Barbary Pirates Research Articles

Barbary’s slow death: European attempts to eradicate North African piracy in the early nineteenth century

ABSTRACTIn many works on the late Barbary period, Stephen Decatur’s 1815 attack and Lord Exmouth's 1816 bombardment on Algiers are frequently seen as the end of the Barbary corsairs. This article challenges that idea by examining the 15-year period from Napoleon’s Hundred Days through French colonisation when Western powers repeatedly attacked the Barbary States. Despite the attention received by Decatur or Exmouth's attacks, neither eliminated the corsairs nor did any attack that followed. The end of the Napoleonic wars changed European power relations making the Barbary corsairs intolerable; Britain’s responsibility for and protection of small Italian states (the bulk of the corsairs prey) continued after the war. Britain’s new position as ‘protector’ of the Mediterranean and the Congress of Vienna’s denouncement of piracy eliminated European tolerance for the corsairs as demonstrated by the 10 different attacks on Barbary between 1815 and 1830. Post-war instability and repeated environmental crises across North Africa also weakened the Barbary States. Corsairs endured beyond Exmouth’s bombardment, and piracy lasted in North Africa beyond French invasion of Algiers. Changes in European power relations eliminated the corsair institution through the colonisation of Barbary, not isolated attacks on its ports.

Soldados de “naciones” para la armada del mar océano: las compañías irlandesas de los Tercios embarcados, 1604-1639

Desde 1604 hasta 1639 varias compañías compuestas por militares irlandeses sirvieron en los Tercios embarcados de la Armada del Mar Océano. Este estudio pretende describir las actividades en las que dichas unidades se vieron involucradas durante su servicio a Felipe III y a Felipe IV, desde enfrentamientos navales contra corsarios berberiscos en el Mediterráneo a operaciones contra los asentamientos piráticos holandeses en el Nuevo Mundo. Además se intenta identificar quiénes fueron sus miembros, tanto oficiales como soldados, y se presentan sus cursus honorum con el detalle que permite la documentación existente. Se ensaya así otra perspectiva, hasta ahora inédita, del servicio prestado por el exilio irlandés a la Monarquía Hispánica durante los primeros cuarenta años del siglo XVII.http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/ohm.24.2369

Measuring the military decline of the Western Islamic World: Evidence from Barbary ransoms

This paper uses data on more than 4000 captives ransomed from the Barbary corsairs to track the military power of the Ottoman Empire's most powerful North African regency over time. Results suggest that as the seventeenth century advanced, Algerian-based corsairs found it increasingly difficult to capture “hard” targets. These results do not appear to be driven by changes in ransoming preferences or by other unobserved factors and provide insights into both the timing and reasons behind the military decline of the Western Islamic World.

The Congress of Vienna: power and politics after Napoleon

Convened following Napoleon s defeat in 1814, the Congress of is remembered as much for the pageantry of the royals and elites who gathered there as for the landmark diplomatic agreements they brokered. Historians have nevertheless generally dismissed these spectacular festivities as window dressing when compared with the serious, behind-the-scenes maneuverings of sovereigns and statesmen. Brian Vick finds this conventional view shortsighted, seeing these instead as two interconnected dimensions of politics. Examining them together yields a more complete picture of how one of the most important diplomatic summits in history managed to redraw the map of Europe and the international system of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The Congress of Vienna investigates the Congress within a broad framework of influence networks that included unofficial opinion-shapers of all kinds, both men and women: artists and composers, entrepreneurs and writers, hosts and attendees of fashionable salons. In addition to high-profile negotiation and diplomatic wrangling over the post-Napoleonic fates of Germany, Italy, and Poland, Vick brings into focus other understudied yet significant issues: the African slave trade, Jewish rights, and relations with Islamic powers such as the Ottoman Empire and Barbary Corsairs. Challenging the usual portrayal of a reactionary Congress obsessed with rolling back Napoleon s liberal reforms, Vick demonstrates that the Congress s promotion of limited constitutionalism, respect for religious and nationality rights, and humanitarian interventions was influenced as much by liberal currents as by conservative ones.

