The fight against piracy had brought them to the desert. A group of French sailors had been dragged from a desolate beach along muddy paths to hilltop villages before they reached the open plains south of Algiers. The landscape, one of the men later recounted, appeared ‘burned’ and ‘deserted’. His eyes scanned the horizon for ‘something that could indicate the end of our tribulations’.Footnote ¹ When he neared the city, he could distinguish a multitude of white sails and French flags in the distance out at sea. Those ships on the horizon were blockading Algiers during a war that would last from June 1827 to July 1830.

The group of Frenchmen looking out on this fleet consisted of two crews who had fallen into enemy hands. They had tried to reinforce and provision the squadron, but their ships had run ashore during a storm. Finding themselves on a beach at night without reserves of clothing, arms or food, they were captured by an Algerine militia, who took them on an exhausting march to the capital. Upon reaching the gates of Algiers and seeing the French fleet in the distance, the prisoners were initially calmed but soon found their illusions of rescue ‘of short duration’.Footnote ²

Like so many other captives in previous decades and centuries, the Frenchmen were held in the main prison, or bagno, of Algiers. Yet their imprisonment was unlike any other. One of the eighty-six prisoners, the then twenty-five-year-old Louis Adolphe Bonard, would later tell the story to a journalist over cigars and digestifs in French Cochinchina (presently southern Vietnam), where he was a colonial official. The preface of this 1863 account noted that Bonard’s captivity ‘had something providential’ in it. His time in the bagno had ‘marked the last instance of barbarity’.Footnote ³ Bonard’s group of captives counts among the last European seamen held on the infamous and dreaded ‘Barbary Coast’. The French naval forces he had reckoned on the horizon attacked several weeks later and landed thousands of troops, who managed to take the city by 5 July 1830. This event started a long, troubled history of imperial expansion and colonial rule, marked by warfare, oppression and brutality. Many European contemporaries viewed the French victory in an altogether different light – it represented the end of Mediterranean piracy.

Bonard’s captivity appeared ‘providential’ because it represents an ending. His imprisonment symbolised a significant change in the Mediterranean. Officials repeated this message to French troops in the spring of 1830, before they even departed for Algiers. A hefty work of propaganda by the Ministry of War noted that the impending attack would ‘deliver France and Europe from the triple plague … of piracy, of the enslavement of prisoners, and of the tributes imposed by a Barbary state on Christian powers’.Footnote ⁴ Ending piracy and its malice featured prominently in the invasion. Likewise, when the white flag of surrender appeared on the battered remnants of Algiers’ fortifications, French officials noted the restoration of ‘security of the Mediterranean’ and that Europe had been ‘avenged of a long humiliation’.Footnote ⁵ Contemporaries considered the events of 1830 part of a longer conflict, a struggle in which France finally managed to deliver ‘Europe’ from an old ‘plague’ that had tormented Christians for centuries – piracy. The payoff in this fight, the same line of reasoning held, would not be glory or gain alone (though those things certainly mattered) but most of all an Arcadian splendour that had perhaps once existed on Mediterranean waters and would now return: security.

This book delves into the entwined history of these two concepts. It discusses how changing notions of security and piracy became related to each other and thereby deeply impacted the nineteenth-century history of the Mediterranean region. Together, they gave form to new divisions of power and helped create a novel political order dominated not by a single hegemon but by the era’s Great Powers working in concert. To make this clear and to better understand how contemporaries utilised these words, we need to historicise ‘security’ and ‘piracy’. What did ‘piracy’ mean at the time when Bonard fell into captivity? How did ‘security’ inspire his compatriots to mobilise against Algiers? What was the historical significance of French claims to deliver ‘Europe’ of an old ‘plague’? And how did the French invasion relate to a broader European effort to fight pirates and bring security to the Mediterranean Sea? This book answers those questions, showing how discourses and practices of security against piracy related to the creation of a new imperial order in the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1856. In tracing this nineteenth-century history, a clear picture emerges of how the fight against piracy brought Louis Bonard to the plains outside Algiers and how concepts of security, piracy and imperialism intertwined during the nineteenth century in the Mediterranean.

Security in History

With its focus on notions of security and their relation to the fight against piracy, this book is not a purely military history. Naval warfare, imperial interventions and the outlooks of armed forces all feature at different points in the subsequent chapters, but they are not the prime subject matter. Nor is this book primarily a maritime history, concerned with seafaring experiences and life at sea.Footnote ⁶ Instead, this is a work of international relations. It particularly focuses on the way in which ideas and discourses have shaped the conduct of international relations in the past. ‘Security’ operates as the central concept in my analysis. The main concerns of this work include how historical actors conceived of security as an idea, used it in their writings and discussions, pondered its implementation and turned conceptions into practice. Security efforts, I argue, shaped international relations at a crucial moment in history, during the first half of the nineteenth century when international systems and global divisions of power dramatically changed. International involvement with Mediterranean piracy reflected all of these changes. Yet, in order to better grasp the impact of security considerations, one must look at the means by which contemporaries made sense of, were swayed by and, also, turned against the concept. Security must be historicised.Footnote ⁷

Plenty of scholarship has been published about security in history, but seldom have these works relied on thorough empirical research. Most works that deal with the concept focus on the present and the recent past. These works generally stress that security emerged as an important principle only after 1945 or perhaps during the interwar years. Security’s links to the changes of the nineteenth century have remained obscure.Footnote ⁸ A few scholars have treated security in earlier eras, but they tended to do so by taking a modern definition of security – for instance, the United Nations’ definition of ‘human security’ – and extrapolating it to the past.Footnote ⁹ Other conceptual histories of ‘securitas’, ‘security’ and ‘safety’ have tracked the changing meanings and uses of the terms over long periods of time. These works show how security obtained a more secular meaning linked to intra- and inter-state politics by the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ Though drawing inspiration from such works of conceptual history, Menacing Tides forgoes their extended timeframe and zooms in to focus on the first few decades of the nineteenth century.

