274 youval rotman
Clash of economies or of economic conceptions?The economic dynamics of the early modern Mediterranean were a product of both
internal and external international contacts: on the one hand the political and eco-
nomic relations between the southern European Christian and North-African Muslim
littorals and on the other hand, the growing importance of the western-European and
Atlantic economies and the economic model that they presented. The destiny of slav-
ery in the Mediterranean was determined by the relations between these economies.
This is apparent from the Mediterranean corsair economy (see also Greene, Backman,
this volume).
The number of Christian European victims of Mediterranean corsairs from 1530
to 1780 is estimated to be between a million to a million-and-a-quarter (Davis, 2003),
matched by similar numbers of North Africans raided by European ships. The esti-
mate for Italy alone is between 400 000–500 000 (Bono, 1999). A certain number of
the corsairs’ victims were ransomed for sums that largely surpassed their price as slaves
thanks to European organizations, both charitable orders and private agencies, which
offered financial aid to ransom Christian captives. Recent studies have revealed that
the financial conditions for this were created ad hoc in Italy, Provence and Spain, and
evolved into local mercantile systems of credit and loans (Kaiser, 2008). The economy
of ransom that had been practiced since the central Middle Ages, became more wide-
spread mainly due to the prevailing financial conditions. The families of ransomed
captives were now dependent on new financial firms which offered to ransom their
loved ones. Once back in their home towns, the ransomed captives were not free to
go their own way. If they did not have the financial means to reimburse their ransom,
they became the dependents of their redeemers.
But most captives were sold as slaves in both south-western European and north-
African markets. The “corsair economy” therefore relied on the financial means of
Mediterranean economies to both buy and ransom captives. It also relied on the fact
that North African and Italian markets lost their hegemony in the slave trade because
of the new Atlantic routes connecting southern Europe directly to the African slave
markets, and the position of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant. The Christian
European and Muslim North-African corsairs, therefore, catalyzed the Mediterranean
economy by offering captives for sale or ransom. The fact that half of the captains
enrolled in the Barbary corsairs were Christian–European demonstrates the economic
raison d’être behind these activities that attracted opportunists and entrepreneurs.
Raids, captivity and ransom were also common in the Balkans and the eastern
Mediterranean, thanks to the financial means that were available in the Ottoman
Empire for buying foreign kidnapped captives, and for ransoming their own inhabit-
ants (Dávid and Fodor, 2007). This is a characteristic example of the function of
merchandizing human beings in the international Mediterranean economy.
The history of the west Mediterranean slave trade in the light of the history of the
Atlantic slave trade is yet to be written.^2 The west Mediterranean markets lost their
hegemony once north-western European companies began to dominate the Atlantic
slave trade in the eighteenth century. North-western European ports in Britain,
France and Holland were now controlling direct transfers of Africans from West Africa
to the Americas thanks to their maritime monopoly. However, the future of slavery in
the Mediterranean was not only due to the shift in trade routes in the West, but also