Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean, by Gillian Weiss

Abstract

Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in Early Modern Mediterranean, by Gillian Weiss, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2011. xvi, 389 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). Gillian Lee Weiss has widely published on ransoming and redemption of French captives in North of Africa in Modern Age. Her book under review here, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in Early Modern Mediterranean, is undoubtedly a major contribution to both growing literature on early modern slavery, and existing literature on sociopolitical dynamics in Western Mediterranean. The book sets itself a highly ambitious task. Through a rich blend of diplomatic, social, and cultural sources, it aims at showing that between 1550 and 1830, liberating French slaves from North Africa changed from expression of Christian charity to a method of state building and, eventually, a rationale for imperial expansion (p. 2). The book advances new arguments about the fluid nature of slavery, association between liberation and state building, and imperialism's roots in (p. 5), as it seeks to understand France's response to and captivity came to form a foundation myth of French empire (p. 6). The book is divided into eight chapters. In first, Weiss offers insights into Mediterranean slavery. Chapter Two analyses politics of captivity and redemption in first half of seventeenth century. Weiss explores crown's failure both to prevent enslavement and to redeem slaves. Chapter Three evaluates how French belonging and Barbary captivity came to seem incompatible, and it examines flowering of first-person French-language captivity narratives. Chapters Four and Five chronicle Louis XIV's politics toward North of Africa. In Chapter Six, Weiss explores contradiction between North African servitude and French idea of freedom. In Chapter Seven, author addresses issue of in Sahara, implications of North African in a time of colonial ascendancy, and racialization of Barbary slavery. Chapter Eight focuses on conquest of and the abolition of white slavery debate. Captives and Corsairs concludes with some paragraphs which return to previous assertions on pertinence of longue duree approach to study of relations between France and North of Africa. Weiss affirms that regeneration and racial servitude, brought together in a broader discourse about liberation, helped make possible France's takeover of Algiers (p. 171). Published in 1949 and reissued in 1966, Fernand Braudel's seminal work The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in Age of Phillip II helped establish Mediterranean as a field of study, but had little impact in producing a Mediterranean focus in French historiography. In sixties, Mediterranean also became, in words of Dionigi Albera, an anthropological laboratory. In last three decades, many anthropologists and historians have examined whether Mediterranean is a convenient and homogeneous unit of anthropological and historical study. …