When arriving by boat in Malta from Libya, migrants encounter a strong state and legal framework that shapes their mobilities and journeys. This chapter brings forward migrants’ lives in Malta’s reception structures. It reveals how people experience mobility as a form of stuckness, influenced by bureaucratic techniques of governance.

This chapter opens up space for rethinking the experiences, economies and governance of mobile life. It sheds light on aspects of comparison between migrants’ experiences in the fragmented context of Libya and in Malta’s legal framework, enabled through the book’s unique analytic of the journey. Journeys foster novel understandings of the intersections between economy and unauthorized migration, encapsulated by the concept of mobility economies. The ethnographic and analytical insights of the book furnish a new anthropology of mobility and economic life.

This chapter offers a temporal view on mobility: the ways in which migrants negotiate their longer-term futures in Malta’s state and legal system. Showing how onward movement is constrained by legal status and a bureaucratic landscape, it front stages the importance of the journey as an analytic for theorizing mobility.

How might we characterize the unauthorized journeys of migrants from countries in Eastern and Western Africa as they make their way to or through Libya to Europe? This chapter front stages the journey as an analytic for understanding contemporary migration. It outlines what is at stake when the lived experiences of migration and migrants’ lives are brought into conversation with biopolitics and political economy. It highlights the concept of ‘mobility economies’ as a means for recasting analyses of migration and economic arrangements under contemporary capitalism.

The Mediterranean boat crossing highlights vulnerability and risk along migrants’ unauthorized journeys. This chapter attends to migrants’ experiences of taking a boat from Libya to Europe. The chapter enlivens affective and meteorological dimensions of the crossing to show how they configure mobilities and peoples’ futures. It provides a unique insight into unauthorized migration and its intersections with affect and atmospheres.

Due diligence is absolutely key to stem possible problems with investment migration programs. Focusing on examples from Canada, Saint-Kitts and Nevis, and the European Union, this chapter offers a critical assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of due diligence practices.

Chapter 3 examines two features deemed constitutive of ‘national characters’ in the eighteenth century: language and religion. Many naval recruits, both from abroad and from the British Isles and Ireland, were not native English speakers, and sometimes did not understand the language. Yet naval English was a technical argot, blurring language divides, and shipboard structures and workflows, combined with a shared professional background, made linguistic competence a secondary concern. In fact, it was men otherwise known as ‘foreigners’, but speaking perfect English, who were potentially seen as suspect, because of their upturning of expectations. Religious difference, too, was generally unproblematic. Unlike other European fleets, the Navy ranked devotion relatively low among its priorities and routines. Although Catholics were theoretically banned from serving, this law was policed only in the case of officers, and some practical accommodations were even provided for Catholic common seamen. Overall, cultural differences often mattered to individuals. However, the naval service pursued efficiency, and its discipline was very efficacious in flattening or accommodating difference, making any diversity relatively marginal to shipboard rhythms. Royal Navy ships could thus become just another part of a maritime world in which various languages and faiths met and mingled.

The TPNW was welcomed at the UN General Assembly, under the participation of a wide range of humanitarian groups and civil society organizations, supported by a groundswell of nations around the world. The Treaty firmly implants new law into the international legal landscape for states who wish to ratify it, sowing the seeds of potentially new normative behavior within the global community more generally. Indeed, the TPNW purports to strive for universality, raising significant questions regarding its ambitions in achieving legal unity within the wider international legal order. The dedication to the spirit of the Treaty cannot be ignored, nor can the optimism to ban nuclear weapons.

Despite the qualified successes of Operation ‘Crusader’, Britain was faced with a disastrous turn of events in early 1942. The entry of Japan to the war had compelled a redistribution of force to the Far East, while some key British losses and new in-theatre German commitments had further redefined the Mediterranean balance of power. Chapter 5 outlines how the British were forced to adopt a defensive posture throughout the theatre, as their gains from ‘Crusader’ were rapidly reversed. As the Axis then advanced into Egypt, Malta was subjected to an intense aerial siege and came perilously close to being starved into submission. The difficulties in conducting anti-shipping operations during this period were numerous. Yet in a reversal of the thesis advanced by historians such as van Creveld and Gladman, the chapter demonstrates that significant sinkings (of over 300,000 tons) were achieved during this period. The continued attrition was greatly troubling for the Axis, contributing to a shipping shortage that was to reach crisis point later in the year.

