WI the US and European powers hadn't waited til 1815-30 to fully crush the Barbary Pirates as a power in the Med ? Could the Christian powers have tried to do so by as early as say 1600, and with what wider effects ?
WI the US and European powers hadn't waited til 1815-30 to fully crush the Barbary Pirates as a power in the Med ? Could the Christian powers have tried to do so by as early as say 1600, and with what wider effects ?
The Barbary pirates weren't really pirates - they were actually just coastal states that collected tolls on passing ships
Their definitions of "toll" and "passing ship" were rather liberal.
The Barbary pirates weren't really pirates - they were actually just coastal states that collected tolls on passing ships, as they always had. After the Napoleonic Wars, it was collectively decided that wasn't cool anymore, so people started to get hostile about it.
In 1600 North Africa was a more integral part of the Ottoman Empire, so smashing them would have been an enormous undertaking, and maybe not achievable - or at least not without enormous cost to the Mediterranean powers to the detriment of other pursuits.