Abstract
Barbary Captives is an edited anthology of 13 memoirs, all written by Europeans who were captured by corsairs and traded as slaves in North Africa. The accounts that Mario Klarer has chosen are indicative of the extremely controversial early modern phenomenon that is elsewhere often anachronistically referred to as ‘white slavery’, wherein hundreds of thousands of Europeans found themselves in varying forms of enslavement in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. This was often with the express intent of extracting ransom from their families or native countries, and typically justified not by race but rather according to the religious opposition between the Christian and Islamic worlds. This wider phenomenon and these specific forms of written testimony are in many cases very poorly studied. Nonetheless, they remain centrally important to our understanding of how maritime slave economies intersected with the shifting cultural categories of religious and racial affiliation in the Mediterranean world.
The accounts that Klarer has selected cover a huge period of history, extending from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Several are newly printed from manuscript, while the remainder are translated extracts from print sources. Klarer's background as a literary historian makes him an ideal guide. In addition to a robust scholarly apparatus, he offers short prefaces that situate each account relative to other genres of writing. For instance, the eleventh text, Marcus Berg's ‘Description of the Barbaric Slavery in the Kingdom of Fez and Morocco’, is shown to draw from the eighteenth-century Robinsonade, conglomerating the captivity narrative and forms of popular fiction.
As works that are often on the border of testimony and commercial narrative, the veracity of each account is, as Klarer emphasizes, contentious. Nevertheless, each is fully deserving of the kind of close editing and careful attention that it receives here. The fourth account, an autograph manuscript by the Flemish nobleman Emmanuel D’Aranda, is the basis for several seventeenth-century print editions in multiple languages, and Klarer is attentive to how past editors have reshaped the narrative. While this is scholarship with a distinctly literary slant, the accounts are of significant interest to maritime historians: besides adding to the existing corpus of first-hand seafaring accounts, they offer important testimony concerning major slave-trading hubs such as Livorno, Tunis and Algiers, and views of galley slavery from the less represented perspective of enslaved people. In a broader sense, the collection offers important insights into the intersections of commerce, religious difference and ethnicity, which dominated the slave trade in the Mediterranean in parallel to the better-understood transatlantic trade.
One thing that Klarer is right to make clear from the outset is that our understanding of European slave narratives does not happen at the expense of, or in conflict with, existing bodies of knowledge regarding the trade of African enslaved people, predominantly to the Americas. Rather, these trades were closely linked both economically and culturally, and the study of both is mutually enriching. Klarer provides an example of this in his introduction, outlining how the generic form of the European slave account gave rise to novelizations and satires – such as Samuel Sewall's The Selling of Joseph (1700) and Benjamin Franklin's Sidi Mehmet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade (1790) – which rely on an analogy being drawn by readers between the two trades in order to criticize New World slavery. His introduction also offers a brief characterization of each of the anthologized memoirs, and elucidates a few of the specific historical contexts: piracy in the Mediterranean, North African slavery, ransom, female slavery and the place of captivity narratives in world literature. This contextualization is vital, and synthesizes an impressive array of scholarship in many fields and languages, but is rather brief in places, considering the temporal scope of the anthologized texts. For instance, while there are appropriate footnotes glossing terms like ‘Turk’ and ‘Blackamoor’, which carry period-specific senses, it would have been useful to see a longer discussion of how the earlier accounts bear witness to the active process of racialization, which appears differently in those from centuries later.
In a way that reflects the wide reach of Barbary corsairs, the accounts that Klarer has gathered here are sourced from nine regions spread widely across Europe – as local to the Mediterranean as Italy and Spain, and as remote as Iceland and Sweden. Similarly, the Europeans who found themselves in captivity are from a wide range of backgrounds. The first, Balthasar Sturmer (whose 1558 manuscript is likely the earliest extant example of the captivity narrative), was a wheat merchant from Gdańsk who turned to piracy in a Christian crew to pay his debts and was then captured by Ottoman corsairs after a sea battle. The third, Ólafur Egilsson, was an Icelandic Lutheran reverend whose family was among the estimated 400 Icelanders captured during the Tyrkjaránið, a 1627 raid on the regions of Grindavík, Vestmannaeyjar and Austfjörður carried out by cooperating groups of Barbary corsairs (with parallels to similar raids in Madeira in 1617 and Ireland in 1631). The majority of those anthologized here, however, were simply unlucky travellers at sea, and the volume is of importance not only for its examination of the conditions of slavery, but also for its insight into the everyday business that comprised or necessitated sea travel.
Klarer's work will be important to those with an interest in the broad phenomenon of Barbary Coast slavery, and each brief preface is clearly suggestive of areas for further study. The preface to Egilsson's account, for example, may have benefited from a discussion of Jan Janszoon, the Dutch privateer who changed sides depending on who he was robbing but definitively ‘turned Turk’ after his capture in 1618, going on to orchestrate raids. While this would have drawn into focus the permeability of the two ostensible ‘sides’ of the Mediterranean world, this theme already emerges within several of the accounts, particularly that of Hark Olufs in the first half of the eighteenth century. This is therefore less of a criticism and more a testament to how promising this gripping material, finally rendered accessible, really is.