Hospitaller Malta and the Mediterranean Economy in the Sixteenth Century, by Joan Abela

Abstract

This book is a milestone in historical research on Malta for two reasons. First, because of the ‘recent opening’ of Malta’s notarial archives (a date would have been appreciated) and, second, because the author, Joan Abela, is a Founding Member of the Notarial Archives Foundation. It is hard to imagine a historian who would be better placed to exploit the rich documentation of early modern Malta, and Abela’s meticulous work does indeed rest on a wealth of archival material, drawn from a wide array of sources, including, but not limited to, notarial material. Abela’s book is quite distinctive within the context of Maltese historiography. That is because, as Maria Fusaro notes in her Foreword, ‘The real protagonist of this book is the population of Malta itself; not the well-known Knights of St. John, the offspring of European Catholic nobility, but the local notables, merchants, seafarers and those small-scale entrepreneurs of...