Barbary's “character” in European letters, 1514–1830: An ideological prelude to colonization

Abstract

European colonialism in North Africa be? gan with the French conquest of Algiers in 1830, but an ideological preparation for it antedated that conquest by at least three cen? turies. During that time, an age which wit? nessed both the rise of capitalism and the in? fancy of cultural anthropology, Europe syste? matically carved out an image, a composite portrait of North Africa's "character" which, though not a primary cause of colonization, eventually became a major intellectual justifi? cation for it. An odd name, "Barbary" was from the be? ginning of North Africa's recorded history al? ready a mythological image. It originated in classical times from the Greek and Latin barbarus, designating non-Greeks and non Romans ? all that was foreign, uncivilized, and liable to subjection [ 1 ]. A native of North Africa, St. Augustine would have used barbarus to describe his fellow natives who resisted Roman rule and Christianity. "Berbers" would finally emerge as an ethnic pseudonym for those natives. Thus "Barbary," a foreign ap? pellation imposed on the land from without, for centuries carried a burden of pejorative connotations: from the beginning the homo? nyms Barbarian and barbarian were synonyms; the land itself carried the sign of its depraved character in its emblematic name. Such a view of Barbary was amplified in Europe when the tide of Islam (that "heresy," "imposture," and "imminent menace") swept over North Africa late in the seventh century and over Spain early in the eighth. Islam was condemned further when the Turks challenged the Holy Roman Empire for the domination of the area. By 1511 Spain had turned national reconquista into imperial conquest and an? nexed practically the whole North African coastline, but in 1514 Barbarossa turned Algiers into a Regency of the Sublime Porte whose control soon extended over Tunis and Tripoli [2]. Between 1514 and 1830, privateering, a semi-official "substitute" for war, dominated the history of relations between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Though privateering and slavery were then a feature of all societies around the Mediterra? nean, "western historians have encouraged us to see only the pirates of Islam, in particular the Barbary corsairs" while Europe's com? pounding of the conquest of Algiers was happily forgotten [3]. Such historians generally re? duced an endemic Mediterranean practice to "Barbary piracy" which they conveniently interpreted as the "revenge of the Moors," i.e., pure retaliation against the Spanish recon? quista and Inquisition. As late as 1890 Stanley Lotfi Ben Rejeb is a professor at the University of Tunis, Tunisia