Although the Ottoman Empire nominally extended along the North African coast as far as the borders of Morocco, much of it, especially the Westernmost reaches, were largely autonomous much of the time. By the turn of the 19th century, control by Istanbul of the so-called Barbary States was nominal; the dey of the Regency of Algiers would deal directly with foreign states.
This was a world of “corsairing” (authorized, if not quite legalized, piracy) and slavery (where the objective wasn’t labor but rather the ransoms paid by European countries to free their nationals). There were rules about these things: treaties and regular payment could prevent ships from being taken.
Corsairing ships could capture vessels flying flags of regimes with which the regency was at war. Deys would, if necessary, declare war, so that their corsairs would have a greater choice of targets. In 1791, the Dey Hassan declared war on Sweden, and even though the corsairs did not take a single Swedish ship, the Swedes paid him 350,000 francs for a new agreement and promised to deliver annual gifts.
The Napoleonic Wars raged, Britain and France battled for influence and military advantage and both countries, as well as others, desperately needed North Africa’s grain and other commodities.
Kalman tells the story of the Bacris and the Busnachs with verve and a certain wry panache.
This is the Algiers of Julie Kalman’s new book; the “kings” of the title are not the deys, but rather the Bacris and the Busnachs, two interconnected families of Jewish businessmen.
Their trading house sent prized Algerian wheat around the Mediterranean and beyond, to Northern Europe and America. They brought in colonial goods from the Atlantic, and luxury goods from Europe. They insured boats, and they armed corsairing ships. When captured enemy boats were towed into Algiers Harbor, the Bacris would sell off the cargo. When unfortunate members of the ship’s crew, or even its passengers, were enslaved, as was the standard practice, the Bacris would lend money at interest to foreign consuls, so that they might buy back their citizens from the regency. They made loans to consuls to buy luxury gifts for the dey, too, as well as for his extended family and his ministers.
They had family members in Paris, Marseille and Levanto (whence they seem to have hailed earlier in the 18th century.) They had the ear (and more) of the dey who would adjust policy in their favor, pressuring foreign governments to make good on their debts and passing official business through them.
So present were members of the extended Bacri family in the lives of consuls that they featured in virtually every letter sent home to the metropole, and they were no less well known in the centers of power. Jacob Bacri—one of the brothers—was invited to dinner with Napoleon, who personally designated the task of supplying his armies to the family. Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson puzzled over how to deal with the Bacris. American Secretaries of Foreign Affairs Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe considered strategies that would allow them to circumvent the Bacris’ influence.
Although Jewish trading families had been and would continue to be rich and powerful—the Sassoons come to mind—none seem to have been as politically entrenched as the Bacris. Exactly how this happened, and was allowed to happen, is not entirely clear. Kalman says that there were indications that officials might have been partners in some of the undertakings; certainly, the payment of a long-running French debt to the Bacris (amounting to millions of francs) was a matter of state policy. But influence would not have been possible without business success and the Bacris had connections that spanned the Mediterranean.
It was hardly smooth-sailing: things would often go pear-shaped. Leading family members would be assassinated, the Bacris would for a time find themselves on the wrong side of the shifting political alliances during the wars, resulting in occasional imprisonment and sequestration of goods and properties. Jacob, the Bacri family member posted in Paris to retrieve the huge debt, seems—despite the dinner date with Napoleon—to have been out of his depth. The family fell out and chased each other for decades through the French courts. Yet for several decades almost nothing happened in or with Algiers unless the Bacris were in the middle of it.
The Bacris were the bane of the French consuls’ existence, who would complain at length in their dispatches about their machinations and perceived betrayals. The British were more phlegmatic, but it was the Anericans, more observer than party to Franco-British tensions, who seemed most objective about the situation.
Yet, Algiers was not fully autonomous either. The deys would hail from the Eastern Mediterranean, janissaries ran amok in Algiers as elsewhere, and when the Sultan in Istanbul ordered the dey to declare war on France, the country with whom Algiers was most entangled, he resisted but had to comply.
This is a time that seems both immeasurably distant and yet very close.
Kalman tells the story of the Bacris and the Busnachs with verve and a certain wry panache, liberally quoting from primary sources which can be entertainingly theatrical.
This is a time that seems both immeasurably distant and yet very close. The belligerents in the Napoleonic Wars resorted to sequestration and financial measures to try to force third-parties to comply with their war aims; these sound rather like “sanctions”. Similarly, Algiers’s desperate attempts not to take sides in the Napoleonic Wars and to continue dealing with both Britain and France, has echos in more contemporary conflicts, as do the ways in which the major powers’ reliance on commodities affected their diplomacy with countries they might, given their druthers, have kept at arms-length.
The French debt to the Bacris triggered a diplomatic incident in 1827 that provided much of the justification (if not perhaps rationale) for the French invasion, and colonization, of Algiers in 1830. And the Bacris really were out of business.
You must be logged in to post a comment.