With a tighter focus on this period we can try to understand how historical actors themselves conceptualised and carried out security, rather than making another attempt to cram their perspectives into the mould of present-day terminology. Examining past engagements with security brings more clarity to the variety of its meanings and uses across culture, time and space. Context matters for making historical sense of security. Or, as a recent publication puts it, to historicise security is to study the term as a historical concept with its own historical trajectory ‘of imbued meaning and political application’.Footnote ¹¹

The fight against piracy in the Mediterranean provides a suitable case in which these imbued meanings and political applications can be traced and revealed. In the case of piracy, the meanings and applications of security can be distinguished in three related functions. Firstly, security provided a legitimising discourse, justifying repressive action while simultaneously opening up the possibility of contestation. Secondly, security functioned as a perpetuating logic, setting off courses of action that often had unintended consequences. Thirdly, security worked as an ordering principle that historical actors forcefully imposed. There were, of course, many alterations and alternatives in how historical actors talked about and practiced security. Nevertheless, these three aspects can help explain how security and the fight against piracy created a new imperial order in the Mediterranean.

These three functions leave unanswered the question of why historical actors would invoke security to justify their efforts at this particular time. Revolutionary upheaval, and the great reordering of political concepts that came with it, explains why the early nineteenth century represents a crucial period for studying this topic. The aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars – those transformative years after the defeat of the French Emperor – reordered Europe and reshaped the concept of security. In 1815, as the negotiations and agreements of the Congress of Vienna brought an end to over two decades of global warfare, security truly arose as a crucial concept in international politics. Seeking to neuter the aroused passions of intermittent struggle and limit states’ propensity for war, attendees of the Congress turned to security. They developed plans to foster collective security by creating a continental order of peace, tranquillity and moderation that was to be the counterpoint to the ‘terrors’ of the French Revolution and its subsequent conflicts. Fearing the toppling of hierarchical social order, the outbreak of conflict and the rise of hegemonic despotism on the continent, signees of the Congress of Vienna’s Final Acts entered into alliances, set up international organisations and agreed to further multilateral meetings – all for the professed sake of security.Footnote ¹² This basis had to give the concept its legitimising (if contestable) ring. Actors in subsequent decades continued to reference the Congress of Vienna as a precedent for their actions – especially when they fought against piracy in the Mediterranean. Security on the continent became twinned with the repression of piracy.

The year 1815 also marks an important point in the modern history of security in Europe and its Mediterranean environs, but its significance has been somewhat misunderstood. Historians have tended to see the arrangements of Vienna as deeply conservative and retrograde, as foolhardy attempts to return to a pre-Revolutionary past of restored monarchical rule and illiberal oppression. This has, for a time, diverted historical attention away from the novel, innovative aspects of the post-Napoleonic international order, particularly in matters of security.Footnote ¹³

Among the most prominent historians of the international relations that radically altered this dominant perception of the period is Matthias Schulz. In his landmark work Normen und Praxis, he has shown how continental peace in 1815, for the first time in history, continued to be the subject of follow-up meetings, negotiations and cooperative practices that had to prevent potential crises.Footnote ¹⁴ Following the Congress of Vienna, he argues, peace became an international project managed through specific forms of mediation and cooperation.Footnote ¹⁵ The string of successive multilateral meetings that came after 1815, exemplified by the Congresses of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Verona (1822) and Paris (1856), ensured that the newfound international order lasted well into the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁶ This international order created at Vienna in 1815 has also been termed the ‘Congress System’ or, when the assembling of international congresses became less regular in the decades after the late 1820s, the ‘Concert of Europe’. Its demise is generally dated around the middle of the century – allegedly due to the rise of bellicose nationalism and a variety of other factors.Footnote ¹⁷ Schulz, backed by the subsequent work of Maartje Abbenhuis and Jennifer Mitzen, has shown that the Congress System and Concert of Europe were not only innovative but also created a durable order of continental security.Footnote ¹⁸ As such, their works extend the argument Paul Schroeder put forth in his landmark The Transformation of European Politics. There, Schroeder emphasised how European diplomatic elites found ‘a way beyond war’ by ‘learning how to conduct international politics differently’.Footnote ¹⁹

Other authors turn to the period to grasp the emergence of new ideas about politics that transcended the nation state, particularly internationalism. David Armitage and Glenda Sluga have stressed the importance of new conceptions of an ‘international realm of political action and activism’, which became thinkable for the first time at the start of the nineteenth century. The quickening spread of news, increasing knowledge of the wider world, developments in legal thinking and the border-crossing dynamics of revolution made this possible.Footnote ²⁰ According to Mark Mazower, the accompanying political ideal of internationalism (expressed through agendas or ideologies as diverse as pacifism, the free trade movement, liberal nationalism, Marxian socialism and the push for codified international law) was ‘nothing if not a response to the Concert’ and its ‘deeply conservative sense of mission’.Footnote ²¹ Mazower dusts off the tried-and-tested narratives of the post-Napoleonic international system here, but the division between internationalist aims and the multilateral politics of the Congress System may in fact be less stark than he makes them out to be.

