It has long been recognised that friendship communities are shaped by their environments: ‘the form they take, their salience in people's lives, the extent to which they are permitted to be influential, and the legitimacy and support they provide are all shaped by the constraints and opportunities people experience as a consequence of their specific location within the social and economic formation’. Similarly, the letters friends and family write to one another ‘display the signs of the distinct environments in which they were conceived’. This paper examines the environmental pressures that shaped the social worlds of British expatriates in the early modern Maghreb (roughly modern Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya), using the letters of a small, tight-knit group of English merchants and consuls who lived in Tunis and Tripoli, 1679–1686. In this period, Tunis and Tripoli were autonomous ‘Regencies’ of the Ottoman Empire – nominally ruled from Istanbul, they largely managed their own affairs. Both nations had reasonably small, agrarian economies and small naval fleets and, after former conflicts, had established largely stable diplomatic relations with the English. The following peaceful period fostered the stabilisation and expansion of existing English trading communities, which were shaped by three main environmental factors. Firstly, unlike similar groups of English traders and consuls who lived together in the combined consulate-business headquarters known as ‘English houses’ elsewhere in the Islamic world, English expatriates in the Maghreb were not beholden to any chartered trading company. This meant that, though unencumbered by a distant agenda-setting authority, they were also exposed: unprotected by the risk spreading of a joint-stock investment company or the collective negotiating power of a regulated firm.