A Frontier without Archaeology? The Ottoman Maritime Frontier in the Western Mediterranean, 1660–1760

Author(s):  
COLIN HEYWOOD

The North African maritime frontier in the period under review in this chapter presents a paradox. On the one hand, there was a situation in which, to borrow J. S. Bromley's luminous phrase, ‘two societies, two conceptions of justice, collaborated and collided’. Bromley was referring to the contemporary Caribbean world of the late seventeenth-century boucaniers, but, equally, in the western Mediterranean, and on the land frontier of the North African littoral, there was a common maritime culture which shared many traits across the religious divide. In the context of the Ottoman frontier, the discussion suggests that a British archive-based archaeography of the Ottoman North African maritime frontier for the entire period from 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth is a subject which both has something to contribute and deserves to be taken further.

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 602-631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tristan Stein

AbstractBetween the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the security of British navigation in and around the corsair-infested waters of the Mediterranean depended on indented parchment passports—Mediterranean passes. This article recovers the history of the Mediterranean pass and traces the development of the Mediterranean pass system from its origins in England's mid-seventeenth-century treaties with the North African regencies to its role in the emergence of Britain's Mediterranean empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. At its inception, the Mediterranean pass system formed an interstate regulatory regime that mediated between North African and British naval power by providing a means to identify British vessels at sea and to limit the protection of Britain's treaties to them. During the eighteenth century, however, foreign merchants and shipowners, especially from Genoa, sought out the security of British passes by moving to Britain's colonies at Gibraltar and Minorca. The resulting incorporation of foreigners into the British pass system fundamentally altered the nature and significance of the pass and contributed to the development of Britain's imperial presence in the Mediterranean. This article reveals how the growth of British power and the interactions of British consuls and imperial officials with mariners and merchants from around the Mediterranean transformed the pass from a document of identification into an instrument of imperial protection that helped sustain Britain's Mediterranean outposts in the eighteenth century and make possible the dramatic expansion of the British Empire further into that sea at the start of the nineteenth.


Author(s):  
Robert H. Ellison

Prompted by the convulsions of the late eighteenth century and inspired by the expansion of evangelicalism across the North Atlantic world, Protestant Dissenters from the 1790s eagerly subscribed to a millennial vision of a world transformed through missionary activism and religious revival. Voluntary societies proliferated in the early nineteenth century to spread the gospel and transform society at home and overseas. In doing so, they engaged many thousands of converts who felt the call to share their experience of personal conversion with others. Though social respectability and business methods became a notable feature of Victorian Nonconformity, the religious populism of the earlier period did not disappear and religious revival remained a key component of Dissenting experience. The impact of this revitalization was mixed. On the one hand, growth was not sustained in the long term and, to some extent, involvement in interdenominational activity undermined denominational identity; on the other hand, Nonconformists gained a social and political prominence they had not enjoyed since the middle of the seventeenth century and their efforts laid the basis for the twentieth-century explosion of evangelicalism in Africa, Asia, and South America.


1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.


Rural History ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
A. W. Purdue

The agricultural economy of eighteenth-century England exhibited many paradoxes, being in part progressive and even entrepreneurial, yet existing in a legal context which preserved many ancient customs, rights, duties and taxes. Within the one county of Northumberland we find the Culley brothers with their business-like attitudes and innovative and scientific farming methods and, in contrast, antique manorial regimes with courts, fines and heriots, such as prevailed in the manors of Hartleyburn and Bellister. We also find, as throughout England, the ‘contentious tithe’ and what must have been one of the most lucrative examples of tithe-farming, by which one of the North East's leading merchants and its first banker made a considerable part of his fortune out of a lease on this venerable tax from the appropriators, Merton College, Oxford.


2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (S24) ◽  
pp. 93-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rossana Barragán Romano

AbstractLabour relations in the silver mines of Potosí are almost synonymous with the mita, a system of unfree work that lasted from the end of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, behind this continuity there were important changes, but also other forms of work, both free and self-employed. The analysis here is focused on how the “polity” contributed to shape labour relations, especially from the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. This article scrutinizes the labour policies of the Spanish monarchy on the one hand, which favoured certain economic sectors and regions to ensure revenue, and on the other the initiatives both of mine entrepreneurs and workers – unfree, free, and self-employed – who all contributed to changing the system of labour.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 295-341
Author(s):  
Deniz Beyazit

Abstract This article discusses The Met’s unpublished Dalāʾil al-khayrāt—2017.301—(MS New York, TMMA 2017.301), together with a group of comparable manuscripts. The earliest known dated manuscript within the corpus, it introduces several iconographic elements that are new to the Dalāʾil, and which compare with the traditions developing in the Mashriq and the Ottoman world in particular. The article discusses Dalāʾil production in seventeenth-century North Africa and its development in the Ottoman provinces, Tunisia, and/or Algeria. The manuscripts illustrate how an Ottoman visual apparatus—among which the theme of the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina, appearing for the first time in MS New York, TMMA 2017.301—is established for Muhammadan devotion in Maghribī Dalāʾils. The manuscripts belong to the broader historic, social, and artistic contexts of Ottoman North Africa. Our analysis captures the complex dynamics of Ottomanization of the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire, remaining strongly rooted in their local traditions, while engaging with Ottoman visual idioms.


Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Fitts

Chapter 3 documents the emergence, composition, and political interactions of the Catawba Nation through the mid-eighteenth century. Between the Spanish incursions of the 1560s and the establishment of Charles Town in 1670, a group of Catawba Valley Mississippians known as Yssa rose to become the powerful Nation of Esaws that formed the core of the eighteenth-century Catawba Nation. In the late seventeenth century this polity was a destination for European traders as well as American Indian refugees fleeing hostilities associated with the Indian Slave trade and settler territorial expansion. While many of these refugees were from the Catawba River Valley, others—most notably the Charraw—were Piedmont Siouans who fled southward from the North Carolina-Virginia border. The incorporation of refugees had significant implications for Catawba politics and daily life, which are explored in subsequent chapters.


1994 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 127-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hunwick

Murray Last obliquely suggests that [the “Kano Chronicle”] is best regarded as a rather free compilation of local legends and traditions drafted in the mid-seventeenth century by a humorous Muslim rationalist who almost seems to have studied under Levi-Strauss.The danger lies in being carried away by one's own ingenuity.The question of the authorship and date(s) of writing of the so-called “Kano Chronicle” (KC) and hence how historians should evaluate it as a source, have intrigued students of Kano (and wider Hausa) history since the work was first translated into English by H. R. Palmer in 1908. Palmer himself had the following to say:The manuscript is of no great age, and must on internal evidence have been written during the latter part of the decade 1883-1893; but it probably represents some earlier record which has now perished….The authorship is unknown, and it is very difficult to make a guess. On the one hand the general style of the composition is quite unlike the “note” struck by the sons of Dan Hodio [ʿUthmān b. Fūdī, Abdulahi and Muḥammad Bello, and imitated by other Fulani writers. There is almost complete absence of bias or partizanship…. On the other hand, the style of the Arabic is not at all like that usually found in the compositions of Hausa mallams of the present day; there are not nearly enough “classical tags” so to speak, in it…. That the author was thoroughly au fait with the Kano dialect of Hausa is evident from several phrases used in the book, for instance “ba râyi ba” used in a sense peculiar to Kano of “perforce.” The original may perhaps have been written by some stranger from the north who settled in Kano, and collected the stories of former kings handed down by oral tradition.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-158
Author(s):  
Goke Akinboye

The story of Rome’s destruction of the once buoyant maritime city of Carthage in 146 B.C. has been explained by many scholars, generally, in terms of the fear and security threats posed by Carthaginian naval authority and great trade across the Mediterranean. This kind of generalization leaves little room for other intrinsic causes of the destruction and plays down the core policies that characterized Roman imperialism in North Africa during the Republican times.Adopting the political economy approach, this paper, therefore, re-examines from the economic perspective, the principles and dynamics which underlined the international relations of Rome in Africa during the stirring times of the second and third Punic wars with a view to identifying the strong economic motives that led to the eventual annihilation of Carthage. The paper shows that Carthaginian Africa was a region of great economic potential in the western Mediterranean. It reveals that Rome was a typically imperialistic state which employed various divide et impera stratagems to exploit the rich agricultural resources of the region. The paper concludes that the crippling of Carthage was premised not just on the fear or jealousy of Carthage but more importantly on the Roman desire to exploit the North African vast territories, wealth and agricultural resources.


2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Daniel Anadón ◽  
Andrés Giménez ◽  
Eva Graciá ◽  
Irene Pérez ◽  
Marcos Ferrández ◽  
...  

Despite being one of the most charismatic elements of the Mediterranean Basin fauna and its threatened status, the western Mediterranean range of Testudo graeca is at present very poorly known. The present work provides the most detailed geographical and ecological description for the North African clade of T. graeca so far. We gathered 283 occurrence data of T. graeca in North Africa and modelled the distribution by means of presence-only distribution modelling tools. The obtained model was then projected to southern Europe in order to explore whether the environmental characteristics of European populations fall into the predicted niche of the species in North Africa. T. graeca showed a wide environmental range in North Africa. Presence localities ranged from the sea level to 2090 m of altitude and from 116 to 1093 mm of annual precipitation. The presence-only model indicates that distribution in North Africa is mainly related to rainfall, specifically rainfall values in the wettest and coldest quarter of the year. The distribution model showed a range of ca. 1 000 000 km2. The projection of the model to southern Europe showed that the southern Iberian and Balkan Peninsulas, as well as most Mediterranean islands, present climatic conditions within those found in the range of the species in North Africa.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document