When the events we commemorate as Sette Giugno took place, my maternal grandmother Teresa was only ten years old. Today she would be 110. She died when I was one and yet the memory of that day - surely reflecting her own parents' reaction - came down to me through my mother's description of the fear, horror and shock that would appear on her face whenever she mentioned the Sette Giugno, even 40 or 50 years after the events. This is understandable. After all, hadn't British troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd of Maltese protestors, killing four and wounding several others?

The Sette Giugno in Maltese History 1919-2019 is a collection of essays, edited by Henry Frendo and published in a handsome, hard-bound, high-quality-finish edition, endowed with two hitherto-unpublished Reports on the events.

Charles Xuereb's essay, which closes the book but opens this review, deals explicitly with memory. He argues that it is impossible to view past events in the same way as those who experienced them, and discusses how the historian links the past with the present. You know what they say about jazz musicians, that they play music for musicians? At times, it seems as if Dr Xuereb writes about history for historians. Yet, if you look beyond the theory (sometimes expressed like this: the post-colonial mindset needs "to gradually be replaced by notions of multiple, overlapping or intersecting markers within the realm of universal identity" (p. 93)), you can find a truly engaging central theme. An event like the Sette Giugno contributes to our identity as it was a watershed moment in the building of the Nation: we can speak of a Before and an After. Dr Xuereb constantly looks for public spaces - places of memory - where the State and the citizen can dialogue. Finally somebody talking some sense, the intelligent reader will remark. Dr Xuereb acutely observes that it was only in 1986 that a monument to the Sette Giugno victims was erected in the capital city. He further observes that the Independence and Republic monuments lie outside Valletta. How can the intelligent reader fail to see the incontrovertible logic of Charles Xuereb's argument? He or she might even wonder whether Queen Victoria's monument should be removed from its current location for its place to be taken by a new monument representing Malta Repubblika.

Continuing in reverse order of appearance, as it were, we find Paul A. Bartolo's ingenious essay, informed more by history than psychology even though the author, who had studied the former up to post-graduate level, is currently a professor in the latter field. Professor Bartolo offers the reader insight into what really happened on that fateful day, and why. The convergence of the interests of the landed élites and those of the working classes fuelled the "Maltese Revolution" of 1919. The London-imposed 1918 succession duty triggered the dissatisfaction of the landowners but also became a national issue, coalescing the different social classes. This was made easier by the dire economic situation the working class faced, with mass emigration being the most practical way out. The exploitation of the colony by the metropole is the underlying premise on which Professor Bartolo's thesis is predicated. The British needed a strategically-valuable fortress that would be self-financing but not self-managing. All this put enormous pressure on Anglo-Maltese relations leading to the 1919 "Revolution" which then brought in its wake wide-ranging changes: responsible self-government for the Maltese, a sum, paid for by Britain, equivalent to more than one-third the regular budget of the Government of the time, and political recognition for the workers (p. 73).

The worth of Professor Bartolo's essay lies not only in its analysis but also in the newspaper articles of the period of which it includes a facsimile. One of them is the front-page article from Il-Ħmar which serves as a snapshot of influencer techniques of the time. But it also affords the intellectually-curious reader a sort of linguistic time travel. You read the article and are impressed by the spontaneous discovery that the article might have been written yesterday. Quite literally. The Maltese language of a hundred years ago is almost identical to that of today. The excerpt from a speech delivered by Crown Advocate M Refalo in 1918 is another snapshot from that period, and again it's as if time has stood still:

When the proletariat is well educated about its rights, then it will be able to understand that its rights vis-à-vis those who make use of it for the production of wealth are not limited to the provision ... of a hospital bed, if it is available at all, when the worker falls from the third floor of the building which he is constructing to bulge the pockets of the speculator ... (p. 58).

Keeping to the reverse order, next is Tonio Borg's critical legal analysis of the shootings and killings. Making use of post-World War II human-rights legislation and case-law, Dr Borg essentially considers the colonial administration guilty of employing disproportionate force and concludes that had the administration been more cautious, the fatalities would have probably been avoided. Dr Borg closes his essay with a methodological justification which I would have used as premise: in 1919, the principles which were crystallised in the aftermath of WWII, were already well-known, as attested by Winston Churchill's reference to how things ought to be done. It is obvious that Dr Borg is correct as it is accepted that human rights have existed since time immemorial; legal instruments and courts of law merely reduce them to writing, also for the benefit of those who - as WWII has amply shown - are not aware of them or are reluctant to respect them.

Preceding Dr Borg's short and crisp essay, is a timely contextualisation of the Sette Giugno penned by André P. Debattista, an up-and-coming public intellectual whose writings I follow with interest and admiration.

I have long noticed that for the Maltese, the island is in the head. Do you remember Norbert Attard's deceptively simple drawings of Malta surrounded by bastions? That's how a certain type of Maltese historiography is presented to the reading public, portraying Malta as if she exists in vacuo and the Maltese are cut off from what's going on beyond the shores of their tiny homeland. The newspapers articles I cited about, quoted by Professor Bartolo, actually show that the Maltese - even the supposedly ignorant workers - were fully abreast with current affairs and knew that US President Wilson was sympathetic toward small nations and Britain had ostensibly fought the Great War for democracy. Mr Debattista's essay is thus valuable as it places the Sette Giugno events in the context of what was unfolding within the Empire and elsewhere. He manages to compress a huge amount of information into a few pages, transmitting to the intelligent reader the essentials necessary to form a mental image of the times. The result of this contextualisation is that the intelligent reader realises that the Maltese were somehow already part of the universal identity Charles Xuereb referred to. On one point only I might disagree with Mr Debattista: the omission of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, particularly in the light of Crown Advocate Refalo's Marxist speech cited by Paul Bartolo. Then again, Mr Debattista might have been focussing exclusively on 1919.

The book opens - and this review closes - with an assertive essay replete with quotable nuggets, penned by Henry Frendo, who also edited the book.

Professor Frendo has practically dedicated much of his professional life, if not all of it, to capture and convey Malta's colonial experience and the core tension between the British who needed a fortress-colony to protect their interests and the Maltese who desired to be a British protectorate to allow them to pursue their interests, or, at worse, a British colony which would still allow the metropole to enjoy the military benefits of the Islands' strategic position while permitting the population to realise its aspirations. This tension electrified Anglo-Maltese relations and galvanised Professor Frendo's work. His essay reflects this powerful relationship between historian and historical subject, and achieves a number of objectives. It not only gives a masterful interpretation of the events, but also affords the intelligent reader the opportunity to reflect on the effects of imperialism on intra-Maltese relations. If you have read Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus or watched Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (or both), you will have before your eyes the phenomenon which, to my mind, Professor Frendo is referring to in his essay. For the Professor, who is among Malta's finest historians, the Sette Giugno was not rowdy bravado and vandalism or the misdeeds of a wild bunch intent on theft. It was not the eruption of pent-up violence to give vent to the base instincts of the uncouth projected toward the wealthy. It was not class hatred. Instead, it was one of the defining moments in the protracted coming of age of the Nation. All the other essays in the book are intellectually stimulating and rewarding, but Henry Frendo's goes one step further. It transmits the emotional charge of a life-long passion to reach to the soul of a people, to understand the spirit of the times, and to convey the "spiritual" way in which history manifests itself, making use of individuals through whom the Nation's destiny is forged.

According to the blurb on the back cover, the book is a "modest commemoration", "a small addition to... the books about the event that have already been published." I'll take these words at face value and strongly disagree. This is neither a modest commemoration nor a small addition. This is an excellent revisiting of one of the most tragic days in the making of the Nation, a hundred years later.