Download PDF | Erik de Lange - Menacing Tides_ Security, Piracy and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean-Cambridge University Press (2024).
348 Pages
MENACING TIDES
New ideas of security spelled the end of piracy on the Mediterranean Sea during the nineteenth century. As European states ended their military conflicts and privateering wars against one another, they turned their attention to the ‘Barbary pirates’ of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Naval commanders, diplomats, merchant lobbies and activists cooperated for the first time against this shared threat. Together, they installed a new order of security at sea. Drawing on European and Ottoman archival records – from diplomatic correspondence and naval journals to songs, poems and pamphlets – Erik de Lange explores how security was used in the nineteenth century to legitimise the repression of piracy. This repression brought European imperial expansionism and colonial rule to North Africa. By highlighting the crucial role of security within international relations, Menacing Tides demonstrates how European cooperation against shared threats remade the Mediterranean and unleashed a new form of collaborative imperialism.
Erik de Lange is an assistant professor at Utrecht University. He completed his PhD within the ERC-funded research project ‘Securing Europe, Fighting Its Enemies: The Making of a Security Culture in Europe and Beyond, 1815–1914’. In 2022–2024, he was a visiting research fellow at King’s College London.
Introduction
The fight against piracy had brought them to the desert. A group of French sailors had been dragged from a desolate beach along muddy paths to hilltop villages before they reached the open plains south of Algiers. The landscape, one of the men later recounted, appeared ‘burned’ and ‘deserted’. His eyes scanned the horizon for ‘something that could indicate the end of our tribulations’. 1 When he neared the city, he could distinguish a multitude of white sails and French flags in the distance out at sea. Those ships on the horizon were blockading Algiers during a war that would last from June 1827 to July 1830.
The group of Frenchmen looking out on this fleet consisted of two crews who had fallen into enemy hands. They had tried to reinforce and provision the squadron, but their ships had run ashore during a storm. Finding themselves on a beach at night without reserves of clothing, arms or food, they were captured by an Algerine militia, who took them on an exhausting march to the capital. Upon reaching the gates of Algiers and seeing the French fleet in the distance, the prisoners were initially calmed but soon found their illusions of rescue ‘of short duration’. 2 Like so many other captives in previous decades and centuries, the Frenchmen were held in the main prison, or bagno, of Algiers. Yet their imprisonment was unlike any other. One of the eighty-six prisoners, the then twenty-five-year-old Louis Adolphe Bonard, would later tell the story to a journalist over cigars and digestifs in French Cochinchina (presently southern Vietnam), where he was a colonial official.
The preface of this 1863 account noted that Bonard’s captivity ‘had something providential’ in it. His time in the bagno had ‘marked the last instance of barbarity’. 3 Bonard’s group of captives counts among the last European seamen held on the infamous and dreaded ‘Barbary Coast’. The French naval forces he had reckoned on the horizon attacked several weeks later and landed thousands of troops, who managed to take the city by 5 July 1830. This event started a long, troubled history of imperial expansion and colonial rule, marked by warfare, oppression and brutality. Many European contemporaries viewed the French victory in an altogether different light – it represented the end of Mediterranean piracy. Bonard’s captivity appeared ‘providential’ because it represents an ending. His imprisonment symbolised a significant change in the Mediterranean.
Officials repeated this message to French troops in the spring of 1830, before they even departed for Algiers. A hefty work of propaganda by the Ministry of War noted that the impending attack would ‘deliver France and Europe from the triple plague ... of piracy, of the enslavement of prisoners, and of the tributes imposed by a Barbary state on Christian powers’. 4 Ending piracy and its malice featured prominently in the invasion. Likewise, when the white flag of surrender appeared on the battered remnants of Algiers’ fortifications, French officials noted the restoration of ‘security of the Mediterranean’ and that Europe had been ‘avenged of a long humiliation’. 5 Contemporaries considered the events of 1830 part of a longer conflict, a struggle in which France finally managed to deliver ‘Europe’ from an old ‘plague’ that had tormented Christians for centuries – piracy.
The payoff in this fight, the same line of reasoning held, would not be glory or gain alone (though those things certainly mattered) but most of all an Arcadian splendour that had perhaps once existed on Mediterranean waters and would now return: security. This book delves into the entwined history of these two concepts. It discusses how changing notions of security and piracy became related to each other and thereby deeply impacted the nineteenth-century history of the Mediterranean region. Together, they gave form to new divisions of power and helped create a novel political order dominated not by a single hegemon but by the era’s Great Powers working in concert. To make this clear and to better understand how contemporaries utilised these words, we need to historicise ‘security’ and ‘piracy’. What did ‘piracy’ mean at the time when Bonard fell into captivity?
