North Africa and the Atlantic World

Abstract

The engagement of North African polities and characters in the Atlantic world has received little scholarly attention in comparison with western Europe and to a lesser extent sub-Saharan Africa. The region is considered as the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and while its contribution to the Mediterranean World is nowadays acknowledged, this is not the case regarding the Atlantic. Repairing the broken connections between North Africa and the Atlantic is a difficult task still to be done, but the available literature examining the region’s connected past has provided a useful and promising basis. North Africa (or the Maghreb) as defined in this article refers to the territories spanning from Atlantic Morocco to Tripolitania (in present-day Libya). Hence, special attention is paid to their relationships with Atlantic Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. The chronological span of the article goes through the period between the central decades of the sixteenth century, when the rise of the Sharifian dynasties in Morocco and the consolidation of the Ottoman rule in Central and Eastern Maghreb marks the start of an Early Modern period in this region, to the mid-nineteenth century, when the advent of European colonialism puts an end to it. North Africans participated in the boom of the Atlantic economy and Moroccan and Algerian corsairs raided places as far as Iceland or obliged the European powers to develop institutions to cope with the threat they posed to long-distance trade. Furthermore, major political events in the wider Atlantic world had a momentous impact on North Africa. A wide array of North African actors, such as rulers, port cities, intellectuals, religious leaders, corsairs, and slaves, reacted to and engaged with the struggle waged by the European empires for long-distance trade, with the Atlantic revolutions, or with the rise of sea powers.