Conclusion

The conclusion recapitulates the book’s key arguments, fast-forwarding to the mid-eighteenth century to test the assertion that the Ottoman Mediterranean was a legal space, defined in large part by the challenge of piracy. Recounting an incident from the 1740s, in which Cretan seamen traveled to Tripoli to acquire licenses to attack Venice—with which Tripoli then considered itself at war—it reflects on the path by which Tripoli and the rest of North Africa came to be excluded from the Ottoman Mediterranean legal space, such that neither administrators in Istanbul nor sailors in Candia considered Tripoli truly “Ottoman.” It then reconsiders the connections between legal corsairing/privateering and illegal piracy, and the complex roles religion and subjecthood played in fixing the line between them.