The Last Days of Barbary. How Piracy Disappeared from the Mediterranean Sea

While privateering – state-sanctioned piracy – was common practice throughout Europe and beyond, European powers agreed to end the practice with Napoleon’s defeat. Trade needed to flourish, and with time, the continuation of the practice by the Babary Coast’s regencies of Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis and the Sultanate of Morocco came to be seen as barbarism and thievery – to say little of Europe’s outstanding debts to the region’s rulers. What followed was military repression and diplomatic intimidation, but also one of Europe’s first cooperative projects, which would spawn an early forerunner of NATO.

Giving history a human face, De Lange focusses on the lived experience of people of the time and the ideas that drove them, the negotiations and contradictions, the foiled ambitions and unforeseen consequences. He takes readers through bombardments, disastrous naval battles, brittle alliances and the most important colonial invasion of the nineteenth century, when France sacked Algiers with a fleet of a hundred ships, the large majority from other European nations. He demonstrates how the European powers, though encouraged by ideas like civilizing missions or the desire for colonies, were above all driven by one thing: security.