This book intends to show how the fight against piracy in the Mediterranean was shaped both by a broader public awareness that maritime raiding ‘transcended the problem-solving capabilities of the nation state’ and by elite decision-making at new international forums.Footnote ²² Glenda Sluga emphasises the ‘ordering’ of international relations at this unique historical moment when new possibilities for conducting inter-state relations arose, but women, non-state actors and non-European powers were also increasingly marginalised.Footnote ²³ The direct counterpart of this reinvention of diplomacy was the ordering of the seas through the fight against piracy. Likewise, the repression of piracy at times intersected with the rise of humanitarianism – the other development that features so prominently in new histories of the nineteenth century. This ascendant ideology found a basis in new notions of a common humanity and the corresponding development of an international apparatus to protect lives and livelihoods in the name of that newly conceived collective identity.Footnote ²⁴ International engagement with piracy became infused with novel ideologies and agendas, which indicates how the multilateral frameworks of the Congress System and Concert of Europe were much less backward-looking than some would like to argue.

Our focus on security relates to but remains distinct from new studies on internationalism and humanitarianism in the nineteenth century. These emerging agendas and ideologies influenced the international engagement with security, allowed issues to be put on the agenda or made a threat appear particularly menacing, but they cannot fully explain how international cooperation unfolded within the framework of the Congress System. The literature on the period has thus far failed to pay sufficient attention to the means by which perceptions of threat inspired practices of cooperation for the sake of continental security. Dutch historian Beatrice de Graaf first pointed out that sentiments of fear and conceptions of threats were the crux of this nineteenth-century international order. She contends that fear was one of the great unifiers bringing European statesmen together in 1815. Fears of regicide, Napoleonic despotism, military invasion, looting, destruction and occupation animated them.Footnote ²⁵ De Graaf has accordingly proposed to think of the post-1815 order as a ‘security culture’, shaped by shared engagement with specific threats.

In addressing the historical involvement with the fear-inducing figure of the pirate, I embrace this security culture approach. The nineteenth-century security culture, as De Graaf defines it, relies on contemporary concepts and allows space for understanding changes. It thereby furthers the historisation of security. She explains the meaning of the security culture as an open-ended, contested process of community formation on the basis of shared interests and threat perceptions. De Graaf notes that actors in this culture developed a shared idiom of security. They also put that vocabulary to use and created a common set of practices for enacting security.Footnote ²⁶ Thus security culture functions as a way of bringing historical threats, practices and actors together in a single analytical framework. As such, it is both less expansive and less rigid than alternative analytical concepts like Michel Foucault’s ‘security apparatus’ or the notion of a ‘security regime’.Footnote ²⁷ In the case of the fight against piracy, the former would involve drawing connections between matters as diverse as port construction, quarantine regulations and import tariffs, while the latter implies a stability and coherence that international engagement with Mediterranean piracy often lacked.

If we look at the nineteenth century through the lens of security culture, the dynamics and regional impact of the campaigns against piracy become apparent. With its emphasis on three factors – threats, practices and actors – this analytical framework shows how the perceived threat of piracy transformed into a matter of international security and how discussions over this threat eventually materialised into action. Historical actors from diverse functions and backgrounds shaped this process as they translated threat perceptions into security practices. Menacing Tides focuses on these actors. It clarifies how they mediated and prioritised piracy as a threat to security.Footnote ²⁸ It uncovers which interests they deemed to be at stake in fighting piracy. It describes how they proposed, planned and obstructed specific sorts of security practices. It also gauges how contextual factors such as technologies of shipping, means of communication or diplomatic rituals impacted their conduct.

Senior statesmen and low-ranking officials, naval commanders and merchant sailors, poets and captain’s wives played a pivotal role as historical actors in the development of security culture in the nineteenth-century. The relevant actors of security were not just foreign policy elites. Entrepreneurs, insurance underwriters, scholars, journalists, artists and activists all took part.Footnote ²⁹ Security agendas could be set from the ‘bottom up’ as civilians or lower-tier officials prioritised threats and altered practices.Footnote ³⁰ Hence, I do not seek the main thinkers and shapers of security among philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant or Adam Smith but rather take the many practitioners who acted out security as my subject.Footnote ³¹ These practitioners even included the allegedly ‘threatening’ or ‘piratical’ actors themselves, as they contested or collaborated and worked to influence, manipulate or escape particular security practices. Though many discourses and methods of security referenced a ‘European’ interest or precedent, non-European actors offered important contributions at decisive moments. They were not just a threatening nuisance. Pirates managed to co-opt, collaborate with or derail the new security culture as it took shape.Footnote ³²

One must recognise that the security culture and the fight against piracy by no means represented a level playing field. This nineteenth-century way of managing international issues operated with deeply hierarchical and exclusionary practices. European officials operated within a hierarchy that distinguished between Great Powers (Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia and, later, France), second-rank powers (Spain, the Netherlands) and third-rank powers (Hanseatic cities, small principalities). Beyond this ranking lay the allegedly ‘uncivilised’ political entities – the non-European ‘barbaric’ states and ‘savage’ societies – whose invocations of security or perceptions of threat remained wilfully ignored.Footnote ³³

