The limits of cosmopolitanism

The Ottoman Regencies of North Africa were key components in a number of important commercial zones in the Mediterranean and beyond. Much of the scholarship on the so-called Barbary States has considered their role as perpetrators of maritime violence and slavery. Such Eurocentric and Orientalist tropes are thankfully on the way out, and this chapter seeks to consider one of those North African states, Algiers, as a site of commercial cosmopolitanism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. War certainly featured in Algiers’s approach to commerce, however not through some reductionist idea of Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb. Rather, Algiers was defined as Dar al-Jihad, the abode of holy war, where very specific legal measures were put in place ensure that Algerian warship could go after the enemy, but to also enable the continuation of peaceful commerce with friendly states. The treaties between Algiers and states like Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided this legal framework, with rather intrusive measures like permitting Algerian ships to search friendly ships for weapon and enemy cargo, but at the same time guaranteeing the right to free passage and trade. There was therefore a multi-layered legal aspect to the Algerian approach to trade: an acknowledgement of Ottoman sovereignty and capitulatory practices; a system of treaties and legal decrees designed to facilitate trade; and regular correspondence between Algiers and London or Paris aimed at resolving disputes. However, as this chapter argues, as the eighteenth century wore on, the Europeans adhered less and less to these legal and customary practices, constantly challenging and indeed ignoring the Algerian legal systems when it did not suit their national interest. This was particularly evident when Algerian subjects had commercial disputes with the French or the British in Europe itself. Using documents from the French, British, Ottoman, and Algerian archives, this chapter aims to trace the journey of the erosion of commercial cosmopolitanism in the Western Mediterranean, thinking about how the articles of Algerian treaties aimed at facilitating peaceful commerce were gradually overshadowed by the actions of the various waves of ‘Northern Invasion’ into the Mediterranean.