Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans were abducted by pirates and enslaved in North Africa during the early modern period. This book collects slave narratives from this era, revealing the experiences of Christian pirates, rowers, house slaves, and others. It sheds light on Mediterranean slavery, unfree labor, and the development of the Barbary captivity narrative.

Format: Hardback
Length: 416 pages
Publication date: 01 March 2022
Publisher: Columbia University Press

In the early modern period, a significant number of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Spanning from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only targeted sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also ventured as far as Iceland. A substantial portion of the European captives who eventually returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then known, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives had a profound impact on the development of the modern novel and autobiography, as well as shaping European perceptions of slavery and the Muslim world.

Barbary Captives presents a collection of early modern slave narratives in English translation, offering a unique perspective on the experiences of capture and servitude in North Africa. These accounts, written by men and women across three centuries and in nine different languages, recount the tales of Christian pirates, Christian rowers on Muslim galleys, house slaves in the palaces of rulers, domestic servants, agricultural slaves, renegades, and social climbers in captivity. They depict various forms of liberation, including ransom, escape, or religious conversion.

By bringing together these diverse narratives, Barbary Captives sheds new light on the social history of Mediterranean slavery and piracy, early modern concepts of unfree labor, and the evolution of the Barbary captivity narrative as a literary and historical genre. It provides valuable insights into the lives of individuals who were subjected to the brutalities of captivity and offers a deeper understanding of the complex and multifaceted world of early modern slavery.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780231175241