Snapshot · Empire: World History
Barbary corsairs captured and ransomed over a million Europeans across the Mediterranean and beyond, forming the economic foundation of Algiers.
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At 5:06 · chapter starts 5:00
Anita Anand and William Dalrymple paint a vivid portrait of pre-colonial Algiers: a semi-independent pirate republic within the Ottoman Empire, whose economy rested entirely on raiding, ransom, and the enslavement of Europeans captured from Iceland to Cornwall to Cork. Over a million Europeans were captured by Barbary corsairs, and a third of Algiers' population at any time were enslaved. The beautiful courtyard houses that survive today were built in this world of brutal captivity. Yet the Ottoman system defied simple categorisation — unlike Caribbean plantation slavery, it allowed the talented or the fortunate among the enslaved to rise dramatically, and some formerly-enslaved Europeans ended up running the very city that had captured them, as William recounts from Nandini Das's book 'This Little World'.
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