Malta and the Commonwealth Connection

Abstract

The flight of the Knights of St John from Malta following its occupation by Napoleon was succeeded in 1800 by the siege of the French occupiers by the Maltese who invited Nelson to their aid. From then on the horizons of the Maltese people for new settlement have broadened. Nevertheless, during the nineteenth century most Maltese refused to look farther than the Mediterranean area for opportunities to improve their standard of living and escape from the ups and downs of the Maltese economy. Emigration was directed at the North African littoral and at certain areas in the eastern Mediterranean, but many of the migrants returned home to Malta and net migration for much of the century was only about 15 per cent of gross emigration.¹ Love of home and a desire to settle in a country near enough to home to make a return passage easy, combined with periodic but often short-lived improvements in the Maltese economy and political disturbances in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, were responsible for this high rate of Maltese return migration. During the nineteenth century the Empire links with the British Dominions and the linguistic and historic links between Britain and the United States failed to move many Maltese to consider migration to areas outside the Mediterranean. The official attempt to sponsor migration to Australia in the latter half of the nineteenth century was in large part a failure, although it did provide a Maltese nucleus from which later migratory movements from Malta to Australia perhaps drew some sponsorship and encouragement, for Maltese emigrants in general have drawn a great deal of comfort from being able to join a colony of their own people overseas. Official attempts were also made to start Maltese colonies in the West Indies, in Cyprus and elsewhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, without substantial success. More success attended a settlement of Maltese in Gibraltar. Where Maltese communities were established outside Malta, they were for the most part the result of unsponsored emigration and were sited on the north African coast and in Turkey.