Les boudoirs dans l’œuvre de Balzac: surveiller, mentir, désirer, mourir par Jean-François Richer

by riches (48). For his part, Raffaele Carbone reads Montaigne in dialogue with Giordano Bruno, both of whom “ont cultivé une forme de marginalité capable de remettre en cause l’ordre social et politique établi”(75).The growing number of students and scholars interested in Early Modern France and its Mediterranean context will enjoy Mahbouba Saï Tlili’s study of the anarchic society of corsaires barbaresques (Barbary pirates) in Marin Le Roy de Gomberville’s L’exil de Polexandre (1629), situated on an island “abritant le désordre et le chaos à la frontière d’un monde d’ordre et de droit” (121). The fact that Gomberville’s novel aims largely to “mettre en valeur la politique étrangère de la France en dénigrant sévèrement celle de l’Espagne” (129) reminds the reader that margins and marginality are largely a question of perspective. Mediterranean pirates are also the topic of Sandrine Blondet’s “Pirates et corsaires sur les théâtres parisiens en 1637.” There, the corsaire “ne revendique jamais sa marginalité, mais la subit, et la déplore” (154). The open definition of marginality throughout the volume, as well as the juxtaposition of authors from different places (England, France, Italy) and times (approximately 1530s–1680s), mean that the volume offers more a sample of possible topics related to a range of forms of marginality (often the case with conference proceedings) than a specifically focused treatment that results in carefully planned conceptual heavy lifting, which is not a problem—each of the chapters is informative, well written. A collection worth reading by anyone interested in the range of topics discussed. New York University Phillip John Usher Richer, Jean-François. Les boudoirs dans l’œuvre de Balzac: surveiller, mentir, désirer, mourir. Québec: Nota bene, 2012. ISBN 978-2-89518-370-9. Pp. 320. $30 Can. In the course of four chapters, Richer convincingly demonstrates the essential role played by the boudoir in the Balzacian universe.Richer takes us far from the eighteenthcentury erotic spaces of Crébillon fils and Sade into the darker terrain of the many boudoirs within the architecture of power constructed by Balzac across his oeuvre. “Le lieu des ébats est désormais un lieu de combats,”Richer notes of the divide between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries (42). Through close readings spanning Balzac’s fiction, and occasionally illuminated by references to other treatises of the period such as Chaumont’s 1841 Physiologie du boudoir et des femmes de Paris, Richer steers us through a series of boudoirs where private meets public, where, more often than not, suitors are infantilized, where rendezvous have lethal consequences, and where silence and eloquence reflect the destinies of individuals and the fates of politicians. Under the theoretical aegis of Foucault, chapter one,“Surveiller,” demonstrates the impossibility of intimacy within the boudoir. Narrators or other characters can be stationed just outside and husbands lurk. In short, the boudoir is anything but a private place. Appearances are deliberately deceptive here, as Richer shows in the 288 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 289 next chapter, “Mentir.” The boudoir at the beginning of Sarrasine uncovers, while at the same time covering up the origins of the Lanty fortune and the originary gender ambiguity that would prove fatal to Sarrasine. Rarely is desire consummated in this space of mendacity.As grown men enter the boudoir only to leave silenced and reduced to sons of a mother figure, the space is shown to be one haunted by the specter of incest. Not all males succumb to the dangers of the boudoir, however. Part of what distinguishes the triumvirate of (generally) successful Balzacian male protagonists— Eugène de Rastignac, Henri de Marsay, and le marquis de Ronquerolles—is their ability to wield their eloquence in this space so fraught with danger. As suitors of influential women, the boudoir, for them a space of conquest, serves to catapult them upward into brilliant public careers. The book’s final chapter, “Mourir,” exposes the boudoir to be, for many, a toxic space. There is, of course, the spectacular boudoir death scene of Paquita Valdes in La fille aux yeux d’or. More subtle, however, are other...

