Britain and Barbary, 1589-1689 (review)

Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 is the final installment in a trilogy about Britain and the Islamic world written by Professor Nabil Matar of Florida Institute of Technology. The series also includes Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 and Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. This ambitious project obviously interests historians and students of English literature. But it also has considerable relevance, in my estimation, for the imperial ambitions of the United States in the Mediterranean and Middle East regions today, and I will concentrate my review on this subject with special emphasis on chapters 4 and 5 as well as the author's conclusion regarding what he sees as a British "paradigm shift" in the seventeenth century from negotiation with Islam to domination by an imperial power, a shift also taking place, I fear, in US Middle East policy today.

This book begins with Queen Elizabeth I and her cooperation with the king of Morocco, Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur, who saw in the English defeat of the Spanish Armada and Elizabeth's soaring reputation among her people an opportunity to link his own moves against Spain and the Ottomans with Britain's impressive naval power. In turn, Elizabeth was only too glad to reciprocate in an alliance of mutual interest. And her pet playwright, William Shakespeare, began to feature Moorish figures in his works as noble, if flawed, persons, as in the case of Othello.

Immediately upon Elizabeth's death in 1603, the first "imperial" call for conquering Barbary was voiced in London, ostensibly to head off pirate raiders who not only attacked British shipping in the Mediterranean but moved in English home waters and even raided coastal communities. It should also be noted that this summons to warfare against Barbary coincided with civil war in Morocco and, of course, in England itself under the Stuarts. "It was unfortunate for Charles I," Matar writes, "that his accession to the throne coincided with the spring season of the year when the weather in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic allowed the [Barbary] corsairs to range far and wide . . . [They] threatened British ships in the mouths of the English Channel, the Bristol Channel and the waterways between Ireland and England . . . [and] they endangered all shipping to and freedom to and from the major western ports of England and Wales." Sound familiar? A veritable war on Islamic terrorism early in the reign of a new monarch? While the British policy of cooperation with the Moors found its popular voice in Shakespeare's plays, so the apologia for armed intervention in Barbary would find its stage in the drama of John Dryden and others. To this day, now in resistance to the American-British occupation of Iraq, London's West End continues its brilliant political theatre.

In Matar's chapter 4, "Moors in British Captivity," we encounter those seventeenth-century Barbary corsairs who were "the terrorists of their day," engaged in piracy, enslavement of Europeans, and violence against Christians. The author expands on this idea in note 7. (A good feature of some university press books, if not carried to an extreme—which Matar does not—is room provided for expanded commentary in footnotes.) The expression, "terrorists of their day," comes from Nick Page's Lord Minimus, published by HarperCollins in 2001. Matar continues in note 7 with a citation from Linda Colley's Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (Anchor Books, 2002) in which she draws an analogy between early modern ideas about Barbary corsairs and Western notions of terrorism today. Yet another author cited here by Matar, Janice Thomson, has described Walter Raleigh's activities as "state-sponsored terrorism." I will explain shortly why I find this all so relevant to the current American "war on terror," quite aside from the obvious cyclical nature of the history of Western imperialism, be it British, French, Russian, or American, in the Islamic Arab world.

Chapter 5, "From Tangier to Algiers," takes the reader from...