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George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, John Paul Johns; all of them amongst the more famous of the United States’ early power-elite, and all of them concerned at one time or another with the pirates of the Barbary Coast of North Africa. While most of the contemporary population of the US most likely has a very slim grasp upon the historical import of North Africa in early North American history, the three books here under review demonstrate how very formative those interactions were during the period from 1776 to the mid to late 1800s.
In recent years, much of the historiography dealing with US history has shifted its focus outwards, "internationalizing national history" in one historian’s quotable formulation. This emphasis has certainly picked up a great deal of speed since the 1990s, with the advent of “globalization” and the increasing spread of variously related socio-political shifts (the internet, the EU, the ICC, neo-liberalism, etc). Thus, contemporary observers are perhaps more apt to place ostensibly localized events within a more totalizing, global context. The seeming banality of this approach removes none of its utility, however; especially in regards to the US, certainly one of the most expansionist powers of the previous two centuries. Barbary Coast privateering (also corsairing, or piracy) presented the US with an early, and quite formidable, obstacle to this commercial, military, and cultural expansionism.
The Barbary Coast during the period in question was comprised most importantly of Morocco, Algeriers, Tunis, and Tripoli. Officially part of the Ottoman Empire, by the late 17th century the various governmental units of these regions had effectively gained their independence as well as a certain coherency as proto nation-states. Their economies had also come to rely heavily upon both piracy as well as tribute paid by various states for protection against such activities. A rather ritualized cycle had developed, whereby one of the Barbary states would declare war on an outside country, take a few of their ships hostage, then negotiate a return of the crew and goods in exchange for tributary “presents.” Or, if negotiations failed, they might sell the crew into slavery and repurpose the ships in question for use in later corsair operations.
Prior to US independence, these North African corsairs did not represent much of a threat to North American commerce. Under the protection of the powerful British Navy, ships from the colonies did not much worry over piracy. This temporary security allowed for a rapid and increasingly important commercial interaction. After the break with the British, however, the newly formed US was left to face the corsair threat to their important Mediterranean shipping with neither a formal Navy nor the means to acquire one. Thusly, one of the first geo-political problems that the US was to face took shape.
Historian Frank Lambert depicts these interactions as an early challenge to US sovereignty within the context of the “Atlantic World” in his 2005 work The Barbary Wars: American Independance in the Atlantic World. The “Atlantic World” to which Lambert refers is a recent historiographical trend which argues for the existence of a semi-enclosed historical space roughly delineated by the boundaries of the Atlantic Ocean. Under this rubric, Bernard Bailyn for example has described how the settlers and slaves which came to live in North America brought with them cultural assumptions which proceeded to mutate in their new environments, mutations which then traveled back to their sending communities to effect change at home. Thus, a large scale system developed, a context in which The Barbary Wars argues the early US had to demonstrate its ability to not simply operate effectively as a nation-state, but to exert a certain amount of control of events.
And Lambert’s The Barbary Wars does successfully describe the challenges that the corsairs represented within this framework. European states, particularly the British and the French, successfully sabotaged several rounds of US negotiations with the Barbary states as they saw the North Americans as potential rivals in the Atlantic economy. Much of the US political elite saw the problem in the same light, concerned as they were with expanding trade in a fiscal system already dominated by the European imperial powers. As Lambert points out, the various piratical crises with the corsairing states went a long way to provoke the creation of the US Navy. Releatedly, and again pace The Barbary Wars, one important reason that the famously problematic Articles of Confederation were scraped for the Constitution was the need for the greater taxation powers necessary to pay tribute and naval expenses for the rows with North African pirates.
Lambert rather brusquely argues in The Barbary Wars that religion played little if any role in these disputes; that they were “primarily about trade, not theology…” James A. Field, Jr.’s 1969 America and the Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 demonstrates how including non-governmental historical actors in this narrative belies this contention, however. For example, Field shows how a 1787 treaty with the Emperor of Morocco might have come to a conclusion beneficial to the US based upon the entreaties of a Spanish Christian preacher, and his convincing of the emperor that “Islamic” Morocco and the “Christian” US had much common theological ground. Field goes on to demonstrate the intimate connection between US trade and proselytizing, although he does do so on a longer time scale than does Lambert’s Barbary Wars.
Field also places these events in a rather different geographical construct than does Lambert; that of the “Mediterranean World”, rather than that formed by the Atlantic basin. The idea of a “Mediterranean World” began much earlier than its Atlantic counterpart, often seen as beginning with the publication of Ferdinand Braudel’s dense, masterful, and massively boring two volume 1949 work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World. Much like the concept of the “Atlantic World” which it would later influence, Braudel’s theoretical construct posited an integrated socio-cultural structure bounded by geography. It is Field’s interesting contention that the US should be included in this complex as well, an early extension of US history of which more recent historians like Lambert would certainly applaud.
Former US ambassador to Algeria, Lebanon, and Morocco Richard B. Parker brings the story down from such heights, to focus upon the personalities involved in his Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History Rather than depict large scale trends like Lambert and Field, Parker’s narrative is a micro-history of “America’s first hostage crisis”; the 1785 capture by Algerian corsairs of two US merchant ships and their respective crews. Parker highlights the importance of cultural assumptions and personality in diplomatic negotiation; for example, how a less than qualified, rather disorganized US envoy made this particular “hostage crisis” last much longer than it might have. Uncle Sam in Barbary likewise demonstrates the constraints in which US diplomacy of the time operated, from communication difficulties to the poor credit of the early US government. Unfortunately, Parker does this through the use of massive block quotes, many of which are more than a page and often difficult to navigate. There are also several authorial slippages within in this piece whereby the US envoys become “us”, a lamentable assumption of the book’s audience. As a case study, Uncle Sam in Barbary does its job however, lending detail to the more overarching narratives of the previous two books described in this review.
Taken together, these three works point towards a number of important conclusions. First, US history should be considered a global, rather than a national, affair. From its very inception, this North American state was part of an integrated socio-political complex in which seemingly domestic concerns like state taxation policies were very much affected by events sometimes quite geographically distant. Secondarily, simplistic notions of the “West” versus the “Islamic World” found in works like Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of Global Order do a poor job illuminating US history (though they do a great job of promoting jingoism). As we have seen, it is quite possible to write a history of the interaction between the Barbary Coast and the US without much recourse to the supposed inimicality of “Islamic” and “Christian” states. Furthermore, where the interface between these two religions has had a historical role, it need not be one of confrontation. Finally, although these events have been mostly forgotten in the contemporary historical consciousness of the US public, it should be clear that they still have resonance. Indeed, Lambert’s The Barbary Wars goes so far as to depict these episodes as a continuation of the War of Independence from British imperialism. While I might not recommend reading Uncle Sam in Barbary before taking a look at the other two works under consideration, I would certainly recommend taking the time to read more on this fascinating and little known contact between the early US and North Africa.
