Passes and Protection in the Making of a British Mediterranean

Abstract

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.

Convoy of Scottish Trade by the English Royal Navy on the Eve of the Union of 1707

“…Some of these treaties explicitly covered Scots, while in others their protection was "equally intended." 86 A substantial element of Scottish overseas trade, however, could not use the protection of English convoys, because in English eyes, if not necessarily those of the Scots, it was illegal trade. The most significant trade that had to risk sailing alone was with France; at a tenth of sailings in the 1680s, mostly trading in valuable wines, this was a significant trade to have stopped because of the war.…”

Peace with Pirates? Maghrebi Maritime Combat, Diplomacy, and Trade in English Periodical News, 1622–1714

“…Of course, in reality it is hardly like that all 'the people' of Tunis desired 'nothing more' than peace with the English; this presentation clearly exaggerates diplomatic niceties for popular audiences.14 The definitive article on Mediterranean passes and their role in British relations with the Maghrebi states is(Stein 2015).15 (Matar 2005, pp. 150-58) has recognised a similar trend, 'a wide interest in eyewitness accounts and [a] deep-seated desire to valorize British warriors and annihilate the unnamed and unknown Moors', in a small flurry of accounts relating to Tangier that appeared around 1680.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2015

“…Here Fusaro analyses some detailed cases of civil litigation to reveal how English and Dutch seamen were able to combine private trading and public service to the Venetian Republic to take advantage of employment opportunities in the eastern Mediterranean in the long seventeenth century. Stein also focuses on English vessels in the Mediterranean in an article that examines the development of the Mediterranean pass, a document issued by the Lord High Admiral that thanks to various treaties signed in the second half of the seventeenth century gave British merchant ships protection from North African corsairs. While English vessels had often relied on the support of the Venetian state to operate successfully in the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century, by the end of the period the English state was starting to become a more serious player in the region.…”