I am grateful to Stephen Constantine and to Manchester University Press for giving me the opportunity to provide a brief Foreword toCommunity and Identity: the Making of Modern Gibraltar since 1704. To do so is an enormous pleasure, both personally and professionally.

Attentive readers of Stephen Constantine’s Introduction will learn what our shared colleagues and friends, both in Britain and in Gibraltar, already know: that the research project of which this book is a major outcome was jointly directed by the two of us. If, as Stephen observes, I can claim credit for the original idea and its early...

Gibraltar has, of course, a very long history. There is archaeological evidence of human settlement on the peninsula stretching back several thousand years. Moreover, in historic times the Rock of Gibraltar was joined by its isthmus politically as well as geographically to a much larger territory. This was the case, for example, following the first Moorish conquest of southern Spain beginning in 711. The connection was sustained after the region was conquered from the north for the Christian kings of Castile, Gibraltar being captured in 1309, lost in 1333, and retaken in 1462. The immediate hinterland, now conventionally called the...

The majority of those currently living in Gibraltar, and many of the Gibraltar-born who live outside, regard themselves as Gibraltarians, with a culture and identity sufficiently distinctive in their eyes to qualify Gibraltar as a nation. This is today repeatedly asserted, and it is a main aim of this book to explore and explain the origins of this self-perception. Undoubtedly its roots and nature are plural, but among its most important origins and character lies the ethnic make-up of the population. It is a convention among Gibraltarians and many outside commentators to stress the multiple origins of the population, and...

The previous chapter noted the modest growth of the civilian population of Gibraltar until early in the nineteenth century and how its ethnic and religious composition did not conform to official British wishes. This chapter will add a further layer of explanation for those developments by exploring the economic history of Gibraltar in the century or so after the allied occupation. Gibraltar was, of course, sufficiently attractive economically after 1704 to induce civilians to enter and settle, and eventually to bring up families there, but conditioning their experiences, positively and negatively, was the partition of Gibraltar, upon which stress has...

It has been established already that the military conquest of 1704 was followed by failure and frustration. The occupation of Gibraltar in the name of ‘King Charles III’ was not the prelude, as expected, to his triumphant enthronement in Madrid. As a result, and consequent upon partition and the containment of allied troops behind the walls of a fortified town at the south end of an isthmus on the tip of southern Europe, the problem arose as to who would thereafter govern Gibraltar, and how. Those challenging questions were subject to metamorphosis over the subsequent three centuries, but always at...

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 did not debate the future of Gibraltar at all, and therefore the retention by Britain of sovereignty over the peninsula was confirmed by default. Ambiguities and rival interpretations remained about the status of the so-called neutral ground, but there was no doubt that a frontier zone, if not an agreed frontier line, existed, separating British territory from mainland Spain. However, the fortifications at the Spanish end of the isthmus, stretching from the Fort of Santa Barbara to the Fort of San Felipe, had been dynamited by the British in February 1810 with the consent...

The virility of an economy and indeed of a nation has often been equated with the population it has been able to support. Mercantilist doctrine in the eighteenth century had commonly adopted population numbers as an indicator of national strength, and nation states in the nineteenth century, new and old, readily represented either their emergence or their growing status in terms of the volume of people within their borders, or in their empires. To a more dispassionate eye, however, mere population numbers are an insufficient indication of how successfully a national economy is functioning and distributing its rewards, or of...

The civilian population of Gibraltar during the nineteenth century came in some respects to resemble other communities of largely European immigrant origins. Within the British Empire by the end of the century the predominantly white settler societies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand certainly contained higher proportions of people of British and Irish origin than did Gibraltar, but they had all been enriched by immigrant families and their descendants from other parts of continental Europe. The independent republics of the United States and of Latin America likewise had received and were still receiving settlers from old Europe, and indeed many...

By the end of the nineteenth century the great majority of the civilians living in Gibraltar had, legally, a secure right of residence. In most cases this was based upon laws which applied pretty much in all parts of the British Empire, of which, of course, Gibraltar with its British army garrison and Royal Navy base seemed securely and permanently a part. Through the principle ofjus solithe native-born had acquired by birth an apparently robust entitlement, and that privilege was also supposedly enjoyed by all other subjects of the crown, whichever part of Her Majesty’s dominions happened to...

The quality of life for entrepreneurs and employees resident in Gibraltar, and of their families, depended considerably on their energies and enterprise; but it is a similar platitude to acknowledge that a great deal also depended on context. Men, and women (to adapt Marx), make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.¹ It was therefore fortunate that in the nineteenth century, as has been shown, the circumstances in which people in Gibraltar found themselves were eventually conducive to an improvement in material living standards, of course in stuttering fashion and with an inequitable distribution of rewards....

The previous two chapters have suggested that during the course of the twentieth century some of the features of Gibraltar which had formerly characterised it as principally a British fortress and naval base had been unsettled. From the beginning of the century the absolute right of all British subjects to take up residence in this British colony had been removed, and by its close the Gibraltarian status of civilians, with attendant rights of belonging, and immigration controls over all others, had not just been imposed by the colonial government but had been negotiated with and implemented by, principally, leaders of...

Because it has become a truism it is not necessarily untrue. The evacuation from May 1940 of much of the civilian population from Gibraltar, and especially some of their uncomfortable experiences in Britain and Northern Ireland, did embitter the exiles and those still resident in Gibraltar and did provoke demands for political change.¹ The apparently tardy steps being taken by the British authorities to organise repatriation seemed to expose the limited political influence that Gibraltar civilians had over their own lives, even over such a fundamental matter as when they would be allowed to return to their homes and place...

History does not stop, and certainly the political destiny of Gibraltar internally and externally was, in May 1969, still to be determined. Accordingly, subsequent political developments are reviewed as an introduction to this final chapter. The new constitution was certainly an important step, confirming and extending Gibraltar’s democratic character. Each elector was now able to vote for up to eight candidates for the fifteen elected seats in the House of Assembly, from whom were selected, by the chief minister, those who were appointed to office and who were ultimately accountable to the electorate. Elections were to take place at least...