In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only attacked sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also roved as far as Iceland. A substantial number of the European captives who later returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then called, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives greatly influenced the development of the modern novel and autobiography, and they also shaped European perceptions of slavery as well as of the Muslim world.
Barbary Captives brings together a selection of early modern slave narratives in English translation for the first time. It features accounts written by men and women across three centuries and in nine different languages that recount the experience of capture and servitude in North Africa. These texts tell the stories 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 also depict liberation through ransom, escape, or religious conversion. This book 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.
Mario Klarer is professor of American studies at the University of Innsbruck. He is the editor of Mediterranean Slavery and World Literature: Captivity Genres from Cervantes to Rousseau (2020), among many other books.
Title: Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa
Author:
ISBN: 9780231175258
Binding:
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication Date: 2022-03-01
Number of Pages: 416
Weight: 0.6272 kg
Barbary Captives is a singularly inventive anthology of captivity narratives that charts the experience of Mediterranean captivity and enslavement in the early modern era. These narratives of enslaved Europeans in North Africa provide a remarkably nuanced perspective on religious tensions and political conflicts within Europe and across the Mediterranean region. The experience of captured Europeans enhances our historical knowledge of the experience of Black slavery across the Atlantic. Mario Klarer's anthology traces a wide interdisciplinary and intertextual arc that bridges historical archives with literary genres. Klarer's careful editorial eye opens up a world of scholarly inquiry that was hitherto hidden and obscured. -- Homi K. Bhabha, author of The Location of Culture
The published and manuscript narratives compiled by Europeans seized and enslaved by Muslim corsairs are rich but complex and controversial sources. Mario Klarer has done readers interested in the varieties of early modern captivity a great service by combining and editing examples of this genre from nine different European regions and over a span of three centuries. -- Linda Colley, author of The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World
An important and deeply revealing collection of texts. Shedding light on the rise of the novel, the modern autobiography, and the reception of African American slave narratives, this book maps uncharted territory in literature and history alike. -- Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Barbary Captives is an immensely valuable resource both for the cultural history of Old World slavery represented in the memoirs of Europeans from Iceland to Spain held captive in Muslim lands and for the history of genre, the literary history of the novel and of later narratives of Black slavery with which the memoirs in this collection are intimately entwined. It is a work of global history in granular detail. -- Thomas W. Laqueur, author of Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud