The Anglo-Maltese Liberal Network and Colonial Reform, c. 1832-1839

Matthew Mallia is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, where he received the Jenny Balston Scholarship. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Malta in 2018, where he received the Farsons prize for best dissertation in History. Matthew graduated with an MSt degree from the University of Oxford in 2019. His dissertation at Oxford won the prize for best dissertation in his cohort. He also won the Society for Army Historical Research’s annual undergraduate essay prize in 2015. Matthew’s research interests centre around the study of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, and focus on the development of liberalism and reformist ideas in British colonies.

 

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The Sponsored by the Alfred Mizzi Foundation. Malta University Historical Society, in collaboration with the Malta Historical Society, is organising its annual Prof. Andrew Vella memorial Lecture. This year’s speaker will be Matthew Mallia, a past MUHS Executive Member, who will provide us with a glimpse into his M.St. dissertation about the Anglo-Maltese liberal Network and Colonial Reform. Synopsis: Through the conceptual framework of networks, this lecture will discuss how a group of Maltese liberals from the Comitato Generale Maltese, through Giorgio Mitrovich – their representative in London – networked with British reformers to lobby for Maltese colonial reform. By analysing the correspondence between Mitrovich and British reformers, this lecture demonstrates how through the network he created in 1835 with, primarily, William Ewart and Joseph Hume – two parliamentarians belonging to the loose group of radical reformers known as the Philosophic Radicals – Mitrovich was able to place Maltese grievances before the Colonial Office. It was through his agency and his direct lobbying in the metropole that reform in Malta occurred. The lecture will analyse how colonial reform was achieved because of the Anglo-Maltese network, how Malta fit into the Philosophic Radicals’ critique of the colonial system, and how governmental reformers reacted to the Maltese case. A fundamental aim, therefore, is to illustrate how reform politics and colonial politics interacted across metropole and colony, and acted within what ‘new imperial historians’ call a ‘single analytical field’.

 

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