Commerce and Sentiment in Tales of Barbary Encounter: Cathcart, Barlow, Markoe, Tyler, and Rowson

A number of American sailors were taken hostage by Barbary Corsairs and held as slaves in North Africa in the years following the Revolutionary War. The crisis would ultimately lead to open warfare, but many Americans were optimistic that international commerce and common sympathy might overcome religious differences. This essay sketches the history of the Barbary conflict and considers three fictionalized accounts of Barbary encounter as secular conversion narratives, two of the three demonstrating how even despotic slaveholders could learn to embrace commerce and sentiment. Peter Markoe’s novel The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787), Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Slave (1797), and Susanna Rowson’s drama Slaves in Algiers (1794) suggest a certain openness to religious and national difference; however they are clearly about American concerns and, in fact, more committed to secularized Christian norms than their praise of common sentiment would suggest. In all three texts, Jews are excluded from the vision of common sentiment and made to symbolize what was cruel about commerce; it is my argument that they served as scapegoats for the American discomfort with its own failures of sentiment, evidenced most obviously by chattel slavery and the slave trade. These fictionalized tales of encounter hold up sentiment as the solution to all sorts of conflict. However, they also deploy sentiment, paradoxically, as a pre-biological marker of race, designating those beyond the union of sentiment—Jews—as somehow detached from the quality that makes people human.

Europe and the Islamic World: A History, by John Tolan, Gilles Veinstein and Henry Laurens

The idea of bringing together historians of medieval, early modern and modern European relations with the Islamic world is a good one, and it is sad that the distinguished author of the early modern section, Gilles Veinstein of the Collège de France, died around the time that this useful book appeared. A brief introduction by John Esposito rejects the facile concept of a ‘clash of civilisations’, famously set out by Samuel Huntington. If anything, the book tries to pull its readers towards the concept of a single ‘Islamo-Christian’ civilisation, itself an unsatisfactory term—one would have thought that the concept of a ‘civilisation’ with defined boundaries had departed the world with Arnold Toynbee. While they agree that Huntington’s view is a gross over-simplification, three historians with different perspectives are bound to produce a volume that shifts significantly in emphasis. John Tolan’s chapters are the broadest, since his main scholarly interest lies in the intellectual engagement between Christians and Muslims; but he has not shied away from treatment of trade relations, the political history of the reconquista, and even (though in a short section littered with errors) the significance of the first Portuguese advances into the Atlantic. Veinstein was primarily a scholar of the Ottoman world, and it is no surprise that his chapters on the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should lay a strong emphasis on the Ottoman relationship with western Europe, and include authoritative coverage of what was happening in the Balkan areas that lay under Turkish rule. Henry Laurens, on the other hand, is particularly concerned with political developments in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and he offers more detail on the First and Second World Wars than the scale of the book perhaps allows; as a result his analysis of some important developments, such as the planning of the Suez Canal, seems quite compressed. Yet he manages to bring in a great amount of valuable material, such as the final defeat of the Barbary corsairs and the role of Anglo-Moroccan trade in the nineteenth century (without, however, citing the important work of Daniel Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira [1988]).

