"The Sons of New-England": Barbary Captivity and the Transatlantic Production of Anglo-American Identities

This essay proposes a fresh approach to New English accounts of Barbary captivity—one that considers how captivity and enslavement in North Africa influenced peripheral subjects' sense of Englishness during the construction of a "new" England in North America. Juxtaposing narratives of New English former captives with those written by their metropolitan counterparts, the article argues that Barbary captivity catalyzed the estrangement between the colony and the metropole as early as the seventeenth century. The article analyzes Barbary captivity narratives within a metropole-colony-North Africa triangulation rather than employing binary oppositional models based on Edward Said's theory in his discussion of Orientalist discourse. This triangular model reveals that, rather than engaging in an identity formation defined against North African Muslims, Anglo-Americans began questioning the consequences of their creolization when faced with the threat of Barbary captivity. In other words, the metropole's indifference to its peripheral subjects' sufferings as captives in North Africa fomented the process of a "new" English identity formation. This process subverted the metropolitan perception of the colonists as less White, less Christian, and ultimately less English.