Join us in person or online for a seminar with Dr Nat Cutter.
Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662-1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange in an Age of Corsairing and Captivity
The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed a fundamental rewriting of political, diplomatic, economic, and military relations between the Maghreb and the Mediterranean, as the Ottoman Empire and Spain reached the apogee of their regional power, slowly yielding their hegemony to the maritime encroachments of Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic. Seeking to protect their shipping and damage their enemies, these new powers vied for treaty agreements with the autonomous Ottoman provinces of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, and their stunningly effective corsairing fleet, relying on their support in major conflicts including the War of Spanish Succession. As a result, small communities of foreign traders and diplomats sprung up in major ports: ransoming their nations’ captured sailors and ships, negotiating diplomatic disputes, trading with Europe, and gradually embedding themselves in the culture and society of the Maghreb. This talk draws on my first book to tell the stories of the lives and influence of some of these individuals—career negotiator Thomas Baker, housekeeper-turned-merchant Edith Stedham and her Tunis-born daughter Urania, English-born Muslim merchant Hajj Salem—and contextualise them within a period of contestation and cooperation critical to the British Empire’s rise to global power.
29 July 2026, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here.
Nat Cutter is the Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Lecturer in History at the University of Melbourne, with interests in relations between the Maghreb, Britain, and the Mediterranean world. He has written two books: Britain and the Ottoman Maghreb, 1662-1712: Merchants, Consuls, and Cultural Exchange (Oxford University Press, 2026) and, with Tyne Daile Sumner and Rachel Fensham, Cultural Data: The Intimate Analytics of Digital Collections (Routledge 2026). His current research projects focus on Tunisian agency in Mediterranean trade, 1675–1750, and an investigation of British perceptions of the Maghreb through book history.
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