The Last Place in Europe

Abstract

The Last Place in Europe examines Gibraltar’s history from antiquity to the present. Neanderthals sheltered in Gibraltar’s caves tens of thousands of years ago. In classical times when the ancient Greeks first divided the world into continents, some placed Gibraltar at the southern edge of Europe, while others suggested that the Mediterranean world belonged to a single continent distinct from the ocean world to the west. The Bay of Gibraltar was the landing site for the Muslim forces that overthrew the Christian Visigoths in Iberia in the eighth century. During the Middle Ages, Christian kingdoms attacking from the north repeatedly identified the Strait of Gibraltar as their goal. Following the Spanish conquest of the kingdom of Granada and Spain’s subsequent expulsions of Muslims and Jews, Gibraltar became, in the eyes of the Spanish, a fortress city on the frontier of European Christendom. The Anglo-Dutch seizure of Gibraltar in 1704 created a new border cutting the peninsula off from Spain. After Britain assumed sovereignty, Gibraltar became a meeting place for merchants, missionaries, refugees, sailors, scientists, and soldiers from across the British Empire. Legacies of past conflicts, including Spain’s campaigns against Muslims and Jews, the Anglo-Spanish conflict during the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Spanish Civil War and World War II, have inflected Gibraltar’s history through the collapse of the British Empire, the Spanish blockade from 1969 to 1982, Britain’s 2016 withdrawal from the European Union, and Gibraltar’s development as a center of offshore international finance.