Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the security of British navigation in and around the corsair-infested waters of the Mediterranean depended on indented parchment passports-Mediterranean passes. This article recovers the history of the Mediterranean pass and traces the development of the Mediterranean pass system from its origins in England's midseventeenth-century treaties with the North African regencies to its role in the emergence of Britain's Mediterranean empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. At its inception, the Mediterranean pass system formed an interstate regulatory regime that mediated between North African and British naval power by providing a means to identify British vessels at sea and to limit the protection of Britain's treaties to them. During the eighteenth century, however, foreign merchants and shipowners, especially from Genoa, sought out the security of British passes by moving to Britain's colonies at Gibraltar and Minorca. The resulting incorporation of foreigners into the British pass system fundamentally altered the nature and significance of the pass and contributed to the development of Britain's imperial presence in the Mediterranean. This article reveals how the growth of British power and the interactions of British consuls and imperial officials with mariners and merchants from around the Mediterranean transformed the pass from a document of identification into an instrument of imperial protection that helped sustain Britain's Mediterranean outposts in the eighteenth century and make possible the dramatic expansion of the British Empire further into that sea at the start of the nineteenth.O n 21 September 1768, two Algerian cruisers returned to port with a Genoese prize carrying a company of 150 Spanish soldiers in transit to Barcelona. This vessel, the St. Antonio, sailed under British colors and under the command of a Gibraltarian named Nicholas Traverso, who possessed a British Mediterranean pass. 1 Britain's treaties with Algiers specified that corsairs were not to molest or capture vessels carrying British passes, but North Africans were well aware that Genoese merchants and shipowners frequently sailed under Tristan Stein is a research associate at the University of Kent. He would like to thank David Armitage, Phil Stern, Will Pettigrew, and the editors and anonymous readers for the Journal of British Studies for their incisive comments and suggestions to earlier versions and drafts of this article. He would also like to thank Perry Gauci for the opportunity to present an early version of this piece at the University of Oxford's Graduate Seminar in History, 1680-1850 and the seminar participants for their helpful discussion. The research and writing of this article were made possible by support from the Leverhulme Trust.

This article reintegrates the colonization of Tangier into our understanding of the development of the English empire in the latter half of the seventeenth century. At its acquisition in 1661, Tangier appeared integral to the imperial ambitions of the restored monarchy and promised to carry England's commercial and maritime empire into the Mediterranean. This article argues that the particular conceptions of imperial and commercial organization that underlay the occupation of Tangier isolated the city from England's wider empire and contributed to its failure. The creation of a free port and crown colony at Tangier reflected prevalent perceptions of the political economy of trade in the Mediterranean, but added to a wider process whereby ideological debates over the organization of trade and empire helped to create legal and jurisdictional boundaries that differentiated oceanic space. As a free port, Tangier was out of place within an empire increasingly defined by exclusive and restricted trade. It was, however, the ideological significance of Tangier's status as a crown colony that made it unsustainable. Unable to sustain or surrender its sovereignty over Tangier, the crown abandoned the city in the face of Moroccan empire-building.

This article analyses the public debates about the two corporate forms used in the seventeenth century to develop England's international commercial reach: the regulated and joint stock company. It examines pamphlets to assess the changing public postures of the two forms across the period, and challenges histories of seventeenth‐century English overseas trade that argue the triumph of free trade over monopoly. The article instead suggests that the public debate about the two company forms contributed to the development of new corporate constitutions derived from both models and therefore recovers the neglected significance of the regulated company in this period.

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