Although the occupation of Tangier between 1661 and 1684 was one of the most ambitious and intensive overseas projects of the seventeenth-century English state, the ultimate evacuation of the city in the face of parliamentary opposition and Moroccan hostility has long caused historians to neglect the colony and its significance for the development of English empire.Footnote 1 This teleological perspective reflects the broader absence of the Mediterranean from an imperial historiography preoccupied with the rise of settler colonialism in North America and, to a lesser extent, with the commercial success of the East India Company. Since England's empire ultimately centred on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, scholars have generally assumed that Tangier and the Mediterranean were irrelevant for English empire-building. At a time when the Levant Company enjoyed its greatest prosperity, and wars against Muslim corsairs regularly occupied the royal navy, the colonization of Tangier testified, however, to the enduring importance of the Mediterranean for England's commercial and maritime expansion.Footnote 2 Charles II, some of his ministers, and a range of observers envisioned the North African city as a hub within England's trading empire and accordingly sought to transform it into an entrepôt and safe harbour linking the increasingly global threads of English commerce. Seemingly out of place in the evolution of an empire oriented around its American colonies, Tangier could appear central to a seaborne empire that incorporated ‘acquisitions’ in the Americas, ‘ports’ in the Indies, and ‘important fortresses in Africa’.Footnote 3
Recent scholarship focused on the Anglo-Moroccan relations that shaped Tangier's development has thus largely missed the city's real consequence for the development of an English empire. These works have argued that the settlement of Tangier illustrates either England's increasingly aggressive approach to the Muslim world or the limits of its ability to confront Muslim powers.Footnote 4 Yet the full significance of the colonization of Tangier lies in its relationship to England's wider imperial development. Proclaiming Tangier a free port, the crown adopted a mercantile policy that departed from the legally defined national and corporate trades that increasingly linked England to its overseas possessions. While the Navigation Acts reserved England's colonial commerce for English merchants and ships, the colonization of Tangier rested on a different approach to the political economy of empire. As a crown colony and free port at the junction of Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds, Tangier stood quite literally at the cross-roads of ideological debates that shaped the development of English empire from the mid-seventeenth century. The imperial vision that underlay the colonization of Tangier proved ill-suited, however, to the changing context of North African politics and English empire.
This article argues that the ideological foundations of the occupation of Tangier not only contributed to the colony's ultimate failure, but also isolated it within the evolution of an English empire based on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Rather than reaffirming the absence of the Mediterranean from our understanding of English imperial development, the abandonment of Tangier instead highlights an extended process through which competing models for the organization of overseas trade and empire defined the shape of empire for the following century. The first section of this article accordingly recovers the particular conception of English empire that inspired the acquisition of Tangier. Alison Games has recently observed that the history of Tangier testifies to the existence of ‘multiple English paths toward imperial rule’, arguing that plans for Tangier drew on contrasting models of colonial plantation and commercial accommodation drawn from the English experience of the Atlantic and Mediterranean trading worlds respectively.Footnote 5 Neither model, though, fully reflects expectations for Tangier's value within a self-consciously maritime and trading empire. The questions that surrounded the settlement of Tangier centred not on whether the English should pursue commerce or conquest along the North African coast, but on how that trade should be organized and whether the crown or a company should oversee it. The second section examines how these debates divorced Tangier from the development of England's increasingly global empire. The creation of a free port at Tangier oriented the city toward the Mediterranean, but further reflected the rise of intra-imperial boundaries that increasingly differentiated maritime space. As the Navigation Acts defined an economy spanning the Atlantic, they also excluded Tangier from that emerging colonial system.
