NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT – Corsairs & Captives

I have a new book out. It’s titled Corsairs & Captives: Narratives from the Age of the Barbary Pirates.

Corsairs & Captives is available on Amazon in the US, the UK, and Canada, as well as all the other Amazon locations.

As readers of this blog know, Barbary corsairs swarmed the Mediterranean and the Atlantic for the better part of three hundred years (from the mid sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries), seizing enormous amounts of booty and tens of thousands of captives and hauling them back to North African slave markets and auctioning them off to the highest bidder.

The conflict between these Barbary corsairs and Europe was military, but not just that; religious, but not just that; social and economic, but not just that either. Above all, it was a human conflict, with all the confusion, blurred lines, and inherent messiness of such things, and the narratives it generated were more complicated than simple swashbuckling pirate tales.

Corsairs & Captives presents a collection of these narratives, all based directly on primary-source documents, several of which are translated into English for the first time. They include biographies of four renegade corsair captains (Europeans who converted to Islam and became corsairs), descriptions of sea battles by those who were there, accounts of ransomed captives, the report of a French Trinitarian friar who led a ransoming expedition to Algiers, even the transcript of a trial held by the Canary Islands chapter of the (in)famous Spanish Inquisition.

These narratives bring to life a world much rougher than our own but no less complicated, in which people with the ordinary human fears and aspirations we are familiar with today struggled to endure. It is not the world most people expect when they think of Barbary corsairs. It is more interesting than that.

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For the next few weeks here in this blog, we’re going to take a break from the long running series on captives’ experiences in Algiers, and, instead, I’m going to post excerpts from Corsairs & Captives.