Daniel Hershenzon. The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.2018. 289 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-5048-0. $55.00 hardback.

The Captive Sea recasts our understanding of the early modern Mediterranean world from a few different perspectives. Whereas the Spanish-Ottoman truce signed in 1581 is understood to have led to the dissipation of maritime practices, Daniel Hershenzon argues that it in fact led to its intensification through captivity, enslavement and ransom as well as commerce. The new networks of communication that thus came into being, in conjunction with old ones that were reinvigorated by these maritime practices, resulted in dense connections between North Africa and southern Europe. Hershenzon’s scholarship on piracy, captivity and slavery further revises what has become a mainstay in Mediterranean historiography– the ‘northern invasion’ thesis. According to this thesis, ‘between the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588 and the signing of the Twelve Year’s Truce between Spain and the United Provinces in 1609 the Mediterranean became an economic sphere rather than one where religious enmity dominated’ (186). Against this narrative of modernisation, The Captive Sea illuminates the Mediterranean as a complex site marked by the entanglements of trans-imperial politics, religious mechanisms as well as social and personal obligations. Paying attention to these entanglements, Hershenzon suggests, allows historians to refocus their critical energies on the role that ordinary people such as captives, slaves, and their kin played in forming networks of connection between polities during this time. The Captive Sea tracks the multifarious ways in which these communication systems were sustained, and the effects that the information exchanged had on individual historical actors as well as on communities and polities across the Mediterranean.

Whereas piracy and privateering are typically discussed in political and economic terms, Hershenzon argues that these processes need to be apprehended from the perspective of the system’s victims. Making use of a range of archival sources, including captivity narratives, autobiographies and inquisitorial depositions as well as notarial and administrative records, he reconstructs the social lives of both Muslim and Christian captives. Extant scholarship, he suggests, has limited the scope of our understanding by emphasising captivity and bondage as the dominant frameworks of analysis. Yet, a careful study of the lives of captives reveals not only their changing status as property, commodity and gift as facilitated by their spatial and occupational mobility, but also the ways in which they sought to structure their own experience despite limiting circumstances. Notarial records from Spain, for instance, suggest that Muslim slaves deployed different tactics, including performing insanity in order to sabotage their sale. Captives used their knowledge of peace treaties such as the one signed between Spain and Morocco in 1767 to offer false information about their identity and escape bondage. Beyond these instances, The Captive Sea also highlights the role that enslaved and captured people played in obtaining their own freedom–– a process that, in addition to seeking assistance from relatives and institutions, involved collaborating with their masters.

Hershenzon revises standard approaches to captivity further by arguing that it names not only a system of bondage but also a process of communication. By playing an active role in their own ransom processes, captives transformed themselves into ‘hubs within an information and exchange infrastructure’, which connected Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean (68). Letters exchanged between captives and kin as well as Inquisitorial and papal institutions thus performed a range of functions that he tracks across multiple chapters. Christian and Muslim captives, for instance, often communicated news of conversion and the death of their fellow captives. Such news not only enabled the captives’ kin to grieve the departed but also allowed them to initiate administrative protocols that released them from the financial obligation of arranging ransom. Similarly, news about the death of a married captive could enable his widow to take possession of matrimonial assets and even remarry if she chose to. In the decades after the Protestant Reformation, these letters played a vital role in establishing a woman’s status of widowhood to church institutions. Even though Muslim wives whose husbands had been baptised by force could not remarry, as widows they could access their husband’s property to sustain themselves.

The information conveyed by captives’ letters had crucial social and financial implications for their own kin as well as for their communities at large. This is evident in the fact that captives constructed narratives of martyrdom for those who died without converting and also aided the canonisation of executed Christians. Renegades who wanted to be reintegrated into their communities sought letters from Christian captives as a means of avoiding severe punishment by the Inquisition. Often described as certificates, testimonies or signatures, these letters were believed to have ‘the capacity to communicate legitimacy and enable absolution before the Inquisition’ (107). Beyond serving individual captives, these letters made it possible for Inquisitors to add to their limited knowledge of the Maghrib and the life of Christian captives. Hershenzon argues that in their role as informants, captives were able to maintain a standing in their home countries and ensure that religious and political bureaucracies in their respective communities recognised their status.

