The French Revolutionary Wars and Slavery in the Mediterranean Frontier of Ottoman Tunis

During the French Revolutionary Wars, the Ottoman regencies of North Africa profited greatly from Europe’s preoccupation with these wars and increasingly turned to razzias, raids on coastal villages along the southern Mediterranean shores. From the late 1700s until 1816, Tunis  alone increased its share of corsairs to levels averaging only that of the golden age of the campaigns in the seventeenth century. Acting on agreement reached at the Congress of Vienna to stop the disruptions caused by the razzias, Great Britain dispatched Admiral Viscount Exmouth, armed with a military fleet, to release Christian captives from slavery. After releasing nearly 3000 slaves from Tunis and Algiers, Exmouth boasted in a letter to Lord Burthurst, the Colonial Secretary, and declared: “Thank God they are over, and the empty dungeons (called barracks by them) when looked into are shocking to humanity.” He went on to boast that with the treaty signed with Mahmud Bey, “the system of slavery will no longer . . . persist in the Regency.”

As this paper will demonstrates, while the actions undertaken by the European powers after the Congress of Vienna marked a coup de grace for slave raiding along the Mediterranean shores and an official beginning of the end of Christian slavery, to the contrary, this period, particularly the period at the beginning of the 1830s ushered a new period of growth for the caravan slave trade from the African interior. Until 1841, the aggressive maritime commerce that sprang from the new European dominated economy of the Regency largely facilitated the resurgence of the unprecedented traffic of African slaves across the Mediterranean to the Levant. This slave traffic, although clandestine until it was discovered at the beginning of the 1840s, had a corresponding effect on the revival of the slave trade from the African interior.