Mark A. Sammut
My first reaction on reading Mark Camilleri's A rushed and resentful review (TMIS, 4 September) was to give him full marks for the alliteration in the title and laugh out loud at the contents. Then, the stitches subsided (so to speak), so sadness settled in. He employs in his reply to my review the same method employed in his book A Materialist Revision of Maltese History 870-1919, namely assertion rather than evidence.
Health warning (particularly for Mr Camilleri): Today's reply and my original review were meant for a newspaper, not an academic journal. A higher degree of serious entertainment is therefore to be expected.
So let me reply to his defence point by point. (Quickly, though, as we are all busy people.)
1. Mr Camilleri asserts that I am resentful. At what, he does not say. In his inimitable style, he makes assertions without backing them with facts. Even Mark Montebello found Mr Camilleri's methodology lacking. What does Fr Montebello resent, then? The learned priest wrote that "[s]peaking from a technical point of view perhaps it would have been better if he [Mr Camilleri] had placed the tune at the fore and the harmony in the background, instead of the other way round". About this, Mr Camilleri says nothing in his defence. Which must mean that he agrees with Mark Montebello and me.
2. The "actual thesis" of Mr Camilleri's book seems to be that during any given time between 870 and 1919, (1) the Maltese were poorer than other peoples and (2) women were exploited in Malta. (I don't think he meant prostitution. Though that would have been a highly interesting topic, Mr Camilleri had to avoid it. Otherwise, he would have had to acknowledge the Church's role in helping prostitutes leave the trade, and the Church is one of Mr Camilleri's preferred villains, if not his Professor Moriarty of History. This approach belies a certain lack of familiarity with the real role of the Church in the Middle Ages.)
3. Heedless again to the facts, Mr Camilleri says that I claimed "that it is not true that living standards in Malta in the 19th and 20th century were worse than those in their core-European counterparts". Actually I never claimed anything of the sort. I am scientifically amazed at this gentleman's unfaithful relationship with the facts, particularly given his political role.
What I said was, "Mr Camilleri claims that his 'study was very much restricted by the lack of statistics on the society and economy of the Maltese Islands' (p. 32). But there is no lack in reality. In an article published last year in The Economic History Review entitled 'Strategic colonies and economic development: real wages in Cyprus, Gibraltar, and Malta, 1836-1913', Paul Caruana Galizia concludes that '[l]iving standards in these countries were in fact at the European average'. Why did Mr Camilleri fail to analyse and counter this research? If Dr Caruana Galizia's conclusion is right, then Mr Camilleri's central argument collapses like a house of cards."
I will obviously not defend Dr Caruana Galizia's study published in the peer-reviewed Economic History Review of the London School of Economics, the sixth-best college in Europe. I will simply answer to Mr Camilleri's other, parallel line of defence, namely that Caruana Galizia's article was "published last year [2015] when [Camilleri] had already finished [his] research and was drafting the text". Again I am amazed! In his book's bibliography, Mr Camilleri quotes six publications which appeared in 2015 and even a website which he accessed in 2016! It would probably be easier if Mr Camilleri were simply to concede that he was completely unaware of Dr Caruana Galizia's conclusions, or that he decided to ignore them because they could easily demolish his central thesis.
4. When Mr Camilleri stopped busying himself rubbishing Dr Caruana Galizia's peer-reviewed, LSE-supervised essay, he turned to my other criticism, namely that women were not exploited as he claims they were. This underrated champion of "revisionism" tells us that "the evidence we have of mistreatment of women is so overwhelming [he] will not even bother go into it."
But then he throws consistency to the wind and succumbs to the temptation of supplying one example of the mistreatment of women in the Middle Ages: "the story of two men who were forced to marry women or pay a hefty fine to their family after having allegedly had sexual contact with them."
Again, I am worried and at a loss! How exactly does this story confirm the statement that women were exploited or mistreated in the Middle Ages? Considering what sexual contact might result in (with the consequent added financial burden on the family unit and the women themselves), the penalty imposed on these men was actually in the interests of the women involved!
But Mr Camilleri's logic is somewhat erratic. Here he is claiming that protecting women from single motherhood is an example of the mistreatment of women. Elsewhere (in his book) he claimed that a woman giving several pieces of jewellery on loan to her nephew in 1910 was an example of poverty. It is evident that there is much to say about Mr Camilleri's methodology. (Which would explain why he chose to reply to my review in the first place.)
5. Mr Camilleri invited me to make a "strong critique of the methodology and the main theories underpinning the argument" of his book. I thought I had. But since he came back for more, let me indulge him.
What Mr Camilleri means is whether I agree with his inspiration from Hegel and Marx. Well, of course, I would agree. Marx was right in his fundamental intuition about the class struggle, and how the nascent capitalist class created a societal upheaval in order to grow rich on the back of other people's work. And yes, Hegel was probably right in much of the complicated stuff he wrote. But the point is: does Mark Camilleri explain how Marxist-Hegelian theories apply to historical facts, or does he simply assume that they do?
As Mark Montebello too has pointed out, Mr Camilleri's methodology is so weak that it is difficult to say. But, whereas Fr Montebello was charitable ("What he [Mr Camilleri] seems to have wanted is to draw a few examples from various periods of Maltese history in support of his proposed revisionist theory. He may or may not have succeeded."), I was more direct and said that unfortunately he failed. Surely Mr Camilleri is not expecting me now to re-write his book for him...
The important word in the above is "facts", which I am using in the sense E.H. Carr gave it, namely "historical facts", "facts", that is, which are chosen among a veritable multitude of others, and given historical significance. So even an anti-empiricist as Carr believed that the "reconstruction of the past in the historian's mind is dependent on empirical evidence" (What is History?, 1983 ed., p. 22). Otherwise, if the process of finding evidence and interpreting it is not properly done, the historian falls "into one of two heresies. Either you write scissors-and-paste history without meaning or significance or you write propaganda or historical fiction" (p. 29). I will surmise Mr Camilleri knows what I mean.
6. Tellingly, Mr Camilleri said nothing about my point that he levelled criticism at the Prime Minister. This must mean that I am right, and he did want to criticise Dr Muscat.
7. Lastly, the impression Mr Camilleri gives is that he resents that my late father "looked down on [his] work". I do not know where he got this from. But please do allow me to set the record straight, once and for all. In 2010, Mr Camilleri published a pornographic piece in a publication aimed at University students which landed him in serious trouble. Like others, my father expressed a literary opinion on that piece, arguing that pornography is not literature. This was not an ad-hoc position. He had already discussed the fine line between pornography and literature in a 1989 interview with poet Mario Azzopardi, carried in Fondazzjoni Ġużè Ellul Mercer's now-defunct review Neo. In 2010, my father simply reiterated the views he had already articulated 21 years before. What Mr Camilleri insistently fails to understand, in his usual approach to facts, is that this was not personal but philosophical. For somebody who insists on his Hegelian and Marxist/Marxian credentials being taken seriously, it should not be that difficult to grasp this concept.
Again, another instance of irony. Whereas in his Materialist Revision Mr Camilleri thinks he has written some sort of J'accuse to expose the exploitation of women, when in 2010 he published the abovementioned pornographic piece, the National Council of Women had "slammed the story for glorifying sexual violence".
Bottom line: I'm sorry, but, to borrow a Maltese saying, Mr Camilleri's book is "not worth a carlino". Or perhaps, given its homage to Karl Marx, just one carlino. (And it's not the dog.)