How slavery in Malta came to an end

The disappearance of slavery in Malta is often attributed to a single moment in 1798, when Napoleon abolished the practice after capturing the islands. The reality is more complex. The end of slavery in Malta was not a sudden reform driven by enlightened ideals. It was the product of decades of negotiation, foreign intervention, financial incentives, and geopolitical shifts that gradually eroded a system that had shaped Maltese society for centuries.

By the late eighteenth century, the Order of St John still depended on enslaved Muslim labour for its galleys, public works, and domestic service. Yet the institution was already weakening. A decisive factor was the growing involvement of the Moroccan state. From the 1760s onward, successive Moroccan rulers made the liberation of Muslim slaves held across the Mediterranean a central diplomatic priority. Malta was one of their main targets. Through large scale ransom operations financed directly by the Emperor of Morocco, hundreds of captives were gradually repatriated at the Order’s expense.

These redemptions intensified during the 1780s. Archival records show that Moroccan agents paid tens of thousands of scudi to free Muslim slaves held both by the Order and by private Maltese owners. In 1789, the Moroccan government negotiated a single comprehensive agreement to redeem almost all remaining Muslim slaves in Malta, except those who had converted to Christianity. The Order even had to purchase additional slaves from private owners to reach the agreed figure of six hundred. That year alone, the Treasury recorded more than half a million scudi in ransom receipts, an amount unprecedented in the island’s financial history.

This operation did not abolish slavery. The Order continued to capture Muslim prisoners in the early 1790s, and the system of forced labour was maintained. Yet the 1789 mass liberation weakened the institution in practice. It emptied the state owned slave population for the first time since the Knights arrived in 1530 and made it increasingly difficult to sustain the system at previous levels. Slavery remained legal, but its foundations were visibly eroding.

The decisive legal break came with Napoleon’s conquest of Malta in June 1798. After inspecting the prisons and galleys, Napoleon issued a decree that abolished slavery and ordered the release of both state and privately owned Muslim captives. Contemporary records indicate that roughly six hundred were embarked on French ships and repatriated within weeks. Napoleon used these releases as leverage in negotiations with North African rulers, demanding reciprocal treatment for Maltese and French captives held in their territories.

Following the French departure, Maltese leaders and the early British administration chose to maintain this abolition. The National Congress of 1800 rejected petitions by former slave owners seeking to reclaim individuals who had been freed, arguing that liberty once granted could not be revoked. Captain Alexander Ball confirmed this decision in an official proclamation. Legally, slavery had become incompatible with the new political order that emerged on the islands at the turn of the century.

The transition was not immediate. Social attitudes and household relationships changed more slowly than law. As late as 1814, some Maltese continued to refer to long serving domestic workers as their slaves, even though these individuals were legally free. The British administration also faced challenges associated with the importation of African servants purchased abroad. A proclamation issued in 1812 prohibited this practice and barred the sale or transfer of such individuals, placing Malta in line with the wider British campaign against the slave trade.

The abolition of slavery in Malta was therefore a cumulative process shaped by external diplomacy, the collapse of the Order’s political power, the French occupation, and British anti slavery policy. It was neither sudden nor driven by a single ideological impulse. Instead, it reflected shifts in the political and economic environment of the central Mediterranean, and it marked the gradual end of an institution that had long been embedded in Maltese life.

Source Wettinger, G. (1981). The abolition of slavery in Malta. Archivum : the journal of Maltese historical research, 1, 1-19.