Asian States in U.S. Arctic Policy: Perceptions and Prospects

Asian States in U.S. Arctic Policy:Perceptions and Prospects James Kraska (bio) In May 2013, five Asian states—China, South Korea, Japan, India, and Singapore—were admitted as observers to the Arctic Council.1 Generally, the United States views the admission of these nations into the work of the council as a positive development that deepens international cooperation on a key global challenge.2 The admission of observer states represents an appropriate progression of the strength and role of the council as an international institution, and it also recognizes the global importance of the Arctic region.3 The U.S. position takes a distinctly American approach to internationalism that reflects a union of liberal values and transparency with a concern for protecting the United States’ national interest in the political stability and environmental security of the Arctic. The aim of U.S. grand strategy is to develop a broadly inclusive and integrated international system in which all nations share certain rights and responsibilities.4 By recognizing the interests of Asian states in the Arctic region and welcoming them into the Arctic Council, the United States seeks to broaden the number of stakeholders positioned to share benefits and assume responsibilities in the region, provide a positive example for other regional and functional organizations, and underscore U.S. regional leadership. The United States’ Interests in the Arctic The United States understands that it is an Arctic nation “with broad and fundamental interests” in the region.5 Six major issues steer U.S. Arctic [End Page 14] policy, which is focused on securing a region that is “peaceful, stable, and free of conflict”: (1) national security, (2) environmental protection, (3) resource conservation, (4) accommodation of the interests of indigenous populations, (5) scientific research, and (6) international cooperation.6 These interests are pursued along three major lines of effort: (1) advancement of U.S. national security interests, (2) pursuit of environmental protection and resource conservation, and (3) development of stronger bilateral and multilateral cooperation.7 These three pillars of U.S. Arctic policy are likely to persist—and indeed become even more acute—driven both by changes in the region’s natural environment and by increased human activity. National security requirements in the region revolve around preservation of the freedom of navigation and overflight in the Arctic Ocean—specifically, traditional rights and freedoms to engage in commercial trade, conduct scientific research, and operate ships and aircraft of the armed forces in, over, and above the ocean. This approach to maritime security has deep historical roots. Since its inception, the United States has regarded freedom of the seas as a core component of a liberal international order. As a new republic, for example, the United States fought its first war as an independent country against France—the 1798–1800 Quasi-War—to protect freedom of navigation for U.S. merchant ships. During the early 1800s, the country also battled Barbary pirates and went to war with England over this issue. A century later, the United States was drawn into two world wars in large part over the issue of freedom of navigation and Germany’s strategy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Similarly, the Atlantic alliance that connected the United States to its European allies during the Cold War depended on their common interest in freedom of navigation. Thus, it is no mistake to suggest that preserving maritime mobility in the Arctic Ocean is yet another expression of this cardinal tenet of U.S. grand strategy. To ensure freedom of navigation in the Arctic, the United States is on a course to tailor Arctic infrastructure and management, including navigational aids, vessel tracking, ship routing, traffic separation schemes, waterway management regimes, and ports and reception facilities, to the evolving human and commercial activity.8 Space, air, and sea-surface capabilities will be further enhanced as Arctic conditions change.9 [End Page 15] Freedom of navigation on, under, and over the Arctic Ocean promotes national defense, law enforcement, marine environmental response, and search-and-rescue missions.10 Such navigational rights and freedoms rest on a legal framework of customary international law and, in particular, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Although the United...

Women and English piracy, 1540-1720: partners and victims of crime

Piracy was one of the most gendered criminal activities during the early modern period. As a form of maritime enterprise and organized criminality, it attracted thousands of male recruits whose venturing acquired a global dimension as piratical activity spread across the oceans and seas of the world. At the same time, piracy affected the lives of women in varied ways. Adopting a fresh approach to the subject, this study explores the relationships and contacts between women and pirates during a prolonged period of intense and shifting enterprise. Drawing on a wide body of evidence and based on English and Anglo-American patterns of activity, it argues that the support of female receivers and maintainers was vital to the persistence of piracy around the British Isles at least until the early seventeenth century. The emergence of long-distance and globalized predation had far reaching consequences for female agency. Within colonial America, women continued to play a role in networks of support for mixed groups of pirates and sea rovers; at the same time, such groups of predators established contacts with women of varied backgrounds in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. As such, female agency formed part of the economic and social infrastructure which supported maritime enterprise of contested legality. But it co-existed with the victimisation of women by pirates, including the Barbary corsairs. As this study demonstrates, the interplay between agency and victimhood was manifest in a campaign of petitioning which challenged male perceptions of women's status as victims. Against this background, the book also examines the role of a small number of women pirates, including the lives of Mary Read and Ann Bonny, while addressing the broader issue of limited female recruitment into piracy.

The Barbary Pirates

This essay describes the piracy that took place in the Mediterranean from the time of ancient Greece to Barbary. It explains the corso, the sea war between nonstate but state-endorsed Christian and Muslim parties, with reference to the Knights of Malta and, more extensively, the Barbary corsairs. Although the essay focuses primarily on history, it also draws some conclusions about piracy and the international system today. The essay notes a prevailing assumption that contemporary piracy off Somalia and that perpetrated by the Barbary pirates is similar, but it further notes that any similarities are slight and superficial. At the same time, similarities rooted in economic, social, and political change do exist between all outbreaks of depredation at sea and the responses to them.

