Menacing Tides: Security, Piracy and Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean by Erik de Lange Unavailable

The pirate has long stood as an emblem of criminality. As Johns notes in his survey of intellectual piracy, the word derived from an Indo-European root signifying a “trial” or “attempt,” before coming to mean, first, a seagoing thief and then, by extension, a literary pilferer and even a general enemy of humanity.¹ In scholarship, the modern notion of piracy is usually tied to new ideas about civilization, nation-states (what Johns terms “geopolitical thresholds”), and property rights. In this new study of “Barbary” piracy in the Mediterranean Sea, de Lange takes a different tack, analyzing the European reaction to North African and Greek corsairing in the nineteenth century through the lens of “security culture.” Situating his work in the interdisciplinary field of international relations, he adroitly combines military, maritime, diplomatic, and cultural approaches to illuminate how ideas and practices of “security” among the Concert of Europe worked to contain...