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.

Ancient artefacts that comprise the private collections of Malta came largely from the Phoenician and later Punic burial grounds of the archipelago. In many respects, the perception of the island's ancient population as depicted in recent historic accounts has suffered from a limited knowledge of what has been found in the islands over the last few centuries. Co-authored with Isabelle Vella Gregory and Anton Bugeja, this book forms a companion volume to Claudia Sagona's “The Archaeology of Punic Malta (2002, Peeters) and “Punic Antiquities of Malta and Other Ancient Artefacts Held in Ecclesiastic and Private Collections (2003, Peeters). More than 700 objects, many brought into the public arena for the first time, are documented in this volume. The artefacts are held in three collections: that of Joseph Attard Tabone, of the Palazzo Parisio (Naxxar) and of St George's Parish Church (Qormi). While much of the material is characteristically Phoenician and Punic, imported Cypriot, Greek, Italian and other wares demonstrate that the islands were drawn into the ancient economic and political exchanges of the Mediterranean region.