At the edges of the security culture there existed a realm of intimidation, violence and conquest. The lasting peace of the Vienna order was often hard to find beyond the inner circle of the concerting European powers. Concerns over continental security could, as we shall see, play an important role in propelling imperial warfare and expansion outside Europe. Paying attention to the fight against piracy and its impact on the wider Mediterranean reveals how post-Napoleonic peace in Europe and imperial expansion were linked.Footnote ³⁴ This linkage has received particularly short shrift in the literature. One of the few exceptions is the work of Edward Ingram, who argues that the post-1815 system helped divert European bellicism beyond the continent, to China, India and North Africa.Footnote ³⁵ In relation to the latter region, this diverted bellicism was not simply warmongering for warmongering’s sake but a consequence of attempts to ward off Mediterranean piracy as a continued threat to security. The fact that historical studies on the Congress System ignore or give scant attention to the international handling of piracy has meant that these links between the system and imperialism are still largely unexplored.Footnote ³⁶

Piracy and Its Repression

The security measures this book delves into concern specific types of maritime raiding that came to be treated as a piratical threat to security after 1815. Mediterranean waters had long been home to a large variety of marauders. There were the modest scavengers – the bands that set out on a single ship with a few arms to prowl the sea for easy prey: ‘minor carnivores’, in the unparalleled words of Ferdinand Braudel. They appeared as ‘humble men with humble ambitions: to capture a fisherman perhaps or rob a granary, kidnap a few harvesters, steal some salt’.Footnote ³⁷ Braudel wrote of them almost as if they were another layer of the Mediterranean’s great continuities, atop the winds, streams and flows of trade. Indeed, by the early nineteenth century merchant captains and local prefects still reported sightings of black flags in the Adriatic, wrote down rumours of fishing boats being taken near Ravenna or recounted run-ins with seaborne thieves near the island of Elba.Footnote ³⁸ These incidents accounted for the clearest cases of piracy, involving blatant theft by outlaw gangs, but these pirates did not become the target of concerted action for the sake of security.

The maritime robbers who made it onto the congress tables and who bore the brunt of multilateral repression often were not pirates in the legal sense at all. The one type of maritime raiding that featured most prominently in the nineteenth-century security culture was what European contemporaries called ‘Barbary piracy’. Hailing from the ‘Barbary Coast’ of North Africa, these ‘pirates’ were a distinct, organised kind of robbers. They formed sizeable fleets capable of crossing great distances and carrying away large numbers of captives. They also had the backing of a sovereign entity. The ‘Barbary pirates’ (a name allegedly adapted from the word ‘Berber’, though the exact etymology is uncertain) held licences to attack enemy shipping in times of war, granted to them by the rulers of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli – the Ottoman vassal states, or regencies, of North Africa.Footnote ³⁹ In essence, these sailors were not outlaw pirates but rather state-sanctioned privateers. The differences could be blurry, but the possession of an official licence ultimately distinguished legal from illegal capture at sea.

In their Mediterranean context, sanctioned raiders were known as ‘corsairs’. They hailed from every coast. Corsairs not only set sail from North Africa but also from Southern France and ports of the Adriatic. The maritime crusades carried out by the Maltese Order of St. John and the Tuscan Order of St. Stephen depended upon privateering too. This was an institutionalised business in all its incarnations. Whether they carried licences issued by the French king or the pasha of Tripoli, corsair captains would drag their seizures into port cities, have them adjudicated by special courts and then sell them as legitimate prizes.Footnote ⁴⁰

Recently, scholars have begun to stress that the distinctions between priva-teering and piracy were not always clear or particularly significant. Piracy and privateering could sometimes be hard to differentiate at sea. Pirates and privateers used the same kind of fast-sailing vessels, chased the same type of easy targets and deployed highly similar tactics during their seizures.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, pirates often went down the road of ‘legal posturing’, providing forged privateering commissions or stressing ties to distant sovereigns that made it seem as if they acted in a sanctioned capacity.Footnote ⁴² It was not uncommon, on the other hand, for licenced privateers to go beyond the limits of their licences to illegally increase their revenues.Footnote ⁴³

The legal distinctions grew murkier in settings where the pirate–privateer terminology traditionally did not exist. Historians of Southeast Asia and the Persian Gulf stress that the distinctions in vocabulary between legal and illegal raiding derived their meanings from a particular European historical experience. Europeans imposed their own definitions of piracy and privateering on non-European societies in tandem with European imperial expansionism.Footnote ⁴⁴ This process applied less to the states of North Africa, which had for centuries been part of a Mediterranean legal tradition that regulated maritime raiding through treaties, commissions, ransoms and prize courts.Footnote ⁴⁵ During the second half of the eighteenth century, this tradition remained very much alive, as nearly all powers on the Mediterranean participated in the practice of corsairing.Footnote ⁴⁶

The situation changed profoundly after 1815. As the European states ended their military conflicts and stopped their privateering wars against each other, the privateers of the Barbary regencies suddenly came to be treated as a piratical threat to security. They featured prominently in this capacity during the multilateral discussions at the Congresses of Vienna (1814–1815), Aix-la-Chapelle (1818) and Paris (1856). They were the topic of a series of ambassadorial conferences in London (1816–1823). They inspired violent action, such as the Anglo–Dutch bombardment (1816) or French invasion (1830) of Algiers.

