Yoni Appelbaum: The Third Barbary War
[Yoni Appelbaum is a social and cultural historian of the United States. He is a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, and a lecturer in history at Babson College. He previously contributed to TheAtlantic.com under the name Cynic.]
Pundits have, in recent days, sought to explain our latest war by analogy, debating whether Libya most closely resembles Iraq and Afghanistan, Darfur, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, the Ivory Coast, or none of the above. Others have reached back to earlier fights on the shores of Tripoli. In the First and Second Barbary Wars, waged intermittently from 1801 until 1815, we defended our commerce, our citizens, and our national pride. But in the run up to this, our Third Barbary War, the case for intervention was mounted most enthusiastically by Britain and France, and couched in terms of universal human rights. So if we must have a historical analogy, the most appropriate precedent may be the Anglo-Dutch expedition of 1816, when a European armada employed overwhelming firepower to achieve humanitarian aims.
At issue then was piracy by the city states of the Barbary Coast -- Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli -- plundering ships, enslaving their crews and passengers, and extorting tribute in exchange for safe passage. During the long Napoleonic Wars, the British largely subordinated their concerns to strategic considerations, preferring to use the North African ports to resupply their Mediterranean fleet and contain Bonaparte's ambitions. With peace came renewed attention to the free flow of commerce.
Even more important, however, were humanitarian concerns. At the Congress of Vienna, Britain pressed the other powers to bar the trade in slaves but achieved only a commitment in principle to its eventual abolition. Those profiting from slavery mocked the hypocrisy of British concern for African slaves while His Majesty's own subjects languished in involuntary servitude along the Barbary Coast. The taunts stung....
Read entire article at The Atlantic
Pundits have, in recent days, sought to explain our latest war by analogy, debating whether Libya most closely resembles Iraq and Afghanistan, Darfur, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, the Ivory Coast, or none of the above. Others have reached back to earlier fights on the shores of Tripoli. In the First and Second Barbary Wars, waged intermittently from 1801 until 1815, we defended our commerce, our citizens, and our national pride. But in the run up to this, our Third Barbary War, the case for intervention was mounted most enthusiastically by Britain and France, and couched in terms of universal human rights. So if we must have a historical analogy, the most appropriate precedent may be the Anglo-Dutch expedition of 1816, when a European armada employed overwhelming firepower to achieve humanitarian aims.
At issue then was piracy by the city states of the Barbary Coast -- Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli -- plundering ships, enslaving their crews and passengers, and extorting tribute in exchange for safe passage. During the long Napoleonic Wars, the British largely subordinated their concerns to strategic considerations, preferring to use the North African ports to resupply their Mediterranean fleet and contain Bonaparte's ambitions. With peace came renewed attention to the free flow of commerce.
Even more important, however, were humanitarian concerns. At the Congress of Vienna, Britain pressed the other powers to bar the trade in slaves but achieved only a commitment in principle to its eventual abolition. Those profiting from slavery mocked the hypocrisy of British concern for African slaves while His Majesty's own subjects languished in involuntary servitude along the Barbary Coast. The taunts stung....