Joel Barlow: American Diplomat and Nation Builder by Peter P. Hill (review)

Joel Barlow: American Diplomat and Nation Builder. Peter P. Hill. (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012. Pp. 269. Cloth, $34. 95.)If there was ever an American who believed that the early American republic was an era that created opportunities for aspiring men, it was Joel Barlow. Born in Connecticut to modest circumstances in 1754, Bar-low fancied himself an important diplomat, a poet and intellectual shap-ing American cultural life, and a successful businessman-all of this built on the ferment unleashed by the American (and later French) Revolution. Whether Barlow's own assessment of his achievements lined up with reality is another matter. It is that fuzzy line between Barlow's sense of his own greatness, and the fact that he was overshadowed in his own time and in ours by the towering figures of the founding era, that shapes Peter P. Hill's book. The result is a fascinating study based on first-rate research that never takes its subject too seriously.Barlow's greatest claim to fame came in 1795-1797, when he served as a roving diplomat among the Barbary Powers, and in 1811-1812, when he served as minister to France. Those diplomatic ventures had very different outcomes. As American consul to Algiers, Barlow arrived in the midst of chaotic negotiations. By the time he was finished, he had helped orchestrate major treaties with both Algiers and Tripoli. But in France, Barlow was easily outmaneuvered by the Napoleonic regime. His effort to resolve longstanding disputes went nowhere, and his reputation was collapsing when he died in December 1812.These diplomatic ventures were relatively brief excursions in a life marked by constant activity. Barlow published two major works of poetry, Visions of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807), which Hill describes as expressions of patriotic fervor rather than artistic accomplishment. As a businessman, Barlow moved easily from pitchman for land sales in the Northwest Territory to broker for trans-Atlantic trade. During seventeen years in Europe and North Africa, he built numerous business contacts and did sufficiently well to join the time-honored tradition of retiring from business to pursue both literary and political interests.It is Barlow's diplomatic career that consumes most of Hill's attention, and rightly so. While never a major player on the scale of Robert Living-ston, James Monroe, or Charles Pinckney, Barlow nonetheless was at the center of American foreign policy in key moments of its development. Hill is an accomplished historian of American foreign relations, primarily the complex and confusing relationship between the United States and France in the era of the French Revolution. He describes negotiations in both North Africa and in Europe with depth and clarity. That's no small accomplishment, because both diplomatic arenas were filled with secret agendas, conflicting egos, and shifting alliances.Yet the greatest surprises that emerge from Joel Barlow: American Diplomat and Nation Builder are those areas of Barlow's life that were definitively outside his role as diplomat or nation builder. This book rests on a thoughtful, careful examination of Barlow's correspondence, such that Barlow's relationship with his wife, Ruth, and Barlow's private com-mercial interests, come across loud and clear. …

Book Review: Lords of the Sea: A History of the Barbary Corsairs

Book Review: Lords of the Sea: A History of the Barbary Corsairs

Conflicts between Early Modern European States about Rescuing Their Own Subjects from Barbary Captivity

This article is concerned with special cases of the ransoming of Northern European sailors from the so-called Barbary corsairs in the 18th century. Until 1730 these sailors usually were only ransomed when their nationality overlapped with the respective flag of the ship on which they had served. Since the ships' crews in early modern Europe were a largely international workforce, this left a huge group of sailors unprotected from the risk of slavery. This centuries-old practice came to be seen as scandalous in the years from 1730 to 1753 and led to intense diplomatic conflicts between Denmark and Sweden on the one side and Hamburg on the other. These conflicts are presented in detail to highlight a general change of attitudes in Protestant Europe towards the rights of individuals.

The Islamophobic History of the United States

This article offers an history survey of Islamophobic attitudes in the United States. It locates the roots of Islamophobia in colonial views of the Muslim Anti-Christ, early republican fears of the Barbary pirates and Oriental despotism, antebellum fascination with Muslim American slaves, and nineteenth-century fantasies of the Turkish harem. The article also explains how the functions and meanings of Islamophobia have changed during the Cold War and post-Cold War eras, emphasizing the clash of interests that developed between Muslim political groups abroad and U.S. foriegn policy after 9/11.

