Barbary Legend: War, Trade, and Piracy in North Africa, 1415-1830

"Fisher’s book is a wonderful corrective to the prejudice we have about the Barbary Coast pirates. It almost goes too far. It suggests that the West has approached the idea of North African pirates with a prejudiced eye, because they are Islamic. Fisher says: why don’t we look at how the West related to North Africa and particularly the four Barbary states. These were Morocco and the three Ottoman states of North Africa – Algiers, Tunisia and what we would call Libya. I think that people still have that prejudice today. Just look at what’s going on in Somalia. It’s all part of a subconscious racism. These are black Muslims so we don’t romanticise them. In the past slavery was central to Barbary Coast pirates. These pirates were much more considerate than the pirates of the Caribbean who were after loot. The Barbary pirates didn’t kill people because they wanted to sell them. The same tactics are being used today. The pirates want to intimidate people without doing them harm. They want ransom. They relied on shock and awe and the Somali pirates do exactly the same thing. There’s this great statistic that in the 17th century alone about a million Europeans were sold into slavery. But let’s not forget the same was true for North Africa – around the same number were also sold into slavery in southern Europe in places like Granada in Spain. Fisher points out that it’s a two-way street. The West is not blameless. We cheated and we lied as well. We’re not talking about heroes, we’re talking about criminals. Whatever you may like to think – pirates were, and still are today, bad men doing bad things. As to whether the Barbary pirates or the Caribbean pirates were the worst – that depends entirely on what your ideological point of view is."