Session Abstract

This panel examines some of the varied networks that practiced and depended upon maritime violence in the early modern Mediterranean, including those of corsairs, ransom brokers, and black market human-traffickers. In keeping with the 2013 theme, “Lives, Places, Stories,” the papers in this panel approach questions of subjecthood, legal identity, and the political and economic forces underlying maritime raiding and slave trading using an array of microhistorical case studies focused on different regions of the early modern Mediterranean.  The stories of corsairs and captives help us to understand the challenges of empire and how the divergent interests of center and periphery played out along Mediterranean frontiers. Moreover, examining the practice of and response to maritime violence provides us with a rough barometer for gauging not only the efficacy of administration and the rule of law, but also the extent of inter-confessional and international contact, trade, and diplomacy.

Daniel Hershenzon’s contribution describes ransoming networks in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Western Mediterranean between Spain and North Africa, arguing for their importance in early modern conceptualizations of maritime space. Joshua White’s paper moves in a different direction, exploring the phenomenon of amphibious slave-raiding by pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century and the illegal enslavement of Ottoman subjects by Ottoman pirates; here, the sea could be used to wash away the markers of legal identity and Ottoman subjecthood, making it possible for pirates to present illegally enslaved Ottoman Christians as “enemy infidels” who could be legally enslaved. The ambiguity of subjecthood at sea is taken up in Will Smiley’s paper, which turns on the stories of two Russian-sponsored Ottoman Greek corsair captains taken captive by Ottoman forces in the late eighteenth century and their attempts to win release by asserting their identity as loyal Ottoman subjects rather than traitors in the service of the enemy. Finally, Emrah Safa Gurkan, examines the crucial role of Ottoman corsairing networks in Ottoman politics between center and periphery, a side of their story that has heretofore been overlooked in studies more concerned with fixing their activities in a “clash of civilizations” narrative that sees perpetual holy war in the clashes of Christian and Muslim corsairs in the early modern Mediterranean.