The Barbary Corsairs

<p>Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the North African privateers who, until their demise in the nineteenth century, were a source of great pride and wealth in their home ports, where they sold the people and goods they’d seized from Christian European ships and coastal towns. Nominally, these corsairs were from Algiers, Tunis or Tripoli, outreaches of the Ottoman empire, or Salé in neighbouring Morocco, but often their Turkish or Arabic names concealed their European birth. Murad Reis the Younger, for example, who sacked Baltimore in 1631, was the Dutchman Jan Janszoon who also had a base on Lundy in the Bristol Channel. While the European crowns negotiated treaties to try to manage relations with the corsairs, they commonly viewed these sailors as pirates who were barely tolerated and, as soon as France, Britain, Spain and later America developed enough sea power, their ships and bases were destroyed. </p><p>With</p><p>Joanna Nolan Research Associate at SOAS, University of London</p><p>Claire Norton Former Associate Professor of History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham</p><p>And Michael Talbot Associate Professor in the History of the Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East at the University of Greenwich</p><p>Producer: Simon Tillotson </p><p>Reading list:</p><p>Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)</p><p>Peter Earle, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970) </p><p>Des Ekin, The Stolen Village: Baltimore and the Barbary Pirates (O’Brien Press, 2008)</p><p>Jacques Heers, The Barbary Corsairs: Warfare in the Mediterranean, 1450-1580 (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018)</p><p>Colin Heywood, The Ottoman World: The Mediterranean and North Africa, 1660-1760 (Routledge, 2019)</p><p>Alan Jamieson, Lords of the Sea: A History of the Barbary Corsairs (Reaktion Books, 2013)</p><p>Julie Kalman, The Kings of Algiers: How Two Jewish Families Shaped the Mediterranean World during the Napoleonic Wars a