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

the source of much dissatisfaction at Algiers and resulted in a string of events
which eventually culminated in the naval encounter of June 1815 in which Rais
Hamidou, Admiral of the Algerian fleet and Algiers’ foremost corsair, was
killed. From then until December 1816, the United States, along with Great
Britain and the Netherlands, would take turns sending fleets to Algiers either in
a mere show of naval might for the sake of enhancing already-obtained
privileges at Algiers or imposing new treaties on the basis of more favorable
terms—as was the case of the USA—or else, alleging recommendations of the
Congress of Vienna, 1815, for pouring a torrent of cannon-balls and incendiary
boats on the city of Algiers in the name of slave trade.
For the United States, those events, known also as the Second Barbary
War, 1815-1816, were one of the turning-points in its foreign policy in
particular and its history in general. A look at American foreign policy in
connection with developments in relations with Algiers during the period 1798-
1816 would probably help understand how Algiers was manipulated, once
more, towards the fulfillment of well-defined objectives. If the crisis of 1785-
86 was used to give the United States a constitution and that of 1793 was
exploited to arm it with a navy, the diplomatic and naval tensions that
characterized relations at the opening decades of the 19 th
century served
primarily to cloak its overseas expansionism, namely economic expansionism
and naval presence in the Mediterranean Sea. That was the beginning of
‘gunboat diplomacy’, the forerunner of Rooseveltian ‘big stick diplomacy’,
which opened an era of American imperialism.
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