Within these frameworks, two other types of raiding were also treated as ‘piratical’ threats to collective security: the privateering of Latin American insurgents against the Spanish Empire (1816–1821) and the increase of seaborne robbery during the Greek Revolution (1821–1830).Footnote ⁴⁷ Though it is important to note that these other perceived ‘piratical’ threats shared many similarities, the international treatment of ‘Barbary piracy’ still largely stands apart – if only because it was a much more drawn-out affair. For these reasons, this book focuses primarily on the segment of the sea historians now tend to term the ‘Western Mediterranean’ in order to describe why and how the corsairs of North Africa came to be fought as ‘Barbary pirates’ who threatened the security of Europe. It also aims to clarify how international engagement with piracy in other places, particularly the archipelago of the Aegean, impacted the repression of North African raiding and contributed to a realignment of power relations in the Mediterranean, particularly in its western half but also along its eastern edges.

The fight against all of these maritime raiders, but especially against the corsairs from Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli, represented more than just a legal matter. It was a profoundly political affair with a far-reaching impact. To call into question these sailors’ status as privateers was to call into question the sovereign authorities that had licenced them. If the commissions issued by the rulers of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli did not suffice to make raiding legitimate, then the sovereignty of these North African states became doubtful, dubious and disputable, and their jurisdictions questionable. International diplomatic recognition and the question of legitimate raiding became intertwined. ‘Distinguishing between piracy and privateering’, one author clarifies, ‘ultimately required a political act of choosing to recognise or to question the legitimacy of the polity sponsoring maritime violence’.Footnote ⁴⁸ When the corsairs started being confronted as a pirate threat after 1815, the statehood of the ‘Barbary Regencies’ as largely autonomous Ottoman vassals was thus also cast in a different light.

Claims of fighting piracy and providing security worked to legitimise and delegitimise. On the one hand, such claims had to justify repressive measures. On the other hand, they delegitimised the conduct of North African sovereigns – opening up avenues for punitive actions, the reversal of treaties and even conquest. As the fight against Mediterranean piracy picked up speed, the first three decades of the nineteenth century saw a gradual hollowing out of ‘Barbary’ statehood. The impact of this process was blatant by the middle of the century. In 1815, the three regencies were still commonly treated as sovereign entities. By the 1850s, Algiers had been conquered by France, Tripoli had been brought under direct Ottoman control and Tunis found itself increasingly hemmed in between French colonial expansion and Ottoman dominion.Footnote ⁴⁹

Historians agree that this repressive turn profoundly influenced nineteenth-century political changes in North Africa, but they are less certain about how and why this repressive turn began. Though the vast majority of the works on the North African regencies primarily treat the early modern heyday of corsairing, the publications that do focus on the nineteenth century all stress the importance of post-1815 changes in the international order.Footnote ⁵⁰ The late expert Daniel Panzac noted, ‘It was the return to a peace generally in Europe that meant the failure for the North Africans.’Footnote ⁵¹ He also argued that there was ‘a profound change in the balance of power and in relations between Europe and the Maghreb’.Footnote ⁵² Prominent historians of Algeria and Tunisia, such as Lemnouar Merouche and Khelifa Chater, stress the importance of ‘enlightened’ civilising notions and the accompanying European attempts to ‘pacify the Mediterranean’.Footnote ⁵³ Other authors simply conclude that European ‘attitudes’ and ‘outlooks’ towards Barbary corsairing and the North African states changed completely in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴

What drove those changes was the new peace among the European powers, supported by the frameworks of the Congress System. The changing perception of corsairing as a piratical threat, together with the creation of a security culture in the post-Napoleonic period, effectuated a repressive turn against the regencies of North Africa and, by extension, against other forms of maritime raiding. The fact that North African privateering came to be seen as a threat not only to security at sea but to the new, peaceful international order that the collective of the four (and later five) Great Powers upheld and oversaw was of paramount importance. It was in this sense that ‘attitudes’ and ‘outlooks’ towards corsairing changed. Attending to historical notions of security can clarify why the continental peace of 1815 was ultimately linked to the demise of the North African regencies.

The demise of Barbary corsairing is not only a local history. It simultaneously features in global debates of piracy repression. An historical analysis of security is thus also relevant to the broader literature on piracy. As in the works on North African corsairs, the historical discussion around the increasing repression of piracy often emphasises structural changes. Seeking to clarify why the nineteenth century saw a crackdown on piracy across the globe, authors tend to conjure up large-scale and long-term transitions. Though such structural clarifications have their merits in allowing for a larger historical overview of the subject, attention to the contemporary discourses of security, implemented practices and perceptions of threat could add crucial insight and analytical finesse.

Essentially, most works on piracy repression draw from different aspects of what is now termed the nineteenth century’s ‘global transformation’. Though part of a bigger interdisciplinary discussion, international relations scholars Barry Buzan and George Lawson have defined this transformation as the nineteenth-century shift towards a global international order dominated by ‘the West’ and its ‘mode of power’. They single out four defining characteristics of the transformation: industrialisation and ‘the extension of the market to a global scale’; ‘rational state-formation’; the rise of ideologies ‘bound up with notions of progress’; and the increasing volatility of ‘great power relations’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Long before Buzan and Lawson made their contribution in 2015, each of these factors had already been posited as a driver of piracy’s eradication.