Identity in Algerian Politics: The Legacy of Colonial Rule * By JONATHAN N. C. HILL

Algeria is a country haunted by history. During Algeria’s civil conflict of the 1990s, commentators, journalists, academics and politicians were quick to cast the former French colony in the role of victim, a nation suffering the revenge of its own bloody history. Over time, violence had encoded itself into the Algerian psyche, inscribed and reinscribed itself into the Algerian polity. For many, it is the endured and learned violence of French colonialism that matters most; for others, it is the crucible of the war of independence. Indeed, according to the most authoritative field-based study produced at the height of the conflict, Algeria has become a country beset by a deeply violent culture inherited from, at least, the heydays of the Barbary pirates and Ottoman rule (Luis Martinez, La guerre civile en Algérie, 1990–1998, Paris: Karthala, 1998). It hypothesized that only a historically informed understanding of the ideational conditions of the conflict (‘un imaginaire de la guerre’) could explain the outbreak of violence in the early 1990s. Such are the clichés, caricatures and rote narratives that now dominate representations of Algeria’s recent and not-so-recent history that James McDougall has criticized (‘Savage Wars? Codes of Violence in Algeria, 1830s–1990s’, Third World Quarterly 26 [2005]: 117–31). To clarify my initial claim, Algeria is not so much haunted by history as it is haunted by historicization.

“Thus I restles rest in Spayne”: Engaging Empire in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Garcilaso de la Vega

“Thus I restles rest in Spayne”: Engaging Empire in the Poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Garcilaso de la Vega Joel B. Davis I The English poet Sir Thomas Wyatt (ca. 1503–42) and his contemporary, the Castilian poet Garcilaso de la Vega (1501?–36), shared so much in common and played such important roles in the development of poetry in their respective languages that the lack of comparative studies of their poetry is surprising. In the article that follows, I compare a few poems of similar themes and dates from each writer to suggest that Wyatt’s poetry is more thoroughly Petrarchan—and more successfully so—than has been generally recognized. Placing Wyatt’s poetry in the context of Charles V’s court and alongside the poetry of Garcilaso reveals that Wyatt’s poems appropriate Petrarchan strategies in a struggle to establish a unified lyric voice and to resist what we might loosely call discursive colonization: for while the flexible, indeed almost protean qualities of Petrarchism invited poets like Wyatt and Garcilaso to experiment in their native languages, the same qualities made Petrarchism an apt vehicle for imagining the imperial ambitions of Charles V. Comparing Wyatt’s poetry to that of Garcilaso de la Vega reveals that a discursive resistance to the imperialism of Charles V’s court is inflected by the difference between the two poets’ relationships to that court—with significant consequences for the development of Petrarchan poetry in the English and Castilian vernaculars. Both Wyatt and Garcilaso flourished in the sixteenth-century revival of Petrarchism, each is credited with introducing Italian Renaissance innovations into his own vernacular literature, and we know that the [End Page 493] two shared common influences in Petrarch, Luigi Alamanni, Baldesare Castiglione, Pietro Bembo, and others. Both men were embroiled in the struggle for supremacy over the Mediterranean basin fought among Charles V, Francis I, and the Ottoman Emperor Suleiman II. Garcilaso had served Charles V against the forces of Suleiman II at the siege of Vienna in 1529; he was wounded in Charles V’s retaking of Tunis from Ottoman forces under the command of Khair ad Din, the feared Barbarossa, in 1535; and he died October 14, 1536 from a head wound suffered at Le Muy, while fighting the forces of Francis I. Wyatt had been a member of Henry VIII’s embassy to France to discuss a league against Charles V in 1526; he was part of another embassy to Pope Clement VII in 1527, just before Charles V’s soldiers sacked Rome; he was Henry VIII’s ambassador to the imperial court from June 1537 through June 1539 and again from December 1539 through May 1540; and he died of exhaustion and a consequent illness as the result of a hard ride from London to Falmouth to meet Charles V’s emissary to England on October 11, 1542. Garcilaso and Wyatt share in common more than hard service to demanding monarchs. Each man’s life and career depended on the constant negotiations, alliances, betrayals, and battles through which Charles V, Francis I, and Suleiman II struggled to control the western Mediterranean. Garcilaso found himself at various times early in his career on both sides of Charles V’s struggle to bring Spain under Hapsburg rule, especially during the revolt of the comuneros in 1521.1 The emperor’s need to control his Spanish aristocracy was intensified by his difficulties in securing shipping lanes in the western Mediterranean against the Barbary corsairs, who were supported by Suleiman II, and in holding onto his possessions in Italy. Charles’s 1535 campaign to retake Tunis, in which Garcilaso was wounded, was likewise part of the [End Page 494] attempt to control the western Mediterranean basin, but by 1535 the stakes were even greater, because the emperor was becoming increasingly dependent on wealth from the New World.2 Much of Garcilaso’s poetry responds to his own role as a soldier in events far beyond his control—beyond even the control of his monarch. Wyatt’s fortunes depended even more on the wider European stage over which he had no control, on the capricious schemes of his relatively weak sovereign, and, worse...

