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

commerce of Europe with the West Indies is obliged to pass before our doors,
which enables us to make short and cheap cruises.” 81
Franklin’s thought is certainly a relevant argument that unveils the
piratical nature of the so-called American privateers but by no means could his
analogy apply to the Turkish or Muslim corsairs. As discussed in chapter two,
the line between piracy and privateering/corsairing was thin; but international
law had clearly identified the three prerequisites for an act of robbery on the
high seas to pass from illegality to legality: sovereignty, authorization of a
sovereign, and more important the existence of a ‘lawful enemy’—in other
terms, the existence of a state of war. 82
Those three conditions were plainly
fulfilled by Algiers. Corsairing, by nature, legal definition, and practice, was
carried by sovereigns against ‘lawful enemies,’ enemies against whom a legal
state of war existed; in the case of Spain, for example, it was a perpetual war.
That state of war existed because Christians declared Muslims as their enemies
and fought them for centuries. Hence, the Muslim-Christians treaties only
suspended hostilities for the duration specified by any treaty but as soon as it
expired, war was resumed; corsairing, therefore, was a legal act of war.
For the United States, however, the three conditions need some
clarification: first, until February 1778 the USA existed clandestinely as none
of the existing states recognized its independence, therefore it lacked
sovereignty. Second: letters of marque (authorization) were legally null and
81 Franklin, Memoirs, 1:529.
82 Hall, International Law, pp. 64-74; Benton, “Legal Spaces of Empire,” p. 705.
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