Historians have used Barbary captivity largely to discuss early American diplomatic and commercial relations, the United States Navy's birth, or the formation of an American identity. Instead, I analyze the North African slavery suffered by hundreds of American between 1776 and 1830 in terms of their enslavement, thus situating my work as a study of slavery.

In order to describe the North African enslavement of Americans, I consulted government documents including naval documents, consular instructions and reports, and treasury records; commercial records; and slaves' papers including journals, published narratives, and personal papers. I also referred to European—primarily British—narratives, letters, and consular records to corroborate and correct American sources and provide a better understanding of Westerners' enslavement in North Africa.

In this dissertation, I seek to understand the experiences of Americans enslaved in North Africa, and how their enslavement compared to that of African Americans in North America. Enslaved Americans encountered diverse conditions as Barbary slaves, depending on how they were captured, by whom, and what type of labor they performed while enslaved. Shipwrecked sailors were held in rural settings by pastoralists in northwest Africa and often did little work, while those captured at sea were held in an urban, cosmopolitan setting and generally labored from sunup to sundown.

I use a broadly comparative framework to comprehend the nature of Western enslavement in North Africa. While analyzing enslaved Americans' experiences in North Africa, I confront how radically different this slavery was from the more familiar plantation slavery of the nineteenth-century American South. Those enslaved in Barbary might serve in elite, official positions, own taverns and even ships. This seemingly contradicts our understanding of what a slave is and what enslavement means. To understand this “peculiar institution,” I compare Western slavery in north and northwest Africa to American and Mediterranean systems of slavery. This approach highlights what was specific to this slavery and considers the flexibility of slavery as an institution.