Fighting Pirates: The Pen and the Sword

The seizure by Somali pirates on September 25, 2008, of the Faina, a Ukrainian-flagged vessel transporting 33 Russian tanks and depleted uranium ammunition to Kenya for consignment delivery to the Sudan People's Liberation Army was startling in its audacity and haul. Even more alarming, however, was the November hijacking of the 1,000foot supertanker Sinus Star. The Liberianflagged vessel, owned by Saudi Arabia's Aramco, was carrying more than $100 million in oil to the United States when pirates seized the ship and its 25 crew members some 400 miles out to sea, then motored for the Somali coast and dropped anchor. Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was stunned by the capture, which sent shocks through global energy markets. The seizure of a supertanker was unprecedented, and the daring attack so far from shore suggested the pirates were using the shipping industry's open-access automatic identification system (Ais) to intercept merchant ships. Merchant ships on international voyages are required to transmit AIS locational data, but criminal gangs at sea operating commercial equipment can receive these signals as easily as do naval forces and maritime law enforcement and use it to target ships. Since January, more than 97 ships have been hijacked in the dangerous waters off Somalia and Yemen, and the ransom for some vessels can fetch into the millions of dollars. Maritime piracy is experiencing a renaissance not seen since the period of the Barbary pirates. Instability from maritime piracy in the Gulf of Aden is sending ripples throughout the global supply chain, which is already reeling from the collapse of shipping rates brought on by the worldwide economic slowdown. The Baltic Dry Index, which measures the cost of shipping most commodities other than oil, has plummeted to its lowest level in six years and has fallen 93 percent from its peak in May 2008. Indeed, the surge in piracy is coming at the worst time for the shipping industry. More problematic, the resurgence is occurring along critical sea lanes: 20,000 ships pass through the Gulf of Aden adjacent to the Indian Ocean each year, transporting cargo that includes 12 percent of the worlds daily oil supply. While it is impossible to eradicate maritime piracy completely, the threat can be greatly reduced if we broaden efforts to work with international partners. Significantly reducing criminal acts at sea in an area that stretches the distance from Miami