How did ‘security’ inspire his compatriots to mobilise against Algiers? What was the historical significance of French claims to deliver ‘Europe’ of an old ‘plague’? And how did the French invasion relate to a broader European effort to fight pirates and bring security to the Mediterranean Sea? This book answers those questions, showing how discourses and practices of security against piracy related to the creation of a new imperial order in the Mediterranean between 1815 and 1856. In tracing this nineteenth-century history, a clear picture emerges of how the fight against piracy brought Louis Bonard to the plains outside Algiers and how concepts of security, piracy and imperialism intertwined during the nineteenth century in the Mediterranean.
Security in History
With its focus on notions of security and their relation to the fight against piracy, this book is not a purely military history. Naval warfare, imperial interventions and the outlooks of armed forces all feature at different points in the subsequent chapters, but they are not the prime subject matter. Nor is this book primarily a maritime history, concerned with seafaring experiences and life at sea.6 Instead, this is a work of international relations. It particularly focuses on the way in which ideas and discourses have shaped the conduct of international relations in the past. ‘Security’ operates as the central concept in my analysis. The main concerns of this work include how historical actors conceived of security as an idea, used it in their writings and discussions, pondered its implementation and turned conceptions into practice. Security efforts, I argue, shaped international relations at a crucial moment in history, during the first half of the nineteenth century when international systems and global divisions of power dramatically changed.
International involvement with Mediterranean piracy reflected all of these changes. Yet, in order to better grasp the impact of security considerations, one must look at the means by which contemporaries made sense of, were swayed by and, also, turned against the concept. Security must be historicised.7 Plenty of scholarship has been published about security in history, but seldom have these works relied on thorough empirical research. Most works that deal with the concept focus on the present and the recent past. These works generally stress that security emerged as an important principle only after 1945 or perhaps during the interwar years. Security’s links to the changes of the nineteenth century have remained obscure.8 A few scholars have treated security in earlier eras, but they tended to do so by taking a modern definition of security – for instance, the United Nations’ definition of ‘human security’ – and extrapolating it to the past.9 Other conceptual histories of ‘securitas’, ‘security’ and ‘safety’ have tracked the changing meanings and uses of the terms over long periods of time. These works show how security obtained a more secular meaning linked to intra- and inter-state politics by the eighteenth century.10
Though drawing inspiration from such works of conceptual history, Menacing Tides forgoes their extended timeframe and zooms in to focus on the first few decades of the nineteenth century. With a tighter focus on this period we can try to understand how historical actors themselves conceptualised and carried out security, rather than making another attempt to cram their perspectives into the mould of present-day terminology. Examining past engagements with security brings more clarity to the variety of its meanings and uses across culture, time and space. Context matters for making historical sense of security. Or, as a recent publication puts it, to historicise security is to study the term as a historical concept with its own historical trajectory ‘of imbued meaning and political application’. 11
The fight against piracy in the Mediterranean provides a suitable case in which these imbued meanings and political applications can be traced and revealed. In the case of piracy, the meanings and applications of security can be distinguished in three related functions. Firstly, security provided a legitimising discourse, justifying repressive action while simultaneously opening up the possibility of contestation. Secondly, security functioned as a perpetuating logic, setting off courses of action that often had unintended consequences. Thirdly, security worked as an ordering principle that historical actors forcefully imposed. There were, of course, many alterations and alternatives in how historical actors talked about and practiced security. Nevertheless, these three aspects can help explain how security and the fight against piracy created a new imperial order in the Mediterranean.
