Book Review: Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean by Joshua M. White

Abstract

Joshua M. White. Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. ISBN 9781503602526. 376 pages. $65.00 This new study of maritime violence in the early modern Mediterranean provides a timely consideration of the personal, legal, and diplomatic repercussions of piracy from an Ottoman perspective. White’s innovative contribution to the scholarly literature on corsairing and piracy develops from his extensive use of Ottoman sources (court documentation, petitions, letters, reports, decrees, captivity narratives, travel accounts, etc.). His focus, not on the actions of the pirates themselves, but on the Ottoman judicial and administrative response to piracy, creates a narrative that is more nuanced than some earlier studies, which have tended to consider events refracted through an interpretative lens that emphasises a purported clash of civilisations meta-narrative and which sees the motivation of such violence located in holy warfare.1 Instead, White considers the Ottomans as much victims of this naval violence as other Mediterranean communities and peoples. However, he does not narrate the Ottomans as passive, impotent victims of circumstance. Through a study of the juridical ramifications of piracy, he provides a focus on the construction of the eastern Mediterranean as a unified Ottoman …