Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (review)

This learned, extensive and detailed book tells the story of almost three centuries (1550-1830) of enslavement and captivity of French nationals in the North African Barbary Coast. During these centuries, about 1 million Europeans were kidnapped or taken to the half-autonomous Ottoman regencies of Barbary—Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoly—and to the Empire of Morocco, held there as slaves or hostages to be ransomed. The number of French captives in Barbary amounted to tens of thousands (the book features a meticulous appendix of slave numbers in Barbary). The kidnapping and enslavement of the French reached its climax during the second half of the seventeenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was mostly an "imaginative" threat to France (131). Nonetheless, the conquest of Algeria in 1830 was excused by the French government at the time as a measure to end "white slavery" (156-157).

This book traces the changing responses of French society and government to the predicament of the French and other Europeans in Barbary, and explores the shifting motivations and rationale for ransoming and freeing the captives/slaves. These changes indicate, according to Weiss, altering understandings within France about who was entitled to be considered French, Christian, and even human. Whereas in the seventeenth century, ransoming and anti-corsairing initiatives were subject primarily to religious considerations and fears (for example, the fear of forced apostasy in Barbary), in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the French Crown adopted a more humanistic approach, which enabled the release not only of Catholics but also of Huguenots and other non-French Europeans. In its turn, the practice of "white slavery" (a category created to distinguish the European slaves in Barbary from sub-Saharan African slaves in the New World) became so atrocious in French eyes that despite its diminishing numerical scale, it could serve the weak monarchical regime of Charles X as a way to gain legitimacy for what was actually an imperialist conquest of Algeria in 1830.

Although Weiss' book is meticulous and important, it is not particularly interdisciplinary. The book indeed deals with many important social and historical issues, but it does not conceptualize them or integrate ideas, methods, and notions in other than a "traditional" manner. The broad issues include state-society relations, church-state relations, and state-building mechanisms and processes (Weiss uses the term "state building" several times throughout the text but hardly explains what she means by it and why certain occurrences and phenomena contributed to it). The book is informative historically but not developed in terms of "the general lesson" that can be drawn from it. Methodologically, it relies largely on presenting and contextualizing "true accounts" of redeemed French slaves, redemptive religious orders' correspondences and documents, and French official archival materials. Because it offers no material in Arabic or Turkish, its picture of corsairing and slavery in Barbary is one-dimensional.

Although Weiss occasionally mentions the equivalent phenomenon of kidnapping and enslaving of Muslims in France's Mediterranean galleys or the ill-treatment of Muslim diplomats and merchants in France, the main focus of the book is the French predicament, suffering, and policy. This approach is legitimate and understandable, but it also carries several shortcomings. An explicit comparison between French accounts and Barbary ones might have provided a more comprehensive understanding of Mediterranean slavery, of which French slavery was just a part. But Weiss' (lack of ) treatment of the Barbary polities risks framing them as "natural objects" rather than as historical subjects. Similarly, Weiss never discusses the "regencies" as political and societal entities—who ruled them and in what manner. Did they encourage or discourage corsairing?

By restricting the viewpoint of the book, Weiss, though critical of the anti-slavery argument as an excuse for the 1830 French occupation of Algeria, reduces Barbary to an amorphous geopolitical entity/region that acted upon France (by kidnapping its nationals) or that France acted upon (even if for...