Knowing the Maghreb in Stuart Scotland, Ireland and Northern England

Abstract

AbstractTunis, 1612: Scotsman William Lithgow visits notorious English‐born corsair Murat Rais at his sumptuous palace. Baltimore, 1631: Corsairs from Algiers and Salé carry away over 100 villagers. Tangier, 1680: 400 soldiers arrive from Ireland in the nick of time to a colony under Moroccan siege. London, 1682: Moroccan ambassador Mohammed ben Hadou entertains dignitaries from as far afield as York. Algiers, 1709: The Isabella of Kirkcaldy is captured at sea, triggering a year‐long diplomatic dispute around the complexities of British union. Throughout the Stuart era, Scottish, Irish, and northern English merchants, sailors, soldiers, captives, and travellers encountered the Maghreb in as varied ways as their southern English counterparts, yet accounts of relations between ‘Britain’ and the Maghreb usually become mainly accounts of the south. By the late seventeenth century, not only did many individuals from Scotland, Ireland, and the North encounter the Maghreb in person, but extensive news networks, both mediated through and independent of London, brought robust, detailed, and up‐to‐date intelligence on events, movements, and demographics in the Maghreb, and educated readers accessed longer accounts from numerous sources. This paper, focusing particularly on locally printed news and publications from Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Newcastle, examines for the first time in detail the Maghreb's reputation in Stuart Scottish, Irish, and northern English urban thought. Using quantitative and qualitative methods in comparison to London‐based equivalents, I argue that these regions developed their own idiosyncratic impressions of this distant and dangerous land, confronting the disjunct between new diplomatic realities and ancestral prejudices as they moved rapidly towards the assurance of British naval power and imperial authority.