These three functions leave unanswered the question of why historical actors would invoke security to justify their efforts at this particular time. Revolutionary upheaval, and the great reordering of political concepts that came with it, explains why the early nineteenth century represents a crucial period for studying this topic. The aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars – those transformative years after the defeat of the French Emperor – reordered Europe and reshaped the concept of security. In 1815, as the negotiations and agreements of the Congress of Vienna brought an end to over two decades of global warfare, security truly arose as a crucial concept in international politics. Seeking to neuter the aroused passions of intermittent struggle and limit states’ propensity for war, attendees of the Congress turned to security. They developed plans to foster collective security by creating a continental order of peace, tranquillity and moderation that was to be the counterpoint to the ‘terrors’ of the French Revolution and its subsequent conflicts. Fearing the toppling of hierarchical social order, the outbreak of conflict and the rise of hegemonic despotism on the continent, signees of the Congress of Vienna’s Final Acts entered into alliances, set up international organisations and agreed to further multilateral meetings – all for the professed sake of security.12 This basis had to give the concept its legitimising (if contestable) ring. Actors in subsequent decades continued to reference the Congress of Vienna as a precedent for their actions – especially when they fought against piracy in the Mediterranean. Security on the continent became twinned with the repression of piracy. The year 1815 also marks an important point in the modern history of security in Europe and its Mediterranean environs, but its significance has been somewhat misunderstood. Historians have tended to see the arrangements of Vienna as deeply conservative and retrograde, as foolhardy attempts to return to a pre-Revolutionary past of restored monarchical rule and illiberal oppression. This has, for a time, diverted historical attention away from the novel, innovative aspects of the post-Napoleonic international order, particularly in matters of security.13 Among the most prominent historians of the international relations that radically altered this dominant perception of the period is Matthias Schulz. In his landmark work Normen und Praxis, he has shown how continental peace in 1815, for the first time in history, continued to be the subject of follow-up meetings, negotiations and cooperative practices that had to prevent potential crises.14 Following the Congress of Vienna, he argues, peace became an international project managed through specific forms of mediation and cooperation.15 The string of successive multilateral meetings that came after 1815, exemplified by the Congresses of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), Verona (1822) and Paris (1856), ensured that the newfound international order lasted well into the nineteenth century.16 This international order created at Vienna in 1815 has also been termed the ‘Congress System’ or, when the assembling of international congresses became less regular in the decades after the late 1820s, the ‘Concert of Europe’. Its demise is generally dated around the middle of the century – allegedly due to the rise of bellicose nationalism and a variety of other factors.17 Schulz, backed by the subsequent work of Maartje Abbenhuis and Jennifer Mitzen, has shown that the Congress System and Concert of Europe were not only innovative but also created a durable order of continental security.18 As such, their works extend the argument Paul Schroeder put forth in his landmark The Transformation of European Politics. There, Schroeder emphasised how European diplomatic elites found ‘a way beyond war’ by ‘learning how to conduct international politics differently’. 19 Other authors turn to the period to grasp the emergence of new ideas about politics that transcended the nation state, particularly internationalism. David Armitage and Glenda Sluga have stressed the importance of new conceptions of an ‘international realm of political action and activism’, which became thinkable for the first time at the start of the nineteenth century. The quickening spread of news, increasing knowledge of the wider world, developments in legal thinking and the border-crossing dynamics of revolution made this possible.20 According to Mark Mazower, the accompanying political ideal of internationalism (expressed through agendas or ideologies as diverse as pacifism, the free trade movement, liberal nationalism, Marxian socialism and the push for codified international law) was ‘nothing if not a response to the Concert’ and its ‘deeply conservative sense of mission’. 21 Mazower dusts off the tried-and-tested narratives of the post-Napoleonic international system here, but the division between internationalist aims and the multilateral politics of the Congress System may in fact be less stark than he makes them out to be. This book intends to show how the fight against piracy in the Mediterranean was shaped both by a broader public awareness that maritime raiding ‘transcended the problem-solving capabilities of the nation state’ and by elite decision-making at new international forums.22 Glenda Sluga emphasises the ‘ordering’ of international relations at this unique historical moment when new possibilities for conducting inter-state relations arose, but women, non-state actors and non-European powers were also increasingly marginalised.23 The direct counterpart of this reinvention of diplomacy was the ordering of the seas through the fight against piracy. Likewise, the repression of piracy at times intersected with the rise of humanitarianism – the other development that features so prominently in new histories of the nineteenth century. This ascendant ideology found a basis in new notions of a common humanity and the corresponding development of an international apparatus to protect lives and livelihoods in the name of that newly conceived collective identity.24 International engagement with piracy became infused with novel ideologies and agendas, which indicates how the multilateral frameworks of the Congress System and Concert of Europe were much less backward-looking than some would like to argue. Our focus on security relates to but remains distinct from new studies on internationalism and humanitarianism in