reality denies the possibility of aligning modernization and its other extreme on the binary opposition of town and country. [...]