Pursuing his inquiry into the production and circulation of information further, Hershenzon examines the ways in which Christians and Muslims narrated violence exerted upon the enslaved. Contrary to scholarly opinion that deems forced conversion, desecration of bodies and executions as ‘irrational and arbitrary’, he argues that these acts of violence were part of a larger system of reciprocity specific to the Mediterranean world. By sending information about violence and by appealing for protection, the enslaved created networks of communication that had the potential to affect diplomatic relations between European and North African powers. These powers in fact had shared expectations regarding the treatment of slaves whose violation, ‘brought into relief the doxa that managed the lives of slaves in the Mediterranean and the implicit rules that were to be mutually respected’ (119). Archival materials such as chapbooks and martyrologies composed by Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian ecclesiastics writing about Christian captives, letters that Muslims enslaved in Spain wrote to their families in the Maghrib and oral testimonies of redeemed Muslim slaves illuminate how Spanish and North African powers responded to slaves’ appeals by threatening each other with retaliatory action. Violence or the threat of violence thus facilitated communication between political powers and over time helped reduce friction by establishing specific sanctions regarding the treatment of the enslaved. It also had the added effect of defining the enslaved as more than economic subjects; that is, their role in this reciprocal dynamic underscored their existence as religious subjects.

Historians have argued that the signing of the Ottoman-Spanish truce in 1581 led Spain to turn its attention away from the Maghrib to northern Europe and the Atlantic. Hershenzon however claims that Spain received more information about North Africa post 1581, albeit in different forms. Published accounts about the Maghrib alongside other modes of knowledge transmission and circulation demonstrates Spain’s continued interest. He examines the nature of information that facilitated the encounter between the Spanish Empire and the Maghrib, paying particular attention to the identity of those who made such information available as well as the mechanisms that were instituted to verify it. Hershenzon demonstrates how Muslim and Christian captives were both ‘active producers of knowledge of the enemy and passive bodies inscribed with useful knowledge’ (141). Aside from letters sent to kin, information traveled through forms such as daily chronicles written by Spanish captives, topographic accounts of Algiers and narratives collected by officials through the interrogation of freed Christians and captured Muslims. Ex-captives and renegades too sent unsolicited submissions offering plans and advice for how to conquer Algiers. Here Hershenzon reveals the formation of a textual universe where topographical accounts meant to aid Spain’s conquest of Algiers were produced through an accretive process of authors making use of existing accounts of the city and constantly adding to it based on their own knowledge of the city. Given the nature and volume of information that circulated, establishing the reliability of the informant assumed crucial importance. Captives, because of their first-hand knowledge, were often in charge of ‘adjudicating the veracity of claims about identity, status, and intentions made by all sorts of informants posted to the Maghrib and by Maghribi officials’ (160). The fact that detainees could play such a role illuminates, on the one hand, that despite being captives they maintained a legal subjectivity acknowledged in Spain, and on the other hand, it underscores Spain’s lack of knowledge about the Maghrib and its limited ability to control such information.

Cumulatively, across several chapters The Captive Sea demonstrates the ways in which piracy and captivity in early modern Mediterranean led to the formation of, and in turn was sustained by, a dense network of information transmission across local regions and empires. These networks connected religious figures with political powers, captives and their kin on all sides of the Mediterranean. The entanglements of religious sentiments, reciprocal violence, social obligations and market principles played a fundamental role in shaping what Hershenzon describes as the political economy of ransom.

Meticulously researched and strongly argued, The Captive Sea will be of value to those interested in the history of piracy, ransom and captivity in the Mediterranean. It might also prove generative for comparative work across Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean worlds. Even though Hershenzon does not pursue a comparative approach, early on in his monograph he gestures towards the ways in which slavery and captivity in the Mediterranean differed from that in the Atlantic world. Such differences, he argues, are visible across a range of practices and circumstances pertaining to the lives and treatment of the enslaved. Whereas enslaved people in the Atlantic world rarely knew their captors, those in the Mediterranean often did, if not at a personal level then at least on the ‘basis of longue duree violent and peaceful exchanges’ (3). Further, unlike enslaved subjects in the Atlantic world, captives in the Mediterranean continued to be in communication with their kin and were able to arrange for their own freedom through ransom. Analyses such as these are useful in thinking about systems of bonded labor across geographies. Scholars like Isabel Hofmeyr emphasise the need to focus on the specificities of systems of bondage as a crucial step in undoing the ways in which the Atlantic paradigm has overdetermined studies of slavery at large.[1] To this extent, The Captive Sea also offers exciting new directions for comparative, cross-oceanic work.

Najnin Islam

Colorado College

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