This book provides a detailed study of the attempts that have been made by Spain, to regain the sovereignty of 'the Rock', despite the wishes of the Gibraltarians.

The story of Gibraltar is one of siege, starvation, plague, and battles interspersed with periods of peace. The colony's civilian population is made up of a rich and complex racial mix of exiled Jews, French royalists, Maltese merchants, emigrants from India and Genoese fishermen who fled Napoleon. Marc Alexander's book is the first full history of the rock for many years, providing the background to a unique community and a chronicle of a remarkable chapter in British military history. Even now, at the beginning of the new millennium, the future of teh 6.5 square km territory is still uncertain. An important RAF base, it is a fragment of Britain's imperial past set uneasily in the territory of a fellow member of the European Union apparently eager to reclaim it. Gibraltar's dramatic history is far from over.

Gibraltar is an Overseas Territory of the UK within the EU, which has for three centuries been at the centre of a dispute between Britain and Spain, a dispute based on traditional perceptions of sovereignty. Hitherto the dispute has been managed in a predominantly bilateral way, but this has prevented the people of Gibraltar having an equal say on the issue of Gibraltar's sovereignty and decolonisation. It has produced a paradox of governance and constitutionalism that encases the Gibraltar people. This book considers the effects of sovereignty and the culture of bilateralism on the dispute, and examines the resulting deficits of governance and democracy. In assessing the evolution of the themes underlying the dispute it asks how its resolution might be facilitated by the application of ideas drawn from the modern legal context of late sovereignty, pluralism and stateless nationalism, suggesting that a productive trilateral approach and recognition of the legal and societal context could enable an enduring settlement. The author marries theories from international relations, constitutional law and public international law in the context of modern literature on sovereignty and nationalism, applying these theories to the case-study of Gibraltar with emphasis on constitutionalism in its international and EU context to produce a ground-breaking addition to the literature on stateless nationalism, late sovereignty and constitutional pluralism. As such it also complements recent studies of sub-state societies, regions or nations within Europe and elsewhere, including Catalunya, the Basque Country and Scotland and Wales, and in the broader Commonwealth context, other British overseas territories. This book will be of interest to lawyers, political scientists, constitutional historians and constitutionalists.

Islands and archipelagos hold great imaginative power, and they have long been a subject of study for cartographers and geographers, for anthropologists and historians of colonisation. But what does it mean to be an islander? Can one feel both British and Manx, for example? What are British tourists looking for when they go to former island colonies? How do past relationships with Britain affect islands today? This collection takes a variety of perspectives to provide answers to such questions, examining war, empire, tourism, immigration, language, literature, and everyday life on and in islands, and the question of travel to and from them. Britishness is highlighted as a global island phenomenon, providing an insight into the history, culture and politics of identities from Jersey to Jamaica. Islands and Britishness not only brings together various contemporary strands in Island Studies, but uniquely focuses on the relationship – historical, cultural and economic – between particular islands and Britain, and, crucially, how this relationship frames national identity both on the island and in Britain itself. The collection examines interactions between Britishness and indigenous or earlier invasive/settler cultures, as well as the internal differences within the concept of ‘Britishness’ (Britain/Scotland/Shetland, for instance). It considers the relationship played out on the island between Britishness and the other nationalities with which the islands share an affinity, and questions received wisdoms about national identity on the islands by considering intersecting discourses such as class and gender. The collection offers a global perspective on the divisions within a notion of Britishness and the identities against which Britishness has been constructed.

The principal argument in Gibraltar and Empire is that Gibraltarians constitute a separate and distinctive people, notwithstanding the political stance taken by the government of Spain. Various factors - environmental, ethnic, economic, political, religious, linguistic, educational and informal - are adduced to explain the emergence of a sense of community on the Rock and an attachment to the United Kingdom. A secondary argument is that the British empire has left its mark in Gibraltar in various forms - such as militarily - and for a number of reasons. Gilbraltar and Empire's exploration of the manifold reasons why the Gibraltarians have bucked the trend in the history of decolonization comes at a time when the issues in question have come to the fore in diplomatic and political areas.