The End of Barbary Terror: America's 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa

This unevenly paced military history gives an exhaustive portrait of the little-known war waged by the United States to stop the enslaving of American sailors by north African pirates. For centuries prior to the 1815 war, the kingdoms of Algeria, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli engaged in a system of state-sponsored piracy, capturing ships cruising the Mediterranean (and even raiding coastal European villages) and using the captors-Leiner estimates as many as a million Europeans had been enslaved-for slave labor in their home ports. When American sailors became targets, the U.S. government could either pay the ransom or go to war. Leiner does an excellent job of describing the personalities involved and depicting the heated naval battles, but the U.S.'s decisive and nearly immediate success in a very short war undermines Leiner's story; once the battles are over, the narrative drifts into the dull terrain of treaties and diplomacy, and the parallels Leiner notes between Islamic terrorism then and now fail to gel into any larger conclusion. Leiner is a talented writer and researcher, but the little-known campaign he chronicles fizzles out too quickly.