The project examines ship seizures in the early modern Western Mediterranean between c. 1650 and 1800. Undertaken by actors ranging from naval officers and state-sanctioned corsairs to maritime warbands, seizing ships at sea served to assert political dominance, enforce economic sanctions, disrupt (illicit) trade, and generate profits from captured vessels and cargo. Ship seizures obviously relied on embodied skills, as well as the ability to navigate rapidly changing spatial and material conditions at sea, and could be carried out covertly, in open battle, or during cargo inspections embedded in everyday commercial exchange. 

Notwithstanding seizures' pivotal role in early modern maritime conflict, their study has largely been subsumed under the historiography of piracy and seaborne raiding. This is particularly true of the Western Mediterranean, where maritime coercion has been approached predominantly through the lenses of religious warfare and the economy of plunder and ransom. By contrast, concrete acts of capturing and invading enemy vessels, as well as their political and institutional aftermath, have received comparatively little attention. 

To investigate the practices and representations associated with ship seizures, the project focuses on incidents involving vessels sailing under the French flag, on the one hand, and those of Algerian and Tunisian provenance, on the other, which together constituted a central arena of maritime coercion in the Western Mediterranean between c. 1650 and 1800. Moving beyond conventional dichotomies between regulated and “primitive” violence, and drawing on interdisciplinary research on organised violence, the project argues that ship seizures provide a unique vantage point from which to re-examine the formation of early modern cultures of combat. Based on source material from French naval and diplomatic collections, as well as archives in Malta, the project will first establish a digital dataset that provides a quantitative overview of the different practices and representations associated with maritime coercion. The empirical findings will then be examined through the lens of research dimensions informed by the cultural history of violence, thereby broadening our understanding of this common naval operation, which has often been framed as a relatively bloodless economic warfare tactic.