Flying the black flag: a brief history of piracy

Many peoples throughout history have fought pirates, writes Alfred Bradford in Flying the Black Flag. Some have lost and some have won. We should learn from their experience. From Odysseus-the original pirate of literature and lore-through Blackbeard and the feared pirates of the Spanish Main, his book reveals the strategies and methods pirates used to cheat, lie, kill, and rob their way into the historical record, wreaking terror in their bloody wakes. The story begins with a discussion of Piracy and the Suppression of Piracy in the Ancient World. It details, for example, how the Illyrians used pirate vessels to try to wrest control of the Adriatic Coast from the mighty Romans, as well as how the intrepid Vikings went from pirate raids to the conquest of parts of Western Europe. Moving into the 17th century and to the New World, Bradford depicts the golden age of the pirates. Here are the Spanish Buccaneers and the fabled Caribbean stronghold of Tortuga. Here are Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, and their fearsome counterparts. But piracy was hardly just a Western phenomenon. The Barbary Pirates looks East to examine the struggle between Christian and Muslim in the Mediterranean, while To the Shores of Tripoli details the American conflict with the Barbary Pirates. It reveals the lessons of a war conducted across a great distance against a nebulous enemy, a war in which victory was achieved only by going after the pirates' sponsor. On the South China Coast, we meet the first Dragon Lady, leader of Chinese pirates. As intriguing as these tales of the past are in and of themselves, the stories and their swashbuckling villains hold lessons for us even today. In Conclusions and Reflections, Bradford gathers all of the chords together, discussing the conditions under which piracy arises, the conditions under which pirates organize and become more powerful, and the methods used to suppress piracy. Finally, he examines similarities between pirates and terrorists-and whether the lessons learned from the wars against pirates of the past might also apply to modern day terrorists.

Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777-1827. By David N. Gellman. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xiv, 297 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-3174-9.)

The movement from slavery to freedom in New York has been amply described both in studies of the broader story of slavery's eradication in the northern states as a whole and in works that focus on the particulars of the movement in the state itself. David N. Gellman's approach opens by weaving together (and lavishly crediting) those works to create an understanding of the social, political, and cultural contexts of the movement in the first two decades of the American republic. It is a useful, if perhaps overlong, discussion of the field. Then things get really interesting, for what Gellman adds to this history is a superb exploration of the public discourse that shaped and reflected this lurching political transformation. Gellman's perspective on the slow road taken to end slavery in New York State usefully maps the variety of influences and factors that shaped the public and political debate from independence until the passing of the gradual abolition law in 1799. Surprisingly, those factors include not only virulent racial prejudice, the Jay Treaty, and the debate over compensation for slaveholders but also the ethics of sugar consumption, the behavior of Barbary pirates, the proper uses of public coercion, the inefficiency of debtor imprisonment, the idolization of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and the use of exaggerated slave dialect by white editorialists. Gellman mines newspapers, popular literature, legislative debates, campaign strategies, personal letters, and public speeches to illuminate the conversations in the public sphere that he sees both reflecting and shaping the shifting attitudes of New Yorkers about slavery—shifts that were then duly noted and followed by their legislative representatives. “Ideology as expressed in the public discourse set the agenda through which political officials shaped the law,” he asserts and more than adequately demonstrates (p. 184). On a larger scale, Gellman pinpoints the ways those public conversations about slavery were intrinsic to the work of creating regional and national identities. This book joins with other recent works in demanding that the problem of slavery be seen as central to the creation of the new nation.

Congress and the “YouTube War”

The United States is fighting a kind of in its on Terror, or so says President Bush. He's right. For the first time since the days of the Barbary pirates, America is doing active battle not with a rival nation, but with a non-state actor (al Qaeda) that lacks a geographical home, is motivated by ideology more than territorial ambition, and whose victories are defined in non-military terms. It is an enemy that uses communication technology, public opinion, and the global 24-hour news cycle to wage its battles. It is, in a very real sense, the first YouTube War of the twenty-first century. The rise of al Qaeda is a sign of the era in which we live. With the spread of economic and political liberalization, with the advent of new communication technology, and with the gradual erosion of state power and influence, individuals, organizations, and institutions are enjoying an unprecedented opportunity to affect international events. The rise of the non-state actor stands to become the most resonant characteristic of global affairs at the dawn of the twentyfirst century. Yet the stateless nature of this kind of enemy is not being reflected in America s current anti-terrorism strategy. In fact, the United States is wielding a military approach against its jihadist foes that is straight out of a twentieth-century playbook. President Bush has chosen to wage this different kind of war in Iraq, in a manner reminiscent of the Balkan wars, the conflict in Rwanda, and even the Vietnam a territorial, resource-based conflict between rival ethnic and religious groups competing for the spoils of political power.