<i>Blood and Ink: The Barbary Archive in Early American Literary History</i> . By Jacob Crane

Jacob Crane poses an interesting question for historians: To what extent did fictional depictions of the Barbary states in the early republican United States affect American attitudes about race and slavery? In a dense and tightly interwoven argument, Crane argues that fictional texts that center the Barbary States were uniquely suited to make arguments about race and slavery in the United States, not just in North Africa. These fictive Barbary states proved adaptable to many arguments, depending on the writer and community for which they wrote.To make his argument, Crane evaluates a number of more-or-less fictional texts published in the early republic. He includes well-studied texts such as Susanna Rowson's Slaves in Algiers and Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive, as well as shorter and more ephemeral texts that were printed in newspapers in major East Coast cities of the United States. His selections include texts from both the era of the Algerine crisis and after its end, allowing him to compare depictions of the region across time. These texts make up what Crane calls the “Barbary archive.” Since the authors of these texts had no firsthand experience with the Barbary States, this archive cannot tell historians much about what life was actually like in North Africa, but it can tell us how Americans used the fictive Barbary states for their own purposes.Part One, “Of Pirates and Print,” analyzes how Americans used Barbary piracy to comment on African slavery in the Americas. This includes texts narrated by both proud American patriots and downcast “Africans,” whose explicitly abolitionist argument inverted the white master/Black slave relationship. Moreover, the trope of the “discovered” and translated Arabic text allowed the actual writers to comment on American society while maintaining a veneer of credulousness. Part Two, “The Barbary and the Jewish Atlantic,” explores the complicated beliefs that white Americans held about Jews and Muslims. While the inversion of white slave/African master destabilized a race-based argument for slavery, racialized depictions of Jews in the Barbary archive suggested that Jews in the United States could never truly be American. In this, the Barbary archive reflects—perhaps more so than shapes, as Crane argues—a strong current of antisemitism in the United States. The fictional Jewish merchants were unwilling to participate in the free commercial enterprise so important to early American luminaries, and this, rather than simple greed, made them appear to be undesirable. Nor did Jews fit neatly into North African society. Crane argues that after the First Barbary War, depictions of Jews shifted as white Americans no longer feared a Jewish-Muslim conspiracy against them. Crane also traces the life of Mordecai Noah, a Jewish author who recorded his experiences as an agent of the United States just before the Second Barbary War. The travel narrative that Noah wrote is not completely fictional, but parts of it are. It is not always clear in Crane's telling which parts are pure fabrication and which parts are rooted in actual events. In either case, Noah tried to distance American Jews from Barbary Muslims, depicting himself as very different from the Muslim people he encountered in North Africa as a U.S. consul.In Part Three, “The Long Shadow of Barbary,” Crane shows how the specter of Barbary captivity lingered long after the practice ended. Representations of it allowed writers to discuss both American expansionism, the violence of slavery, and antislavery uprisings, while maintaining a safe distance from their true aims. Both abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates used those tropes—Americans could argue both that slavery was barbaric, and that American slavery was much better than Barbary slavery. Algiers was used to illustrate a place where slavery had been abolished, thus opening the door for change in America. In particular, the case of the Amistad drew many comparisons to Barbary slavery, and the question of whether Americans who rose up against their Algerian masters would have been condemned. Writers like Frederick Douglass used Barbary captivity to make antislavery arguments. At the same time, Barbary texts allowed white Americans to make the argument that the United States needed to expand across the globe to spread freedom. Even in children's books, such as an adaptation of a famous captivity narrative, writers used Barbary stories to entrench ideas of fortitude under suffering while reifying white superiority.Crane argues that the Barbary archive allowed Americans to make big arguments about modernity and state formation by fictionalizing a real place and real events. I find Crane's view compelling, that fictional Barbary narratives provide a suitable distance from which to critique American society. From a historical perspective, I find less persuaded by his assessment of the impact of such critiques. Readers interacted with these texts alongside many non-fictional texts about Barbary (such as real captivity narratives, which Crane chooses not to consider) as well as many other texts about race and slavery. It is hard to state that these fictional texts were consumed in isolation and thus made a critical contribution to American understandings of race. This monograph would have benefited from deeper discussion of relations between the United States and the Barbary States (by comparing, for example, what Noah wrote back to the State Department alongside his travel narrative. Nevertheless, this monograph is an important contribution to our understanding of how Americans interacted with the real Barbary States, and used fictional Barbary States to advance mostly white American ideals.