My story starts back in 1998 inside the microfilm department at Leeds University’s Brotherton Library. I was halfway through a PhD in English literature (focusing on representations of foreignness in early modern propaganda), and was regularly trawling through the library’s microfilm holdings for images of obscure pamphlets and broadsides.
It was a pretty bleak task, but there was an unexpected perk: while spinning my way manually through those seemingly endless reels, I’d frequently stumble upon 18th century treatises about my native Gibraltar. Many of these texts had grandiloquently archaic titles, such as Gibraltar a Bulwark of Great Britain, or The propriety of retaining Gibraltar impartially considered. It struck me that they spoke a great deal about Gibraltar’s flora and fauna, the state of its military fortifications and other related subjects, but not about the inhabitants themselves.
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