The Barbary Slave Trade

Between 1530 and 1780, North African corsairs enslaved over a million Europeans — and most people today have no idea it happened.

The Corsair Economy

The Barbary states — Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and the Moroccan port of Salé — ran slave-raiding as a core industry. Corsair captains attacked European shipping in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and raided coastal towns from Italy to Ireland to Iceland. A 1631 raid on Baltimore, Ireland carried off the entire village.

Captured Europeans were put to work as galley slaves, laborers, and household servants. Some converted to Islam and rose in the local hierarchy. Women were taken into harems. Conditions for galley slaves were brutal and often fatal.

The Ransom Business

Ransoming captives was a major industry in its own right. Religious orders — the Trinitarians and Mercedarians — specialized in negotiating ransoms and raising funds across Catholic Europe. Families bankrupted themselves to buy back relatives. Governments occasionally arranged mass ransoms.

The corsairs set prices based on the captive’s perceived wealth and status. This created incentives to capture high-value targets and to keep captives alive long enough to be ransomed.

European Responses

European navies launched punitive expeditions against the Barbary states periodically, but the trade persisted for centuries. It didn’t end until France conquered Algiers in 1830. The persistence tells you something: the major powers found it cheaper to pay tribute and ransom individuals than to suppress the corsairs permanently.

In the Novel

Eliza’s backstory is shaped by this trade — she was enslaved, and her experience of bondage drives her hatred of slavery throughout the Baroque Cycle. Jack Shaftoe’s picaresque adventures bring him through this world as well. Stephenson uses the Barbary trade to complicate the era’s moral geography: Europeans who congratulated themselves on their civilization were losing their own people to slave markets, while simultaneously running the Atlantic slave trade in the other direction. Freedom and bondage aren’t abstractions in this novel — they’re lived conditions that shape every character’s choices.