ABSTRACT
Firstly, English maritime activity in connection with the Barbary Regencies of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli during these three centuries has not lacked its interpreters. Secondly, in recent years a growing interest in the sea has been manifested amongst Ottoman historians, a development signalised by a sudden proliferation of international symposia and seminars on the subject. British policy in the eastern Mediterranean, and specifically in Ottoman waters, with regard to the prosecution of the war at sea against France, was cautious in the extreme, both on the part of the Crown and of the Levant Company. The Ottoman islands – speaking of the Archipelago – seem to be a half-way world, in the Ottoman empire but not entirely of it, when compared with the surrounding littoral of the Aegean. Contemporary insertions in the texts have been placed between curly brackets.
