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As Britain was a naval power that acquired an empire, a number of historians
have focused on her role with special reference to military, naval and
strategic interests. Given her early involvement in Tangiers, Minorca and
especially Gibraltar since 1704, the Mediterranean came to figure fairly
prominently in many books published in the 19th century, from J.S. Corbett's
England in the Mediterranean (1904), to the broader-based anthology edited by
J.B. Hattendorf, Naval Strategy and Policy in the Mediterranean (2000). Most
works have concentrated less holistically on the parts rather than the whole, or
on aspects of Anglo-French or Anglo-Italian relations. As a consequence of its
geo-strategic fate in the central Mediterranean, scholars at the University of
Malta, where the Journal of Mediterranean Studies was founded in 1978, have
produced many a book dealing with the island during colonial and post-colonial
times including A. Bin (Ed), Cooperation and Security in the Mediterranean
(1996), S.C.Calleya (Ed), Mediterranean Perspectives on International Relations
(2009), and my own Europe and Empire
(2012).
What is particularly valuable in Robert Holland's Blue-Water Empire is not
its summery, touristic title but the empirical, insightful overview of the whole
region, essentially from a British-Imperial viewpoint, and mainly in so far as
Britain and her empire were concerned. It is also a post-colonial account which,
while not unduly critical, is not obsequious either. It invariably attempts to slot
situations and circumstances into context from an instructed, contemporary
perspective. Holland is well suited for this. Not only has he written about British
politicians and Britain's role in the world, he has also delved deep into at least
one sub-regional area, Cyprus and the Hellenes, for many years now. This mix
of the general with the particular is evident in his writing, which is lucid and runs on
in style and short on rhetoric.
He understands what our supervisor at Oxford, the late Freddie Madden, used
to call 'negative value', a concern which Robinson and Gallagher also bring out
in Africa and the Victorians; he also recognizes the implications of Robinson's
theory of collaboration. Negative value meant taking Gibraltar rather than let
Spain keep it; holding on to Malta for fear that the French or the Italians would
occupy it; varying and volatile carrot-and-stick approaches - sometimes more
stick than carrot - in Egypt, Cyprus and Palestine. There are inter-linking moods and movements across the region or parts of it in the Napoleonic era;
imperialism, free trade and the Pax Britannica; ententes and detentes; powersharing
and conflicts of interest, cultural conflicts as well. There are two 20th
century world wars wherein Britain and France fight on the same side against
the Kaiser and Hitler and their allies to the east. Other overlapping or conflicting
interests and attitudes occur in Graeco-Turkish or Arab-Jewish relations
especially after the first world war. In both of these inflamed situations, Holland
shows, Britain had a hand. In the former, by seeming to encourage the Greeks
to invade Anatolia causing Ataturk's sweep to Smyrna and the so-called 'Great
Fire' massacres. In the latter, by arbitrarily promising, in wartime, a Jewish home
at Palestinian expense; so that, in the end, there was nobody to transfer power
to when the British gave up and left after the second world war. When
journalists asked the Chief Secretary what would happen to the government and
its offices when the British left Jerusalem (says David Fieldhouse in Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914-1958, 2006), he replied by saying that he
would put the keys of his office "under the mat".
We then had a military coup in Egypt followed by the Suez debacle, in which
Anthony Eden was once again a protagonist; and decolonization, leading to the
independence of almost all of these British possessions in the Mediterranean.
Gibraltar, still an Anglo-Spanish bone of contention, was excepted; while in
Cyprus (next door to Syria) two sovereign military bases, nearly the size of
Malta, were retained; and in Arab eyes Israel continues to stick out like a sore
thumb.
As to how far one may highlight 'the British Mediterranean', without using
inverted commas for 'British', that is very much a moot point, given the ethnic-cultural
tensions between Catholic Latin, Muslim Arab, Orthodox Byzantine and
Anglo-Saxon, not to mention military, naval-commercial, political and ideological
clashes. In an age of nationalism and supposed popular sovereignty, control and
progress clearly were not simply about military prowess and technological
superiority or a civilizing mission in the historic Mediterranean - that in spite of
generally well-meant efforts in the direction of parliamentary democracy on the
Westminster model.
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