‘Notoriously and Publicly Known to the Stock Exchange’: Private Initiatives in Early Modern Amsterdam to Ransom and Repatriate Barbary Captives

TY - CHAP

T1 - ‘Notoriously and Publicly Known to the Stock Exchange’

T2 - Private Initiatives in Early Modern Amsterdam to Ransom and Repatriate Barbary Captives

AU - de Boer, Tessa

AU - Reinders, Jirsi

PY - 2023/12/17

Y1 - 2023/12/17

N2 - In the early modern period, thousands of so-called christenslaven or ‘Christian slaves’ were held captive and performed forced labor in port cities on the so-called Barbary (North African) Coast. These captives generally consisted of European sailors whose ships had been taken by Barbary corsairs. One of the key dissimilarities to the more socially and historiographically prominent Transatlantic slave trade was the opportunity and above all desire of European institutions to ransom and repatriate the victims in Barbary captivity. Who was subsequently responsible for organizing this process—raising and allocating the funds, executing the ransom transactions on-site, arranging the physical repatriation of the ransomed captives across Europe—tended to vary. Previous studies on the subject have centralized the role played by stately authorities and Catholic religious congregations. This chapter will study the case of the Dutch Republic, where the central state did not normally consider the ransom and repatriation of its subjects to be its responsibility, and where the Protestant organized religion could not muster sufficient transnational resources similar to its Catholic counterpart. In this context, private initiatives played a much larger role. We demonstrate that in the Dutch Republic merchants, shipowners and specialized brokers were key players in organizing the ransom and repatriation of christenslaven. We argue that the capital in ‘private’ (as opposed to state-funded) ransoms was allocated differently, and that the choice of which captive to ransom and repatriate was based on labor relations instead of subjecthood. In all, by uncovering new primary source material, we reconstruct the cooperative and transnational strategies within these private initiatives in moving christenslaven across the Mediterranean and ultimately, back to the Dutch Republic.

AB - In the early modern period, thousands of so-called christenslaven or ‘Christian slaves’ were held captive and performed forced labor in port cities on the so-called Barbary (North African) Coast. These captives generally consisted of European sailors whose ships had been taken by Barbary corsairs. One of the key dissimilarities to the more socially and historiographically prominent Transatlantic slave trade was the opportunity and above all desire of European institutions to ransom and repatriate the victims in Barbary captivity. Who was subsequently responsible for organizing this process—raising and allocating the funds, executing the ransom transactions on-site, arranging the physical repatriation of the ransomed captives across Europe—tended to vary. Previous studies on the subject have centralized the role played by stately authorities and Catholic religious congregations. This chapter will study the case of the Dutch Republic, where the central state did not normally consider the ransom and repatriation of its subjects to be its responsibility, and where the Protestant organized religion could not muster sufficient transnational resources similar to its Catholic counterpart. In this context, private initiatives played a much larger role. We demonstrate that in the Dutch Republic merchants, shipowners and specialized brokers were key players in organizing the ransom and repatriation of christenslaven. We argue that the capital in ‘private’ (as opposed to state-funded) ransoms was allocated differently, and that the choice of which captive to ransom and repatriate was based on labor relations instead of subjecthood. In all, by uncovering new primary source material, we reconstruct the cooperative and transnational strategies within these private initiatives in moving christenslaven across the Mediterranean and ultimately, back to the Dutch Republic.

KW - Migration

KW - Barbary coast

KW - Slavery

KW - Notarial Archives

KW - Amsterdam

KW - Detention

KW - Ransoming

KW - Maritime history

UR - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-41889-1_4

M3 - Chapter

SN - 978-3-031-41888-4

T3 - Palgrave Studies in Migration History

SP - 71

EP - 96

BT - Managing Mobility in Early Modern Europe and its Empires

A2 - Tikka, Katja

A2 - Uusitalo, Lauri

A2 - Wyżga, Mateusz

PB - Springer Nature

ER -