The political economy of ransom in the early modern Mediterranean

Abstract

This article analyzes the political economy of ransom—understood as the interaction between political regulation, market exchange, social obligation, and religious mechanisms—in the Mediterranean between 1575 and 1650. On the basis of the reconstruction of the entangled histories of Christian and Muslim captives, I argue that Spanish, Algerian, and Moroccan actors—captives, merchants, friars, and rulers—transformed the political economy of ransom by collaborating and competing with one another over ransom procedures, the construction of captives’ value and the regulation of human traffic across the sea.