the nineteenth century. These emerging agendas and ideologies influenced the international engagement with security, allowed issues to be put on the agenda or made a threat appear particularly menacing, but they cannot fully explain how international cooperation unfolded within the framework of the Congress System. The literature on the period has thus far failed to pay sufficient attention to the means by which perceptions of threat inspired practices of cooperation for the sake of continental security. Dutch historian Beatrice de Graaf first pointed out that sentiments of fear and conceptions of threats were the crux of this nineteenth-century international order. She contends that fear was one of the great unifiers bringing European statesmen together in 1815. Fears of regicide, Napoleonic despotism, military invasion, looting, destruction and occupation animated them.25 De Graaf has accordingly proposed to think of the post-1815 order as a ‘security culture’, shaped by shared engagement with specific threats. In addressing the historical involvement with the fear-inducing figure of the pirate, I embrace this security culture approach. The nineteenth-century security culture, as De Graaf defines it, relies on contemporary concepts and allows space for understanding changes. It thereby furthers the historisation of security. She explains the meaning of the security culture as an open-ended, contested process of community formation on the basis of shared interests and threat perceptions. De Graaf notes that actors in this culture developed a shared idiom of security. They also put that vocabulary to use and created a common set of practices for enacting security.26 Thus security culture functions as a way of bringing historical threats, practices and actors together in a single analytical framework. As such, it is both less expansive and less rigid than alternative analytical concepts like Michel Foucault’s ‘security apparatus’ or the notion of a ‘security regime’. 27 In the case of the fight against piracy, the former would involve drawing connections between matters as diverse as port construction, quarantine regulations and import tariffs, while the latter implies a stability and coherence that international engagement with Mediterranean piracy often lacked. If we look at the nineteenth century through the lens of security culture, the dynamics and regional impact of the campaigns against piracy become apparent. With its emphasis on three factors – threats, practices and actors – this analytical framework shows how the perceived threat of piracy transformed into a matter of international security and how discussions over this threat eventually materialised into action. Historical actors from diverse functions and backgrounds shaped this process as they translated threat perceptions into security practices. Menacing Tides focuses on these actors. It clarifies how they mediated and prioritised piracy as a threat to security.28 It uncovers which interests they deemed to be at stake in fighting piracy. It describes how they proposed, planned and obstructed specific sorts of security practices. It also gauges how contextual factors such as technologies of shipping, means of communication or diplomatic rituals impacted their conduct. Senior statesmen and low-ranking officials, naval commanders and merchant sailors, poets and captain’s wives played a pivotal role as historical actors in the development of security culture in the nineteenth-century. The relevant actors of security were not just foreign policy elites. Entrepreneurs, insurance underwriters, scholars, journalists, artists and activists all took part.29 Security agendas could be set from the ‘bottom up’ as civilians or lower-tier officials prioritised threats and altered practices.30 Hence, I do not seek the main thinkers and shapers of security among philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant or Adam Smith but rather take the many practitioners who acted out security as my subject.31 These practitioners even included the allegedly ‘threatening’ or ‘piratical’ actors themselves, as they contested or collaborated and worked to influence, manipulate or escape particular security practices. Though many discourses and methods of security referenced a ‘European’ interest or precedent, non-European actors offered important contributions at decisive moments. They were not just a threatening nuisance. Pirates managed to co-opt, collaborate with or derail the new security culture as it took shape.32 One must recognise that the security culture and the fight against piracy by no means represented a level playing field. This nineteenth-century way of managing international issues operated with deeply hierarchical and exclusionary practices. European officials operated within a hierarchy that distinguished between Great Powers (Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, Russia and, later, France), second-rank powers (Spain, the Netherlands) and third-rank powers (Hanseatic cities, small principalities). Beyond this ranking lay the allegedly ‘uncivilised’ political entities – the non-European ‘barbaric’ states and ‘savage’ societies – whose invocations of security or perceptions of threat remained wilfully ignored.33 At the edges of the security culture there existed a realm of intimidation, violence and conquest. The lasting peace of the Vienna order was often hard to find beyond the inner circle of the concerting European powers. Concerns over continental security could, as we shall see, play an important role in propelling imperial warfare and expansion outside Europe. Paying attention to the fight against piracy and its impact on the wider Mediterranean reveals how post-Napoleonic peace in Europe and imperial expansion were linked.34 This linkage has received particularly short shrift in the literature. One of the few exceptions is the work of Edward Ingram, who argues that the post-1815 system helped divert European bellicism beyond the continent, to China, India and North Africa.35 In relation to the latter region, this diverted bellicism was not simply warmongering for warmongering’s sake but a consequence of attempts to ward off Mediterranean piracy as a continued threat to security. The fact that historical studies on the Congress System ignore or give scant attention to the international handling of piracy has meant that these links between the system and imperialism are still largely unexplored.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق