Barbary’s slow death: European attempts to eradicate North African piracy in the early nineteenth century

ABSTRACT In many works on the late Barbary period, Stephen Decatur’s 1815 attack and Lord Exmouth's 1816 bombardment on Algiers are frequently seen as the end of the Barbary corsairs. This article challenges that idea by examining the 15-year period from Napoleon’s Hundred Days through French colonisation when Western powers repeatedly attacked the Barbary States. Despite the attention received by Decatur or Exmouth's attacks, neither eliminated the corsairs nor did any attack that followed. The end of the Napoleonic wars changed European power relations making the Barbary corsairs intolerable; Britain’s responsibility for and protection of small Italian states (the bulk of the corsairs prey) continued after the war. Britain’s new position as ‘protector’ of the Mediterranean and the Congress of Vienna’s denouncement of piracy eliminated European tolerance for the corsairs as demonstrated by the 10 different attacks on Barbary between 1815 and 1830. Post-war instability and repeated environmental crises across North Africa also weakened the Barbary States. Corsairs endured beyond Exmouth’s bombardment, and piracy lasted in North Africa beyond French invasion of Algiers. Changes in European power relations eliminated the corsair institution through the colonisation of Barbary, not isolated attacks on its ports.