00:00 Today on Empire, Anita Arnen and William Dalrymple discuss the Barbary slave trade with Nabil Matar, Professor of the University of Minnesota and author of "Britain and Barbary, 1589 to 1689," exploring the history and connections between Europe, particularly Britain, and the world of Islam during the 16th and 17th centuries.

05:05 The Moors were communities in North Africa with darker skin, and the Elizabethans established contacts with North Africa, particularly Morocco, as an alternative to Spain, with the proposition of joining together to get rid of Spanish presence, and many Brits voluntarily converted to Islam and refused to go back.

09:50 The Barbary Corsairs captured English captives, including some women, who were sometimes ransomed and sometimes accepted back into English society.

14:14 The Barbary Corsairs captured English captives, who were either ransomed or integrated into society, and the slave trade was organized by individual captains and financed by local governors and the Turkish elite.

18:40 English captives in Algiers were given labor and paid, leading some to choose to stay in captivity because it provided a more comfortable and reliable livelihood than in England, and while captives were not enslaved for generations, they could only marry local women and had to convert to Islam, resulting in the loss of their English or Cornish identity.

23:08 The lack of ecclesiastical or royal institutions in England to ransom captives led to a crisis in redeeming English captives in North Africa, as individuals had to rely on collecting money from local parishes and giving it to someone to ransom them, with no guarantee that the ransom would actually be paid.

27:42 The English monarch and royal courts did not care about the captives taken by the Barbary Corsairs, but the families, parishes, and trading companies relied on them and petitioned for help, leading to sporadic intervention by the monarch; English captives wrote accounts of their captivity, some of which may be exaggerated or fictional, but they were written to entertain and appeal to an audience.

32:01 The historian Nabil Matar conducted research on the number of captives taken by the Barbary Corsairs in Great Britain and found that the number ranged from 500 to 4,000, which is significantly lower than the claim of one to 1.25 million enslaved people made by historian Robert Davis; Matar also highlights the difference between the treatment of captives by the Barbary Corsairs and the transatlantic slave trade, and emphasizes that empires like Britain and France had far greater destructive capabilities than the North Africans.

36:28 The treatment of captives taken by the Barbary Corsairs varied, with some being put to work in the homes or fields of their owners, others being used as galley slaves, and some being able to convert to Islam and potentially gain their freedom, although the decision to free them was ultimately up to the owner.

40:57 The Barbary Corsairs' system allowed captives to rise in status and gain freedom through conversion and valuable skills, but by the 18th century, the impoverished North African states no longer attracted Europeans seeking a new life, and the growing sea power of Britain, under Cromwell, diminished their ability to dominate the seas and capture captives.

45:32 North African slaves were kept in British colonies like Tangier, and while slavery was common, the options for freedom and social mobility were greater in North Africa compared to the Americas, and the Barbary states were separate city states that often fought with each other and aligned themselves with European powers.