The perception of the captive: representation, daily life, and work in the barbary regencies (16th -19th centuries)

This article offers a comparative reassessment of Christian captivity in the Barbary Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli (sixteenth–nineteenth centuries), distinguishing it from both Atlantic slavery and straightforward political imprisonment. Grounded in Fontenay’s differentiation between Mediterranean corsairing and privateering, it frames captivity as an institutionalized, reciprocal practice embedded in a ransom economy: captives were valued less as long-term labor power than as investment goods whose yield lay in redemption. The study disaggregates early modern labels—“slave,” “prisoner,” “hostage”—and aligns them with coeval legal-social lexica, including the Muslim distinction between ʿabd and ʿaṣīr. A second strand reconstructs spaces, work, and everyday life. For public captives, it traces galley service, urban works, and especially the bagni—hybrid carceral complexes with chapels, taverns, brokers, and internal regulations. Particular emphasis falls on the tavern as a key site of sociability and economic agency: frequently managed by captives, taxed by authorities, and used to accumulate funds toward self-redemption and, at times, post-release reinvestment. For privately held captives, conditions ranged from coercive to privileged domestic service with commercial leeway, unified by owners’ rational calculus to preserve the captive’s ransom value. The conclusion nuances labor coercion, highlighting negotiated agency under a regime of non-freedom marked by reciprocity, reversibility (frequent eighteenth-century redemptions), and repeatability among maritime populations. The captive emerges as a commodity striving to sell and re-buy itself, situated at the intersection of Mediterranean economies, social practices, and representations.