Barbary pirates, British slaves, and the early modern Atlantic world, 1570–1800

This dissertation considers the enslavement of Britons in the Barbary States between 1570 and 1800. It re-evaluates the demographics of the problem, concluding that more than 26,000 were enslaved and that few of those were redeemed. Contemporaries cared about the abduction of their countrymen, understood it as slavery, and did not see slavery as a racially delineated condition. This project also considers the changing nature of the British response to Barbary slavery, how the problem was written about at home, and how it affected Atlantic-wide ideas of race, slavery, freedom, commerce, empire, and what it meant to be British. It uses a range of printed and manuscript sources including novels, poems, plays, consular reports, state papers, admiralty records, account books, parish records, local government records, charity records, captives\u27 letters and petitions, and captivity narratives—including one rarely studied manuscript account of a slave\u27s experiences in Tripoli. Barbary slavery was intimately connected to British commercial and imperial expansion. Ineffectual efforts to help those enslaved before 1660 reflect the struggle to conceptualize and popularize ideas of a commercial British empire. After 1660, Barbary slavery was accepted as a problem of empire and empire as benefitting all, prompting a more effective, national response. It was also understood by officials as an opportunity to police imperial regulations and control the commercial behavior of Britons: only those acting as good imperial subjects were able to claim British liberty. As British colonists experimented with slavery in the Atlantic plantations, so too did British merchants in North Africa, where some profited from the trade in Britons\u27 bodies. Concern about \u27renegados\u27 demonstrates the deep anxiety about taint from Mediterranean commercial practices. After 1700, Britain\u27s own imperial needs and slave-holding practices affected the ways in which Barbary slavery was conceived and Barbary slaves were treated. American authors in the early republic inherited and adapted these imperial strategies in their texts on Barbary. It was only with the era of Atlantic abolition that all white slavery was outlawed by the British state. The first British empire was never quite maritime, commercial and free and Britons could indeed be slaves