The History Of The Long Captivity And Adventures Of Thomas Pellow In South Barbary

In the early modern period, hundreds of thousands of Europeans, both male and female, were abducted by pirates, sold on the slave market, and enslaved in North Africa. Between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, pirates from Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco not only attacked sailors and merchants in the Mediterranean but also roved as far as Iceland. A substantial number of the European captives who later returned home from the Barbary Coast, as maritime North Africa was then called, wrote and published accounts of their experiences. These popular narratives greatly influenced the development of the modern novel and autobiography, and they also shaped European perceptions of slavery as well as of the Muslim world. Barbary Captives brings together a selection of early modern slave narratives in English translation for the first time. It features accounts written by men and women across three centuries and in nine different languages that recount the experience of capture and servitude in North Africa. These texts tell the stories of Christian pirates, Christian rowers on Muslim galleys, house slaves in the palaces of rulers, domestic servants, agricultural slaves, renegades, and social climbers in captivity. They also depict liberation through ransom, escape, or religious conversion. This book sheds new light on the social history of Mediterranean slavery and piracy, early modern concepts of unfree labor, and the evolution of the Barbary captivity narrative as a literary and historical genre.

This is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale. Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history. Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour. As his personal slave, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of the imperial court, as well as experience the daily terror of a cruel regime. Gripping, immaculately researched, and brilliantly realised, WHITE GOLD reveals an explosive chapter of popular history, told with all the pace and verve of one of our finest historians.

BARBARY AND ENLIGHTENMENT -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- INTRODUCTION -- PART ONE -- PRECONCEPTIONS -- PART TWO CLASSIFICATION -- INTRODUCTORY -- CHAPTER ONE LOCATION -- CHAPTER TWO RACE -- CHAPTER THREE SOCIETY AND GOVERNMENT -- PART THREE -- TOWARDS THE CONQUEST -- CONCLUSION -- NOTES -- INTRODUCTION -- PART ONE - PRECONCEPTIONS -- PART TWO - INTRODUCTORY -- CHAPTER I - LOCATION -- CHAPTER II - RACE -- CHAPTER III - SOCIETY AND GOVERNMENT -- PART THREE - TOWARDS THE CONQUEST -- CONCLUSION -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

In honor of the German historian Hermann Wellenreuther, this volume explores the Atlantic world in all its many facets and extraordinary scope. Experts from different fields address economic problems as well as religious convictions, on the social differences and the everyday life experiences of the "ordinary people" as well as the aristocracy and the politics of princes. Taken together, the articles weave together German, English and American history and help us to understand the Atlantic societies on both sides of the ocean from the Middle Ages to the present. Claudia Schnurmann is professor at the Department of History at the University of Hamburg (Germany). Hartmut Lehmann is professor at the Max-Planck-Institute for History, Goettingen (Germany).