The correspondence and diaries of two American merchant sailors, James Cathcart and Captain Richard O’Brien, who were held captive in Algiers from 1785 to 1795-1796, bridge and complicate the two literatures of commercial-diplomatic and informal networks.
During this period the nascent American government, and over 100 of its citizens, were held hostage by the North African “Barbary States” of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli and Tunis. Using the letters and diaries of the two most prolific captives, Cathcart and O’Brien, this article shows that the captives successfully penetrated diplomatic networks and self-interestedly wove their cause for liberty into the emerging national narrative.
This article argues that, through the captives’ political rhetoric and canny exploitation of their positions in informal transnational networks, we can gain new insights into how nonelite citizens drew on a shared language of liberty and expectations of popular participation in policy development to simultaneously influence the terms of national identity and reinvent themselves.