Chapter 6 begins by illustrating the respective positions of each side by September 1942. It shows that while the Axis position can in retrospect be viewed as highly precarious, the British evinced real concern about a complete collapse in Egypt. It highlights the resurgent emphasis that was placed on the Mediterranean from Whitehall, and on anti-shipping operations by the theatre commanders. These attacks were pursued with a ruthless prioritisation; even after clear evidence that some Axis vessels were carrying British prisoners of war. This allowed anti-shipping operations to thrive, aided by the effective use of intelligence to target the most critical cargoes of fuel and ammunition. As a result, over the three-month period, ninety-five vessels of nearly 200,000 tons were sunk, with grave effects on the Axis. These sinkings helped curtail the final Axis offensive in Egypt and contributed to the vital British victory at El Alamein by depriving the Axis of essential fuel and ammunition. In contrast to arguments put forward by scholars such as van Creveld, Barnett and Gladman, the book uses a mix of Italian, German and British material to conclusively show that the supply shortages suffered by the Axis were primarily the result of seaborne sinkings.

While El Alamein represented an important defensive victory at the eastern fringe of the Mediterranean, joint Anglo-American landings in north-west Africa caused a transformation of the theatre. This shift to a truly Allied venture, where the war in North Africa was fought on two fronts, had consequent effects on Axis supply requirements. Anti-shipping operations continued to receive high priority throughout this period, resulting in a devastating 477 vessels of over 700,000 tons being sunk in five months. This ensured that the minimum level of supplies required by the Axis forces were not received. In fact, the losses were so devastating that the Axis came to lack the necessary shipping to even attempt shipping the required amounts in the first place. The chapter then offers a revolutionary new argument: that the period around October 1942 represented a tipping point towards collapse for the Axis position in the wider Mediterranean. The consistently high rates of sinkings had greatly eroded the base of available tonnage, and efforts to improve construction had failed. The attempts to fill the void with seized French tonnage were inadequate, and by early summer 1943 the Axis were acknowledging that maintaining positions such as Sardinia and Corsica was no longer possible, while retaining the Aegean islands and even Sicily were tenuous aims.

Chapter 4 starts with the Mediterranean receiving a new level of recognition in British strategic priority during the August–December 1941 period, becoming the primary effort. Moreover, the anti-shipping campaign was promoted to a prime position in operational priority for the Navy and Air Force, with a corresponding dedication of forces to the task. Coupled with this was an increase in the pace of learning and the refinement of tactical procedures. This led to greatly increased levels of sinkings over August–December, which coincided with a new major British offensive in North Africa: Operation ‘Crusader’. These sinkings successfully denied Axis forces in Cyrenaica the necessary fuel and ammunition to either launch their own planned offensive or to resist the British advance, including the loss of 92 per cent of the fuel shipped in November. Furthermore, the increased levels of attrition meant that sinkings were now greatly outstripping the Axis replenishment capability through new construction or other means. This was the first clear example of the dual effect of the anti-shipping campaign: one operational affecting the war on land in North Africa, and one attritional, undermining the Axis ability to conduct any form of warfare in the Mediterranean. It caused serious concern among the Axis commands, leading to the adoption of new countermeasures, which were to have a major impact in the following year.

This chapter makes a case for the existence of a cohesive “British Mediterranean world” that encompassed not only Britain’s Mediterranean colonies (in this period, Malta, Gibraltar, and the Ionian Islands) but also the intrigue and influence the Mediterranean exerted in Britain itself. We consider the diverse ensemble of British personnel driven to the Middle Sea by the obligations of military service, by the needs of diplomacy, or by personal inclination. The chapter demonstrates that it was primarily attention to and interest in Mediterranean dynamics that shaped the course of Britain’s attitude toward quarantine. Finally, in considering the “Doctor’s Mediterranean,” it concludes with a study of the ways in which medical expertise developed in the Mediterranean region impinged in an outsized manner on British debates of the validity of quarantine.

This chapter takes a transnational approach to the study of the administration of quarantine, considering the how boards of health had to operate along local, national, and international registers. Through a social and institutional study of quarantine administration, it becomes clear how boards in different countries negotiated problems in symmetry. The chapter explores the administrative logic underlying disinfection practices and the daily scope of board of health activities. Lazarettos comprised a rigid hierarchy of employees, from the “Captain/Prior” in charge of the building through doctors to the “guardians” who attended each traveling party and who cycled in and out of quarantine themselves. At the top of the hierarchy, boards of health wielded immense power as they acted as local administrators with an international remit. I investigate how the lazaretto could simultaneously serve as an economic engine for cities such as Marseille, a civic institution, and a space that fell within the interstices of administration, whose jurisdictional status remained murky.