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

the two leading and most influential works that investigated American
diplomatic history with Algiers. 5
Ray Irwin’s Diplomatic Relations of the
United States with the Barbary Powers is a classical history work that puts
forward the ‘heroic’ role the United States played in the suppression of a ‘nest
of pirates;’ this work was carried exclusively from the reading rooms of the
Library of Congress in Washington, D. C. Richard Parker’s Uncle Sam in
Barbary is a nuanced account and is the culmination work of a carrier diplomat
who is better knowledgeable about the Arab World and its culture. Although
Parker injects some fairness and unbiased analysis in his account, yet, he does
not deviate from the established consensus and approaches Algiers as a pirate
state.
These two works have much inspired a counter-argument that is
presented by this thesis because while re-reading the same American
government documents one had the preliminary impression that all has not
been said about early American diplomatic history. Therefore this thesis strove
to put forward documents that were either overlooked by American historians
or have not been published until recently. 6 Partly for this reason, the researcher
opted for using exclusively American sources. The second reason motivating
this option is that research undertaken so far at the Bibliothèque Nationale
Algérienne at Algiers has revealed that no documents relating to Algiers’
5 Ray W. Irwin, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers, 1776-1816
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931) and Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary:
A Diplomatic History (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004).
6 Many of the key documents appeared for the first time in Mary A. Giunta, ed., The Emerging Nation:
A Documentary History of the Foreign Relations of the United States under the Articles of
Confederation, 1780-1789, 3 Vol. (Washington, D.C.: National Historical Publications and Records
Commission, 1996).
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