Global networks of trade, the formation of nation states, ideologies of liberalism and geopolitical rivalries have all been offered as explanations as to why piracy came to be repressed over the course of the nineteenth century. Some authors have suggested that the Industrial Revolution brought an increase in oceanic trade, which, thanks to steamships and the telegraph, began to run on an increasingly tight schedule. Defending free trade became an incentive for repressing piracy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Others, especially political scientist Janice Thomson, argue that the fight against piracy should be seen against the backdrop of states claiming a monopoly on violence.Footnote ⁵⁷ Another, particularly salient, line of reasoning maintains that pirates were the most apparent ‘losers’ or victims of attempts to reshape the world’s seas as an ordered realm governed by international law.Footnote ⁵⁸ The literature that links the rise of codified, positivist international law to the nineteenth-century repression of piracy is vast. This reading fits less well the case of maritime raiding in the Mediterranean, as North African corsairing was already subject to juridification and regulation well before 1815.Footnote ⁵⁹ Additionally, actual legal persecution of these ‘pirates’ often proved difficult in practice. The few apprehended raiders from North Africa who will feature in later chapters of this book were rarely ever brought to court.Footnote ⁶⁰

What many of the larger explanations lack is a sense of historical contingency and context – a sense, that is, of lived experience, of the contemporary ideas and sentiments, of the power relations shaping encounters at sea or of the negotiations and contradictions that made up the fight against piracy for the participants who enacted it.Footnote ⁶¹ Legal historians Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford recently made a similar point when they emphasised the ‘ragged edges’ and chaotic consequences of the British navy’s ‘projects of oceanic ordering’.Footnote ⁶² World-spanning visions of global free trade, legitimate statehood, human progress and international law certainly were on the minds of historical actors who wanted to repress piracy on the Mediterranean, but such aspirations do not tell the full story.

The concept that is conspicuously absent from most structural explanations is security. At times it appears in the literature, but it is rarely analysed in greater depth – particularly in a historicised form.Footnote ⁶³ Still, an analysis of security can give us a clearer understanding of what historical actors felt to be at stake in their changing engagement with maritime raiding. What did security encompass in relation to piracy? Was it a matter of protecting ships and coastlines, as modern works on maritime security would lead us to believe?Footnote ⁶⁴ Historical research, with attention to changes over time, indicates that it could mean different things in different situations. As will become clear, security, in our Mediterranean case, could signify matters as diverse as the honour of the national flag, uninterrupted trade, a revived crusade, the abolition of slavery and territorial conquest.

As a threat to security, piracy was perceived and understood within a particular regional and temporal context. Nineteenth-century attempts to eradicate piracy, Benton and Ford contend, ‘were regionally focused and patchy in character’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This book follows upon their assertion. It will show that the fight against ‘Barbary piracy’ possessed a particular dynamic closely linked to the security culture that emerged in post-Napoleonic Europe. The same can be said of the international handling of maritime raiding in the Aegean during the Greek Revolution, although the repression of piracy had different results there. Historians should be weary of bringing different forms of raiding together under unitary labels, whether they are ‘resistance’ against empire or ‘deviancy’ from modern ordering principles.Footnote ⁶⁶ As Benton and Ford argue, it is necessary to be attentive to differences. Only then can we see how the fight against piracy came to have a significant regional impact and reshaped the Mediterranean.

The Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean: Colonial and Safe?

When French officials spoke of re-establishing Mediterranean security in 1830, they imagined a specific kind of regional order. The new, secure Mediterranean would be a sea of undisturbed trade. Its waters would be devoid of warfare; its shores lined by peaceable, industrious polities; and its African hinterlands opened to the spread of ‘civilisation’ or ‘free trade’. This aspiration was not an invention of the summer of 1830, nor was it a figment of the French government’s imagination. Notions of a new Mediterranean order marked by prosperity, tranquillity and legal regularity (all under European domination) infused the changing international engagement with maritime raiding throughout the post-1815 decades. Sometimes such ideas were vaguely referenced, almost as a self-evident byword; in other cases they were put to paper in great detail, but they always hovered around discussions on ‘Barbary piracy’. They were also the product of a decidedly transnational debate involving actors from all over and beyond the European continent. The envisioning of a new, secure order in the Mediterranean was as much a product of international concertation as the repression of piracy itself. The fight against ‘Barbary piracy’ in the Western Mediterranean had an explicitly inter-imperial character.

That a new order took shape in the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century is not a controversial idea. The era has been described as a period in which Mediterranean waters became less dangerous than they had ever been. In his landmark ‘human history’ of the sea, David Abulafia states that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘There was a greater degree of peace and safety than at any time since the heyday of the Roman Empire.’Footnote ⁶⁷ The distinction between ‘safety’ and ‘security’, it should be noted, is generally posited in present-day political sciences as a difference between the status of being free from harm and the process of preventing and protecting.Footnote ⁶⁸ Both definitions, were used rather interchangeably in the early nineteenth century, though historical usage would sometimes resemble the current distinction.

