Escalating piracy in the seas off Somalia has led commentators to designate the region the ‘new Barbary’. But the seizures and killings made to date by Somali pirates cannot compare with the three centuries of terror unleashed on Europeans by corsairs in the Mediterranean and beyond. From 1500 to 1800, murderous Muslim pirates from North Africa’s Barbary coast seized and enslaved more than a million Christians. Lords of the Sea gives us the full history of these pirates, first examining their dramatic impact as the violent seaborne vanguard of an expanding Ottoman empire in the early 1500s through to their break from Ottoman authority a century later.

Alan Jamieson explores how the corsairs of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and other fortified coastal ports rose to the apogee of their powers, extending their activities from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, raiding as far as the British Isles and Iceland. Rescuing captive Christians touched everyone in a Western state, from ambassadors obliged to negotiate to rural communities directed by Sunday sermons to contribute to the fund required to buy back their enslaved countrymen and women. While corsair activities declined in the 18th century, it was only a series of naval wars prosecuted into the early years of the 19th by various European states as well as a determined USA that finally ended the menace, culminating in the French conquest of Algiers in 1830.

A welcome addition to nautical military history, Lords of the Sea is an engrossing tale of piracy, enslavement and the rise of the great powers.