From Captives to Consuls: Three Sailors in Barbary and Their Self-Making across the Early American Republic, 1770-1840

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JHU Press, 2020 M10 13 - 224 páginas

How three white, non-elite American sailors turned their experiences of captivity into diverse career opportunities—and influenced America's physical, commercial, ideological, and diplomatic development.

Winner of the John Lyman Book Award by the North American Society for Oceanic History

From 1784 to 1815, hundreds of American sailors were held as "white slaves" in the North African Barbary States. In From Captives to Consuls, Brett Goodin vividly traces the lives of three of these men—Richard O'Brien, James Cathcart, and James Riley—from the Atlantic coast during the American Revolution to North Africa, from Philadelphia to the Louisiana Territories, and finally to the western frontier. This first scholarly biography of American captives in Barbary sifts through their highly curated writings to reveal how ordinary individuals in extraordinary circumstances could maneuver through and contribute to nation building in early America, all the while advancing their own interests.

The three subjects of this collective biography both reflected and helped refine evolving American concepts of liberty, identity, race, masculinity, and nationhood. Time and again, Goodin reveals, O'Brien, Cathcart, and Riley uncovered opportunities in their adversity. They variously found advantage first in the Revolution as privateers, then in captivity by writing bestselling captivity narratives and successfully framing their ordeal as a qualification for coveted government employment. They even used their modest fame as ex-captives to become diplomats, get elected to state legislatures, and survey the nation's territorial expansions in the South and West. Their successful self-interested pursuit of opportunities offered by the expanding American empire, Goodin argues, constitutes what he calls "the invisible hand of American nation building."

Goodin shows how these ordinary men, lacking the genius of a Benjamin Franklin or Alexander Hamilton, depended on sheer luck and adaptability in their quest for financial independence and public recognition. Drawing on archival collections, newspapers, private correspondence, and government documents, From Captives to Consuls sheds new light on the significance of ordinary individuals in guiding early American ideas of science, international relations, and what it meant to be a self-made man.

 

Contenido

Introduction Victims of American Independence?
1
1 Farmers Privateers and Prisoners of the Revolution
12
2 Diaries of Barbary Orientalism and American Masculinity in Algiers
34
3 Captivity by Correspondence
53
4 From Captives to Consuls and CoupMakers
74
5 Accidentally Useful and Interesting to the World
111
6 Sailing the Inland Sea
132
Conclusion Opportunities of Empire
152
Epilogue
156
Notes
159
Essay on Sources
199
Index
203
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Brett Goodin is a Global Perspectives on Society Teaching Fellow at New York University Shanghai.

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