This ‘safe’ Mediterranean of the mid-1800s was a sea transected by the regulated shipping routes of steamship companies, with the times of arrival and departure neatly charted in standardised schedules. The Mediterranean was no longer a theatre of maritime warfare. Grand naval battles, Abulafia writes, were few and far between following the Battle of Navarino in 1827 and the end of the Greek uprising against the Ottoman sultan.Footnote ⁶⁹ Instead, this ‘safe’ Mediterranean was a sea where travellers, with Murray’s guidebooks in hand, could find leisure as they journeyed from port to port and sight to sight.Footnote ⁷⁰

Yet, the Mediterranean was not ‘safe’ for everyone to the same degree. The historical realities of unequal power relations permeated maritime tranquillity, ensuring that security at sea was not unequivocally beneficial to all. The nineteenth century in the Mediterranean was characterised as much by imperial expansion and colonialism as by security and tranquillity. Other authors have therefore argued that the Mediterranean became a ‘colonial sea’ over the course of the century.Footnote ⁷¹ Manuel Borutta and Sakis Gekas have provided a particularly clear elaboration of this argument.Footnote ⁷² According to them, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition (1798–1801) marked the first instance of a century-long history of imperialist encroachment in the region. In its wake came the establishment of direct and indirect British rule over Malta (1802), the Ionian Islands (1815) and Cyprus (1878). The French conquest of Algiers (1830), Spain’s war with Morocco (1859–1860), the European interventions in Syria (1840s–1860s), the establishment of a French protectorate over Tunis (1881) and the British invasion of Egypt (1882) further mark the colonial timeline.Footnote ⁷³ As Borutta and Gekas argue, the string of imperial conquests rendered the nineteenth-century Mediterranean a space of ‘colonial interactions and entanglements’ marked by asymmetries of power.Footnote ⁷⁴ This is not to say that the European powers or Ottoman Empire managed to colonise the sea itself but rather that the Mediterranean came to connect newly colonised territories and functioned as an imperial contact zone. In practice, the colonial reshaping of the sea meant that maritime commercial interests, the deployment of naval force and the potential for unhampered seaborne movement of powerful groups often predominated. It even meant the near complete eradication of unwanted presences, such as the allegedly piratical corsairs of North Africa.

Fighting piracy was an integral part of the creation of this inter-imperial order of security. In the Mediterranean, the repression of piracy became conflated with imperial interventions and wars of conquest. These violent efforts, in turn, significantly altered the political layout of the region. In making this argument, I follow the important work of German historian Julia Angster, who has linked the repression of piracy to an Enlightenment project of bringing order to the seas, which was largely carried out by Great Britain. The Royal Navy, she contends, furthered this ordering project through mapping, scientific endeavours, ethnographic studies, the assertion of property rights and the crackdown on piracy.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, this book will not follow her exclusive emphasis on British actors. No single power could completely dominate affairs, contrary to what is implied in historical notions of a regional ‘Pax Britannica’ or of the Mediterranean as a ‘British lake’. International concertation facilitated the process of change, rather than unilateral sea power or naval hegemony.Footnote ⁷⁶

The fledging security culture facilitated such concertation. The management of shared threats and the development of common security practices helped contain competing imperial agendas. Following the Napoleonic Wars, various powers tried to retain, consolidate or extend empires in the Mediterranean. Whereas British statesmen sought to maintain the post-war status quo and the French monarchy endeavoured to restore France’s pre-Revolutionary regional preponderance, Russian officials tried to solidify their country’s influence in the Black Sea and Balkans while a reformist Ottoman centre gradually turned towards exercising greater control over its North African vassals.Footnote ⁷⁷ Amidst these clashing agendas, smaller powers sought to assert their own positions and commercial interests on Mediterranean waters.Footnote ⁷⁸ This created ample opportunity for violent conflict – as it did between 1789 and 1814.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet warfare over imperial matters among these powers became increasingly rare during the first decades after 1815, both in the Mediterranean and the wider world. Collective security was of crucial importance in averting large-scale conflict, as it pushed actors to manage shared issues and competing interests collectively. This capacity to collaborate, the historian David Todd argues, can help ‘explain the acceleration of European formal and informal expansion after 1815’.Footnote ⁸⁰

In practice, such collaboration meant that piracy repression in the Mediterranean started to take on a much more multilateral shape than it had in previous centuries. Bombardments, diplomatic expeditions, naval demonstrations and treaty arrangements tended to be undertaken in direct cooperation or through more indirect forms of concertation, like ambassadorial correspondences. The nineteenth-century fight against piracy thus functioned on a basis of shifting combinations of powers participating in a common security effort. Accordingly, the novel maritime order this fight helped create was one of inter-imperial domination marked by hierarchy as much as by collaboration. Contemporaries reshaped the Mediterranean as an imperial ‘contact zone’, which was ultimately subjected to concerted interventions and negotiated expansion.Footnote ⁸¹

With its attention to the shifting international involvement in the region, this book provides a history set not only in the Mediterranean but also problematises that geographical term. In a series of almost paradigmatic publications, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have stressed the need to distinguish between histories in and of the Mediterranean. The latter concerns studies that inquire into the history of the Mediterranean as a geographical whole, both in the sense of ‘indispensable frameworks’ of clarification and as a historically constructed idea.Footnote ⁸² Various historians now assert that the idea of the Mediterranean as a broader ‘region’ only emerged in the nineteenth century, as European powers were establishing their commercial and military dominance.Footnote ⁸³ Security and the repression of piracy were integral to this developing idea and therefore provide a history of the Mediterranean. As they discussed the threat of piracy, statesmen at congresses and civic activists helped foster the notion of the Mediterranean as a region that could be made secure through concerted practices. Accordingly, they shaped conceptions of a regional whole, even if they were located far from the Mediterranean’s shores and had never ventured on its waters.

