The three British possessions in the Mediterranean – Gibraltar, Malta, Corfu – had all been acquired by the British navy, and the first two were retained primarily for the navy's use. All three were also human communities which were only partly dependent on the British navy for their livelihood. They were composed of people of varied origins, and these were in large part not British in persons or religion or language.

Gibraltar by the end of the Napoleonic wars had been a British possession for over a century. It had suffered several sieges by Spanish (and French) troops, during which most of the people of Spanish origin had been driven out as unreliable, or potentially so. In at least two of the sieges the civilian town had been largely battered into ruin, and then rebuilt. The place was essentially a fort, with the town crouching behind solid fortifications which had stood up to the Spanish bombardments much more successfully than anything in the town. Its people were dependent on imported supplies from Spain, if the border was open and the Spanish government permitted commercial traffic to pass, or from North Africa; in wartime supplies had to come from Britain as well. There was not enough space on the Rock to develop a local indigenous food supply other than some vegetable patches.

Malta was an archipelago of islands – three were inhabited – which contain monuments which predated the development of civilisation anywhere in the world. The population was at least in part descended from the makers of these monuments, a people therefore which had inhabited the islands for at least seven thousand years. They spoke a language of North African origin, much affected by Arabic, which was transliterated into Latin characters in a very awkward way, and they were Roman Catholic in religion. They had, for nearly three centuries, been ruled by the violent crusading order of the Knights of St John of the Hospital, which had developed from a group aiming to assist pilgrims in the Holy Land into an aristocratic coterie of celibate warriors. The Maltese had been unenthusiastic subjects, liable to heavy taxation, conscripted to public works and the galleys, and all too often kidnapped by the enemies of those Knights.