Subjects at Sea Final

DISCLAIMER: This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only. Copyright by Alexis Alida Harasemovitch-Truax 2016 The Dissertation Committee for Alexis Alida Harasemovitch-Truax Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Subjects at Sea: Navigating Power in the British Mediterranean, 1661- 1783 Committee: Philippa Levine, Supervisor Julie Hardwick Tillman Nechtman Robert A. Olwell James M. Vaughn Subjects at Sea: Navigating Power in the British Mediterranean 1661- 1783 by Alexis Harasemovitch-Truax, B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2016 Subjects at Sea: Navigating Power in the British Mediterranean, 1661- 1783 Alexis Alida Harasemovitch-Truax, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2016 Supervisor: Philippa Levine In 1608 an English court ruled that those born within the King’s domain were English subjects. Subjects had obligations to the Crown, but they also received certain rights and privileges. On land they were protected by the common law and could petition the King. At sea, treaties kept them safe from the “Barbary pirates”—privateers that captured ships and ransomed or enslaved their sailors. During wartime, British subjects could privateer themselves, with a commission to plunder the ships of England’s enemies. What would “British subject” come to mean as the King’s domains expanded across the seas? Even as the British began to embark on the territorial conquests that would subject people on the other side of the globe to British rule, Britain was already cultivating a maritime empire of diverse subjects right in the heart of Europe. Subjects at Sea explores the often forgotten history of the eighteenth-century British Mediterranean. In this maritime sphere, sailors, diplomats, inhabitants, and imperial administrators interpreted and negotiated British sovereignty and subjecthood through accommodation, collaboration, and diplomacy—not colonization or conquest. It explores the entangled political, social, and cultural currents of government policy and individual experience through the lens of subjecthood. Resource-poor and on the very doorstep of imperial rivals France and Spain, Britain’s tiny military strongholds in Gibraltar and Menorca would depend on successful diplomacy with North Africa for provisions. With few native-born Britons to hand, imperial administrators needed new subjects to sail the ships that would supply and protect the colonies. A series of decrees and treaties extended iv many of the rights and protections of subjecthood to the diverse inhabitants of these colonies, regardless of their religion or national origin. Long before its global imperial conquests of the 1760s, Britain developed a diverse maritime empire in the Mediterranean—affirming the subjecthood of Catholics and Jews, Moroccans, Genoese and others. These diverse and mobile people would don, shed, and transform British subjecthood as they navigated the conflicting currents of trade, war and power in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean. In so doing their world offers new insights into the varied history of the eighteenth-century British Empire. v Table of Contents List of Illustrations ................................................................................................ vii Introduction ............................................................................................................. 8 Chapter 1. Performing Subjecthood:Identity, Allegiance and Establishing a British Mediterranean .............................................................................................. 45 Chapter 2. Rule By Treaty: Limited Sovereignty and Expanding Subjecthood ... 94 Chapter 3. Civilities and Offences: Diplomacy, Trade and Courting the Maghreb145 Chapter 4. A Sea of Wax and Ink ....................................................................... 200 Chapter 5. Navigating Authority, Negotiating Subjecthood ............................... 257 Afterword. “To the shores of Tripoli”: British Subjecthood and the British Mediterranean in the Age of the New American Republic and the Napoleonic Wars ........................................................................................................... 318 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 330 vi List of Illustrations Porto Farina Castle, Edward Coxere, 1684 ...................................................... 60 Bill of Health, Lovely Peggy, Algiers, 1756 ...................................................... 238 Forged Letter of Introduction, “Joseph Hudson,” 1725 ............................... 252 vii Introduction The voyage from the British Isles to the Mediterranean Sea was not, in the grand scheme of global maritime empire, a long one. The fastest clippers might, if friendly winds prevailed, make the journey in just under two weeks. Navy Ships left the busy southern harbor of Portsmouth and sailed south to the British garrisons at Gibraltar or Menorca—the empire’s tiny toeholds in that great sea “in the middle of the land.”1 Merchant ships from London made a longer journey, leaving behind the empire’s throbbing metropolis to travel east down the Thames toward the ocean. From the coast they headed south, passing between the “chalky hills” of Dover and Calais— the “narrowest part of the channel, between France and England,” where sailors could see “the coasts of both these powerful kingdoms at the same time.”2 Rounding the sharp finger of Brittany, ships might traverse against the rough winds of the Bay of Biscay toward the northwestern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. Here, they would arrive at the end of the earth: the sharp peaks the Romans called finis terre, or “Land’s End,” where the “known world” ended, or, in this case, perhaps, began.3 Historians of the eighteenth century British Empire rarely focus on the Mediterranean. The history of the two small British outposts in that sea is dwarfed by the histories of the American colonies and their revolution, the rise of the Atlantic slave trade, and the conquests of the East India Company. The Mediterranean, however, was a 1 From the Latin mediterraneus: medius, “middle” and terra, “land.” Coined by the Romans, it was probably first been used in the third century A.D. by the geographer Solinus. Kai Brodersen, “Mediterranean Sea and Region,” in M. Gagarin and E. Fantham eds., Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4: 387. 2 Fredrik Hasselquist, Voyages and Travels in the Levant in the Years 1749, 50, 51, 52: Containing Observations in Natural History, Physick, Agriculture, and Commerce, Particularly on the Holy Land, and the Natural History of the Scriptures (London: L. Davis and C. Reymers, 1766), 10. 3 Cape Finisterre. 8 unique sphere for the quickly growing empire. It was a diverse maritime space where Britain both exercised and navigated power in a region that was largely outside its territorial sovereignty and was full of fierce imperial rivals and other strong states. The capture of Menorca in 1708 gave Britain a safe and ample harbor for its fleet, and a base from which it could protect trade with the Levant and monitor the French Navy at Toulon. The capture of Gibraltar in 1704 gave Britain dominance over “the greatest thorofare of trade in the world”: the narrow passage between Africa and Europe, Islam and Christendom, sea and ocean, old world and new.4 Close enough to England that armies, warships, and dispatches might be sent in a matter of weeks, these tiny strongholds of British military power and imperial ambition were in the heart of maritime Europe—surrounded by hostile or powerful states. The Mediterranean was also the home of linguistically, culturally, and religiously diverse peoples who lived and thrived, as they had done for millennia, by crossing the blurry boundaries of national, cultural, or ethnic identities in pursuit of trade. In the midst of intense eighteenth-century imperial competition, the British government, British subjects, and other inhabitants of the Mediterranean had to navigate carefully the conflicting currents of power that swirled throughout the “middle sea.”5 The garrison-colonies in the western Mediterranean made that sea a cockpit of Britain’s global empire in the center of maritime Europe. It was, however, peopled and managed by a mere handful of native-born Britons: garrisoned soldiers, sailors and merchants, consuls, and admirals. The colonies themselves were inhabited almost entirely by Mediterranean locals. In Menorca, the Catalan-speaking natives were a largely 4 Harley to Newcastle, 5- 16 September 1704, Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of the Duke of Portland Vol. II (London: H.M.S.O, 1907), 186. 5 Greek (Mesogeios), Latin (Mare internum), German (Mittelmeer), Arabic (al-Baḥr al-Mutawassiṭ) 9 agrarian population who were slowly joined by small but influential communities of Greek and Jewish merchants—welcomed by the British as potential allies against the “popish” locals. By 1750 there were at least 546 “foreigners” on the island (excluding British-born subjects) and 21,073 native Menorcans.⁠6 In Gibraltar, where all but a few of the original Spanish families fled the British invasion,

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