At the same time, this book contains a fair share of history in the Mediterranean. This other variety, according to Horden and Purcell, signifies histories that simply (or incidentally) take place in the Mediterranean, without that conceptualisation necessarily influencing the subject matter under study.Footnote ⁸⁴ Throughout these pages, the many stories of individuals who set out to sea to enforce, contest or escape measures of security form such a history. This work thus finds many people in transit in the Mediterranean, as they carried out their maritime labours or were commissioned for special missions. Among many other historical actors, we will encounter awkwardly cooperating French and British admirals, captured Dutch sailors, quarantined Ottoman envoys, a sojourning Princess of Wales and an ingenious crew of Tripolitan corsairs, who together allow us to trace the twists, turns and trajectories of security at sea.

Sources, Tides and the Structure of the Book

In order to grasp nineteenth-century dynamics of security and follow the itineraries of the different actors who shaped these dynamics, this work draws from a range of dispersed and often unused sources. The book’s emphasis on the relations between threat perceptions, notions of security and implemented practices has necessitated a plurality of materials. Diplomatic correspondences centrally feature here. State archives in London, Paris, Nantes, Vienna, The Hague, Washington and, to a lesser extent, Berlin have been primary sources for official information. These pages also include a small sampling of findings from the Ottoman imperial archives in Istanbul to nuance and alternate the narrative’s predominantly European perspective.Footnote ⁸⁵

Other, non-diplomatic texts complete the selected basis of source material. Providing contrast to official diplomatic writings are the naval journals and travel accounts penned down on decks, the songs and poems sung at tavern tables or recited at solemn memorials, and a string of sometimes vicious pamphlets. Nevertheless, this work lacks materials from the archives of the purportedly piratical entities of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli due to practical and linguistic reasons as well as the historic fact that much material that could potentially have been of use was destroyed by colonial armies and administrators.Footnote ⁸⁶ In addition, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian sources lie outside the scope of this study.

Though this work is set up chronologically it by no means follows a strictly linear path. The dynamics of security and the fight against piracy were more like the flowing of tides: They would rise and recede.Footnote ⁸⁷ Chapters 1–3 concern the stops and starts with which the post-Napoleonic repression of ‘Barbary piracy’ began. Opening with the Congress of Vienna, Chapter 1 discusses the manner in which the North African corsairs were first raised as a threat to collective security. It analyses how ‘Barbary piracy’ became prioritised as a security threat by various non-state activists, much to the dismay of several Great Power statesmen, and clarifies why that perception of threat was a significant break from the early modern past.

Chapter 2 takes to the seaboard, explaining how North African corsairing and its mounting repression functioned. It discusses the Anglo–Dutch bombardment of Algiers in 1816. How was the emerging threat perception turned into violent practice? This chapter shows that historical actors struggled to find ways in which to operationalise and legitimise concerted, violent action. It also indicates that the bombardment of 1816 marked a significant change in diplomatic relations between the European and North African powers.Footnote ⁸⁸

Though asymmetries of power were taking shape, Chapter 3 makes clear that the fight against ‘Barbary piracy’ was not without fierce opposition. It foregrounds how North African actors coped with the new politics of security. The focus lies on the years 1816–1824 when European efforts at concertation led to a series of ambassadorial conferences in London and the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle. The diplomatic and punitive measures European statesmen decided upon at these meetings, however, met opposition on the ground – not just in North Africa but also in the Aegean waters that became a hotbed of new piratical activity.

The latter part of the book looks at the consequences of these security efforts. Chapter 4 links the French invasion of Algiers to collective security.Footnote ⁸⁹ It shows how the threat perception of ‘Barbary piracy’ (as well as the repression of Greek pirates) played a pivotal, if nearly completely overlooked, role in the coming of the invasion. At this point it started to become apparent that the fight against piracy had gone hand-in-hand with a gradual hollowing out of North African statehood. The French invasion brought home the consequences of this development.

Finally, Chapter 5 concerns the aftermath of the 1830 invasion, scrutinising its short-, medium- and long-term consequences over two decades, both in Europe and North Africa. What did talk of a ‘secure’ Mediterranean really signify after 1830? How did lasting occupation and colonisation fit within this history of international security? Colonisation and imperial expansion had a deep impact on international engagement with maritime raiding. Piracy did not completely disappear from the Mediterranean, but the old practice of North African corsairing was effectively destroyed in the decades following 1830. To conclude, the chapter looks at the Declaration Respecting Maritime Law issued by the Congress of Paris in 1856 as a cap on this destruction. The treaty, which has been described as the ‘Magna Carta’ of the laws of naval warfare, maintained that privateering ‘is, and remains, abolished’. It serves as an end to the wilful blurring of legal categories that inspired the repressive turn against maritime raiding in the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁹⁰ The declaration may have been an innovation of international law, but, as the following chapters will clarify, four decades of repression, violence and imperial expansion lay submerged beneath its matter-of-fact phrasing.