Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

crisis, real or machinated, into an opportunity to advance political programs by
a few neat but dramatic twists of the historical truth.
Diplomatic relations of the United States with the ‘Barbary States’ in
general, and Algiers particularly, is a minor episode in early American history;
yet, numbers of American historians and so-called area specialists in Arab-
American relations have inflated it to greater proportions since the 9/11 events.
Today, there is a largely-established consensus in the United States that
attributes the shaping of American foreign policy, particularly the use of
military force abroad, to that early encounter with the so-called ‘pirates of the
Barbary Coast.’ This large consensus is established on interpretations that are
solely based on American archival material and are most often presented from
a contemporary American perspective; therefore, the final product sounds more
like an American unilateral truth, filled up with bias and mistakes, than a
balanced study of two different cultures and systems of government that
clashed in an utterly different international context at the end of the 18 th and
beginning of the 19 th centuries—and continue to clash today. In general, it may
be stated that studying early American history in the light of 21 st century’s
views is apt to lead to perversions of historical truth.
But, by taking the same material and looking at it from a different angle,
one may probably come to a different conclusion about what the actual truth
was; and this is precisely the objective of this research work. The historical
observer, who is also the researcher here, instead of securitizing the history of
diplomatic relations between Algiers and western powers from locations
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