Download or read book Captives, Colonists and Craftspeople written by Russell Palmer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of four centuries, the island of Malta underwent several significant political transformations, including its roles as a Catholic bastion under the Knights of St. John between 1530 and 1798, and as a British maritime hub in the nineteenth century. This innovative study draws on both archival evidence and archeological findings to compare slavery and coerced labor, resource control, globalization, and other historical phenomena in Malta under the two regimes: one feudal, the other colonial. Spanning conventional divides between the early and late modern eras, Russell Palmer offers here a rich analysis of a Mediterranean island against a background of immense European and global change.