Corsairs and Constitutions

This article is concerned with the impact of the activities of so-called Barbary states on the political discourse on a separate Norwegian civil ensign in the union of Norway and Sweden, 1814–1821. In this parliamentary discourse, the argument was made that the Barbary states’ practice of selling treaties of safe passage in order for Christian states to avoid their ships being captured and crews enslaved could endanger the internal political stability of the union. Political measures were taken to avoid such a situation occurring. This case is an indication of how established modes of coexistence between Europe and North Africa could become problematic with the advent of modern constitutions.     

Seventeenth-century legal fictions: the case of John Perry

This essay discusses the role of narrative in the transmission of legal “truth” in the early modern period, taking as its focus the John Perry murder case of 1660. Perry, a servant, confessed to and was convicted of the murder of his missing master, William Harrison, in the village of Campden in Gloucestershire. Two years after Perry’s execution, however, Harrison reappeared, offering in explanation of his absence a lurid and incredible account of his kidnap and transport to the slave markets of Turkey. In the Perry case complex and unstable narratives, with debts to a range of literary genres, served to obscure the central question of a missing body. This narrativisation of circumstance gained further momentum once the affair began to circulate in textual form, when, I will contend, it became not only a legal story but a way of telling stories about the law. In particular, the case raises questions of methodology: where can we, as scholars, locate truth within the ambiguities of law in this period, and is that truth really of value in our consideration of early modern legal and literary texts?     

Denmark and the first world war

This article analyses general opinions of Scandinavia held by British policymakers in the post‐war period, before going on to examine a particular instance of Britain's attempts to copy ‘Scandinavian policies’ in the early 1960s. Given the generally positive views held as concerned Scandinavian economic and social policies at the time, and the influence those countries wielded in international economic and social policy networks, such attempts were only to be expected. During the 1959–1964 Parliament, the British Conservative Government attempted to adopt housing policies from Scandinavia, in particular housing co‐operatives subsidized by the state, but organized by owners and tenants. They failed to entrench such new ideas in the British policy system, for four reasons. The first was the very strong institutional position of municipal housing and owner‐occupation; the second was the taxation system, which proved impervious to change; the third was the obviously politically‐motivated attempt to change British behaviour in a very short time‐frame; and the fourth, crucially, was the lack of knowledge as to how Scandinavian housing markets actually worked. This failed experiment demonstrates the allure, but also the superficiality and some of the dangers, of direct policy transfer between nations.     

Power,Humanitarianism and the Global Liberal Order: Abolition and the Barbary Corsairs in the Vienna Congress System

Although the convergence has been little noted, for several years after Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the moves to extend abolition of the African slave trade internationally following Britain's unilateral declaration in 1807 were joined with efforts to interdict the taking of European captives by the Barbary corsairs of the Ottoman Empire's North African Regencies. Examining the conjunction of the two campaigns consequently deepens our understanding of the development of each. At the same time, study of the combined negotiations and lobbying efforts sheds significant light on several important developments in international history during the congress era, including the extension of a liberal order of political economy and diplomacy beyond Europe, the universalization of humanitarian norms, the internationalization of humanitarian interventions and the emergence of new institutions of collective security following the Vienna settlement of 1815. Analysis of the politics surrounding abolition and Barbary also illuminates the nature of the relationship between power, ideas and institutions in the nineteenth-century international system.