5 - Beyond the Littoral
Treaties, Colonies and Legacies, 1830–1856
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2024
Summary
This chapter takes stock of the many consequences and conflicting legacies of the French invasion of Algiers. It analyses the effects of this climactic event in the fight against Mediterranean piracy. The invasion’s immediate consequences allow us to reflect upon the security goals French actors and their allies had attached to the expedition – and uncovers the long-term impact of those goals. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the two decades following 1830. These were the years in which French expansion commenced and soon posed international problems in Algeria’s environs. Lastly, I discuss how earlier European security efforts against piracy featured at the Congress of Paris that ended the Crimean War (1853–1856), particularly in the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856, which abolished privateering as a legitimate wartime practice. That text finalised the steady delegitimation of North African corsairing and the violent engagement with the Barbary Regencies. It served as a memorial, a recorded legacy of all the preceding negotiation, repression and destruction. It both marks a new era of international law and denotes, in the light of piracy repression, an ending to the old traditions of Mediterranean corsairing.
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- Menacing TidesSecurity, Piracy and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean, pp. 240 - 292Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024