As Joan Abela argues cogently in the following pages, the history of early modern Malta can truly be regarded as the epitome of the history of the Mediterranean. This authoritative and lively portrait of Maltese society and economy introduces us to a complex and diverse world in the midst of transformation. It opens exciting new areas of investigation, and is an impressive contribution to the new historiographical approach to Mediterranean history, which focuses on interaction and crossfertilisation between different customary and legal traditions. Abela's detailed and lucid analysis brings into focus how the establishment of the Hospitaller Order in the Maltese archipelago gave rise to important structural transformations – in terms of administration, the economy and society. For the first time, the maritime economy of Malta is the focus of a sharp and comprehensive analysis which takes all these elements into account and produces a nuanced portrait of the socio-economic development of a heavily militarised society, a distinct frontier world where a crusading mission co-existed with conspicuous consumption and the challenges of provisioning an arid land which was experiencing a veritable demographic boom.

The real protagonist of this book is the population of Malta itself; not the wellknown Knights of St John, the offspring of European Catholic nobility, but the local notables, merchants, seafarers and those small-scale entrepreneurs of both sexes who responded to epochal challenges with remarkable resilience and inventiveness. Joan Abela effectively demonstrates how the Maltese population, confronted with the arrival of new ‘masters’, found ways to negotiate their institutional and social role within this new balance of power; how they successfully took advantage both of the islands’ strategic value vis-a-vis the Barbary regencies and of the multi-faceted economic opportunities afforded by the arrival of the Knights. The socio-economic consequences of corsairing activities – the foundation of the Order's existence in the fractured sixteenth-century Mediterranean – are also discussed, but with a particular focus on the ways in which, paradoxically, they gave women a greater capacity for independent action, given the men's constant exposure to the threat of captivity and relative absence from the islands.

This exciting research work builds on the recent opening of Malta's Notarial Archive to scholars and the general public, itself a wonderful story of collaborative endeavour on the part of the community to preserve its historical heritage through the establishment of a private-public partnership.