In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Algerian piracy in the Mediterranean loomed large in the American imagination. An estimated seven hundred American citizens, sailors, and naval officers were taken captive over the course of the Barbary Crises (1784–1815), and this overseas danger threatened to grow and irreparably harm the young republic.

Blood and Ink reconstructs the largely forgotten influence of these early American conflicts with North Africa on notions of publicity, print culture, and racial and national identity from independence to the Civil War. Exploring the extensive archive of texts inspired by the conflicts—from captivity narratives, novels, plays, and poems to broadsides, travel narratives, children’s literature, newspaper articles, and visual ephemera—Jacob Crane connects anxieties surrounding North African piracy and white slavery to both the development of American abolitionism and representations of transatlantic African and Jewish identities in the early national and antebellum periods.

“Crane’s book makes a very clear case for why writing about Barbary piracy matters to the development of American ideas and ideas of race, freedom, and citizenship. He recovers several different early American works that can be used as the basis for further scholarship while also adding to the extant scholarship on the transatlantic and transnational origins of US literature.”—Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, author of Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature

“Blood and Ink draws attention to a significant but critically neglected area of focus in early US print culture concerning Barbary discourse. It will have a major impact within early American studies of print culture and its relationship to race, nation, and global perceptions in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.”—Keri Holt, author of Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830