"Barbary Pirates" : Politics, Faith, and Violence on the Mediterranean

Americans have always had a fascination with what we are told was our first foreign war, the action against the “Barbary Pirates.” We all know “From the Halls of Montezuma, to the Shores of Tripoli,” but just who were we fighting? This presentation will place these people in the long history of seaborne violence on the Mediterranean Sea. We’ll explore how politics and religion made theft, murder, and enslavement on fast ships an act of statecraft, and learn who benefitted from the continued existence of the Corsairs for over three centuries. We may even question whether they were pirates at all.