Gunboat diplomacy

Britain’s links with the Continent were once  deeper and more extensive than those of any other European country. Paris, Rome and German universities played as vital a role in British culture as many native cities. Mediterranean connections were especially strong. Most cities on its shores contain an English church and cemetery. From Minorca to Cyprus, there are few Mediterranean islands that have not been occupied by British troops: the oldest company in Beirut is Heald and Co., the shipping agents (est.1837).

Blue-Water Empire aims to tell the story of ‘the British in the Mediterranean since 1800’: 1800 is the year that Malta, soon to be the headquarters of the British Mediterranean fleet, was conquered from France, with Maltese help. For a time Britain was regarded, by many living around the Mediterranean, including the Maltese, as a saviour and moderniser.

Robert Holland, Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, is a specialist on modern Greece, and he shows how regularly Britain intervened there, from the War of Liberation in 1821 until the 1960s. Greece has a tradition of dependence on foreign powers. Eighty thousand British troops were stationed there  in 1945: Churchill told General Scobie to treat Athens as a conquered city. Helping to feed the population and defeat the Communists, the last British troops did not leave until 1950, but British bribery of Greek politicians continued.

Holland says he wants to describe ‘the British experience of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean experience of the British’. This lively and absorbing book, however, pays little attention to culture or trade. There is no mention of British writers who nourished the British passion for the Mediterranean, such as Norman Douglas or Elizabeth David. There are no trade figures: the British merchants of Smyrna, Alexandria and Marsala who, while cultivating extremes of Englishness, were often valuable wartime agents in the cities they knew extremely well, are hardly mentioned.