Abstract

The North African maritime frontier in the period under review in this chapter presents a paradox. On the one hand, there was a situation in which, to borrow J. S. Bromley's luminous phrase, ‘two societies, two conceptions of justice, collaborated and collided’. Bromley was referring to the contemporary Caribbean world of the late seventeenth-century boucaniers, but, equally, in the western Mediterranean, and on the land frontier of the North African littoral, there was a common maritime culture which shared many traits across the religious divide. In the context of the Ottoman frontier, the discussion suggests that a British archive-based archaeography of the Ottoman North African maritime frontier for the entire period from 1660 to the end of the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth is a subject which both has something to contribute and deserves to be taken further.