The Barbary Wars, Part 1: Pirates of the Mediterranean

The New Nation
Written By Tom Hand

Americana Corner’s 250th video highlights our country's first foreign war – the Barbary Wars, a defining chapter in our early republic’s emergence on the world stage.

For several centuries, the northern crescent of Africa had been controlled by the Ottoman Empire and consisted of several puppet states including Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli. Each of these Muslim provinces, known collectively as the Barbary States, derived their main revenue from seizing unarmed merchant ships, taking the crews prisoner, and offering to return them for a ransom payment, or, failing that, selling them into slavery. After the American Revolution, as American merchantmen began to ply the waters of the Mediterranean without the protection of the Royal Navy, they suffered the same fate.

Tom Hand, creator and publisher of Americana Corner, discusses how America got drawn into a war with the Barbary States and why it still matters today.  

 

Images courtesy of the British Library, Wikimedia, Naval History and Heritage Command, National Gallery of Art, National Archives, Museum of Fine Arts Boston. 

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