Barbary Coast

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For other meanings, see Barbary Coast (disambiguation).

The Barbary Coast, or Barbary, was the term used by Europeans from the 16th until the 19th century to refer to the coastal regions of what is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. The name is derived from the Berber people of north Africa. In the West, the name commonly evokes the Barbary pirates and slave traders, based on that coast, who attacked shipping coastal settlements in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic and captured and traded slaves from Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

"Barbary" was almost never a unified political entity. From the sixteenth century onwards, it was divided into the familiar political entities of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania (Libya). Major rulers during the heydays of the barbary states were the Pasha or Dey of Algiers, the Bey of Tunis and the Bey of Tripoli, all nominally subjects of the Ottoman Sultan, but de facto independent rulers. Before then it was usually divided between Ifriqiya, Morocco, and a west-central Algerian state centered on Tlemcen or Tiaret, although powerful dynasties such as the Almohads, and briefly the Hafsids, occasionally unified it for short periods. From a European perspective its "capital" or chief city was often considered to be Tripoli, in modern-day Libya, although Algiers, in Algeria, and Tangiers, in Morocco, were also sometimes seen as its "capital" by Europeans of the era.

The first United States military action overseas, executed by the U.S. Marines and Navy, was the storming of Darnis, Tripoli, in 1805, in an effort to bolster diplomatic efforts in securing the freedom of American prisoners and putting an end to piracy on the part of the Barbary states. The opening line of the Marine's Hymn refers to this action:

"From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,"

[edit] Further Reading

London, Joshua E. (2005), Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., ISBN 0-471-44415-4
LAFI (Nora), Une ville du Maghreb entre ancien régime et réformes ottomanes. Genèse des institutions municipales à Tripoli de Barbarie (1795-1911), Paris, L'Harmattan, 2002, 305 p. [1]