“Towards a connected history of bondage in the Mediterranean: Recent trends in the field”

This review article examines recent scholarship on Christian captives in the early modern western Mediterranean. It points out how piracy, captivity, and ransom linked the lives of Christian and Muslim captives, and by extension connected Spain, France and the Italian Peninsula with Morocco and Ottoman Algiers and Tunis. It focuses on slavery, captivity, and redemption, namely, on issues of labor, on the importance of writing as a tool to facilitate ransom, and on the rescue mechanisms that enabled the ransom and return home of captives.