Menacing Tides: Security, Piracy and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean

In his first monograph, Menacing Tides: Security, Piracy and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean, Erik de Lange highlights the crucial role of security within nineteenth-century international relations. He demonstrates how European cooperation against shared threats remade the Mediterranean and unleashed a new form of collaborative imperialism.

European imperial expansionism

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 – 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.