Crown possession of Tangier similarly proved to be incompatible with domestic opposition and the sovereign claims of an assurgent Moroccan empire. Throughout the Mediterranean, centuries of religiously inspired warfare shaped the ideological dynamics of state formation and competition. Inimical to the Islamic states of the Mediterranean, Christian settlements on the northern coast of Africa, such as Tangier, were particularly vulnerable to the revitalized Muslim polities that emerged or resurfaced in the later seventeenth century as major powers in the Mediterranean basin.Footnote 6 As the final section of this article illustrates, however, neither English weakness nor Moroccan hostility sufficiently explains the failure of Tangier. In the years following Tangier's abandonment, the East India Company successfully navigated the final throes of Mughal expansion and the early rise of successor states that made sovereign claims over exposed factories; slaving forts along the African coast similarly survived and even thrived despite their vulnerability to the powerful polities that fed the trade they served. Company factors navigated a world of ‘composite sovereignties’, drawing legitimacy through both European and extra-European sources, but the imperial aspirations and ideological factors that inspired Charles II's investment in Tangier ensured that a different process dominated there.Footnote 7 In the face of Moroccan expansion, the crown's claim to unitary sovereignty over Tangier proved unsustainable.Footnote 8
I
In 1661, Charles II's marriage to Catherine de Braganza of Portugal brought with it Tangier, Bombay, and great hopes for the restored monarchy's global future. For the Portuguese, two poor and vulnerable communities surrounded by enemies were a small price for English support in their war against Spain.Footnote 9 For the earl of Clarendon and his fellow advocates of the marriage alliance between England and Portugal, however, these two colonies ‘situated very usefully for trade’ defined the crown's imperial ambitions as potential commercial centres that would allow England to overcome the advantage the Dutch had secured in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.Footnote 10 Although royal administration of Bombay proved fleeting, the apparent strategic and commercial potential of a harbour at the Strait of Gibraltar led the English state into one of its most ambitious overseas projects of the seventeenth century. Over twenty-two years, Charles II and his ministers invested more in Tangier than in any other English colony, pouring some two million pounds into developing and defending a harbour that promised control over the inner sea and the security of an English port linking the burgeoning Atlantic economy to its Iberian and Mediterranean markets.Footnote 11
Although Charles II acquired Bombay and Tangier together, few historians have compared their early histories or considered the significance of their divergent trajectories. Admittedly, few observers directly linked these two former Portuguese colonies at the fringes of powerful Muslim polities. Initial, if overly optimistic, expectations for their development nevertheless point to a common imperial vision. In early 1662, the propagandist, James Howell, defended the addition of Tangier and Bombay to a set of global acquisitions that favoured English trade and navigation and glorified their possessor, extending ‘his Fame as well as his power making Him most redoubtable farr & neer’. For Howell, England's new possessions of Bombay, Jamaica, Tangier, and Dunkirk fulfilled the classic strategic and economic roles of colonies, providing employment for the country's surplus population while promising to support England's global navigation, fostering trade and industry, and tending ‘to the universall Good of all peeple which is the chiefest Designe & Desire of his Maiesty by being to that end at such extraordinary expences by Sea & Land’.Footnote 12 In Howell's vision of Charles II's empire, the North Sea and the Mediterranean were as important for the expansion of English commercial and maritime power as the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Although visions of royal empire proved equally illusory at Bombay and Tangier, the different outcomes of that failure make the comparison of these two colonies all the more compelling.
Bombay was turned over to the East India Company in 1667, under whose management it would eventually become a seat of British empire in the Indian Ocean. Conversely, early proposals to create a company to conduct trade along the Moroccan coast proved short-lived and Tangier remained under royal control. Behind these contrasting trajectories were common questions regarding the political economy of overseas trade and the relationship between state and corporate authority. Trading companies were not merely commercial organizations, but rather political entities that exhibited sovereign characteristics within their jurisdictions.Footnote 13 As state-like bodies, companies were designed to protect and regulate trade where local political conditions appeared to render merchants vulnerable to oppression or competition but where the crown could not exercise effective authority. Underlying the divergent histories of Bombay and Tangier were thus ideological arguments that contrasted the political and commercial conditions of the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans.
In August 1661, as preparations began to dispatch an expedition to occupy Tangier, Robert Starr, the English consul at the Moroccan port of Salé, petitioned Charles II for patents granting exclusive trading rights on Africa's Atlantic coast from Cape Blanco, on the north-western coast of Africa, to Salé.Footnote 14 Starr explained that, as a result of his long engagement with them, ‘the people of that country’ were willing to yield up into his ‘sole posission & power’ an island and a castle off the Moroccan coast that would serve as a safe harbour for English ships sailing into the Mediterranean or Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and further requested a garrison of one hundred men, arms and provisions, cannon, and 1,500 pounds annually out of the customs revenue in order to defray expenses.Footnote 15 Starr's petition was referred to the Lords and Commissioners for Foreign Plantations and gained the support of powerful backers. On 11 September 1661, a patent was granted to the duke of York and a group of prominent merchants and courtiers incorporating them as the Morocco Company along the lines Starr had originally proposed.Footnote 16
Although patented, the Morocco Company never came to fruition; instead, the patentees appear to have shifted their attention to the Company of Royal Adventurers trading to Africa, under whose jurisdiction the Atlantic coast of Morocco would fall in its revised charter of January 1663.Footnote 17 It is probable, however, that the company was doomed by the vocal opposition it evoked among officials and merchants involved in the settlement of Tangier. For E. M. G. Routh, the only historian to note the proposed Morocco Company and the debate surrounding it, their rejection of corporate trade deprived Tangier of a proven means to develop trade in an insecure environment and thus of an imperial future comparable to that enjoyed by Bombay under the East India Company. Routh's verdict offers a telling counterfactual insofar as it suggests that institutional organization, rather than geographic location, explains the different fates of Tangier and Bombay.Footnote 18 Yet, opposition to the Morocco Company foreshadowed the problems that would later emerge from the brief co-existence of corporate monopoly and a royal colony in the Indian Ocean. Company domination was no less contested in Bombay than in Morocco and, in March 1667, Bombay's governor, Sir Gervase Lucas, denounced the independent sovereignty the East India Company appeared to enjoy in the Indian Ocean. Lucas complained that the Company's resistance to a port outside its control stifled his efforts to develop the trade of Bombay and advised, ‘so long as Your Majestie continues that Company, your affaire[s] in these parts will never answer your great designe and noble intention of advancing trade’.Footnote 19 Even the company factor, Henry Gates, who became deeply involved with the struggling settlement, wrote in 1665, ‘unlesse His Majesty doeth absolutly enorder the Company Presidency and factorys removeall to this place [Bombay], and force the trade hither by keepeing some frigats heere in India, a trade will scarse bee settled as it should bee’.Footnote 20 Although the crown's inability to maintain Bombay effectively led Charles II to cede that colony to the East India Company, ideological considerations underlined both this apparently pragmatic decision and the controversy provoked by the patenting of the Morocco Company.
The officials and merchants who wrote against the Morocco Company feared it would compete with Tangier for Moroccan trade, forestalling expectations that England's new possession would become an entrepôt for the commerce of North Africa and the Mediterranean. Nathaniel Luke, secretary to Tangier's first governor, the earl of Peterborough, warned in late 1661 that a company in the ‘hands of particular men’ who had no interest in the success of a city lying outside the limits of their monopoly, would rather aim ‘to carry the trade to the Moores then to give his Majesties & their nation the advantage thereof’.Footnote 21 As Thomas Povey, the treasurer for Tangier and member of the English Council of Trade, similarly reminded his readers, English expectations for the city's future depended on its transformation into ‘a free port, & the Scale of the English trade’ that would attract foreign trade, undersell neighbouring ports, and draw the Moroccans into a mutually beneficial commercial relationship. If the Morocco Company sought to trade directly with Moroccan ports, it would convince the Moroccans that ‘Tanger shall onely remaine as an enemi's Garrison’, and encourage them to oppose violently an English settlement lacking the trade that alone could ‘drawe them into any kind of amity’.Footnote 22
Critically, neither the memorials of Tangier's officials nor those offered by two separate groups of merchants trading to Morocco made a blanket argument against corporations. Thomas Povey had himself been deeply engaged in schemes to create a company trading to the Caribbean in the late 1650s and joined the patentees of the Morocco Company as a shareholder in the Company of the Royal Adventurers.Footnote 23 Instead, opponents of the Morocco Company more narrowly questioned whether that corporation was necessary or appropriate for Morocco's political conditions. In this sense, Povey's earlier vocal support for a joint-stock West India Company suggests why he viewed the Morocco Company with scepticism. Disgusted by the unwillingness and inability of the English Council of State to support its conquest of Jamaica adequately, Povey advocated the creation of a company to carry on Cromwell's war against Spain on private funds, marshalling private capital towards purportedly public ends.Footnote 24 As the pamphleteer ‘Philopatris’ later explained, joint-stock companies were political bodies designed to govern trade where the state could not: ‘there is a necessity of a Joynt Stock in all Foreign Trade, where the Trade must be maintained by Force and Forts on the Land, and where his Majesty cannot conveniently maintain an Amity and Correspondence by Ambassadors, and not elsewhere’.Footnote 25 According to Philopatris, while companies were vital for the protection of trade in the Indian Ocean, where political conditions were unstable and beyond the reach of the English state, they were unnecessary wherever the state itself could safeguard trade.
Philopatris's explanation of the relationship between corporate trade and state authority responded to an ideological debate that differed in key respects from that which grew up around the Morocco Company, but it is nevertheless significant for understanding why Povey and others opposed that company. Philopatris wrote to defend the East India Company against accusations launched by the Levant Company that it had inappropriately monopolized England's trade to the Indian Ocean, a dispute which called into question whether joint-stock or regulated companies were the more effective means to organize England's overseas trade.Footnote 26 This later contest between regulated and joint-stock companies did not factor into debates over the Morocco Company. Although the Morocco Company was probably conceived as a joint stock, opponents of the company did not make an issue of its institutional organization and instead warned that any form of corporate monopoly would prove to be incompatible with the creation of a free port at Tangier.Footnote 27 Even so, Philopatris's attack on the Levant Company showed how the crown's diplomatic and military presence in the Mediterranean negated the need for corporate trade in that sea. Philopatris denied that the Levant Company served any useful purpose precisely because the king's warships could sail from Tangier to obtain justice for injuries suffered by English merchants in the Ottoman empire.Footnote 28 In this respect, the opponents of the Morocco Company anticipated Philopatris's later arguments. Corporate trade was unnecessary on the Moroccan coast, since the crown intended to make Tangier the cornerstone of the expansion of its power and prestige into the Mediterranean. Moreover, it was also a threat to the king's authority. As Povey pointed out, if the Morocco Company were to have ‘power to erect forts & command them, & to manage trade by their owne authority’, it would be in contradiction to the patents already granted by the king to his governor-general at Tangier and would prevent him from fulfilling his commission.Footnote 29
While corporate trade threatened royal authority, its opponents argued that it also appeared inappropriate for the political environment of Morocco. As Povey succinctly advised, Tangier was ‘to be secured to His Majesty either by force or trade’. The crown had consequently sought to make Tangier a trading city that could draw Moroccans into amicable commercial relations; the competition of company trading posts would leave Tangier a ‘constant settled charge to his Majesty’ and convince its neighbours that hostile designs underlay its occupation.Footnote 30 Like Philopatris, the opponents of the Morocco Company also assumed that joint-stock companies were designed to deploy force to protect and advance their trade, but they advised that if the Company used its allowance of military supplies and customs revenue to establish coastal forts, it would only further provoke Moroccan hostility. In this vein, the memorial of one of two groups of merchants writing against the Morocco Company argued that if the English could take advantage of Tangier's location to limit trade along the Moroccan coast to their new port, they would make Tangier into the ‘the head & fountaine of trade, & the safety & protection of the English marchants [sic]’. The merchants warned, however, that, ‘to erect & build new forts & castles in other places (if it were possible) is the only way to create & stirr up jealousies & provoke the people of that Country to believe, that the English nation intends to enslave them & make a conquest of their countrey’.Footnote 31 Moreover, the ‘antient traders to Barbary without the straights’ warned that the creation of forts was ‘not feasable, without a national engagement, the Country being populous, that people warlyke, & plentifully furnished with all manner of offensive Arms, horses & ammunition’, and would merely convince the Moroccans that the English aimed at territorial conquest.Footnote 32
It would be overly simplistic to argue that debate over the Morocco Company reflected fundamentally different approaches to political economy based on the explicit opposition of pacific trade and the aggressive commerce of trading companies. The nearly simultaneous rejection of crown rule in the Indian Ocean and of corporate trade along the Moroccan coast instead points to widespread ideas that trade had to be organized differently in response to diverse political and economic environments.Footnote 33 Underlying the issue of whether trade to Morocco should be governed by a company were questions about whether the crown could effectively regulate trade, safeguard English merchants, and maintain diplomatic relations with powers outside of Europe. Contrasting recommendations for Tangier's development overwhelmingly depended, however, on a generally unified conception of England's empire as maritime and commercial. Starr's proposal offered a vision for the development of trade to Morocco that was not substantially different from that of Tangier's proponents, as both imagined fortified ports linking England's global networks of trade to Morocco and the Mediterranean. Similarly, although the East India Company jealously guarded its monopoly on trade to and from England, it approached the trading world of the Indian Ocean differently and established its ports as cities open to indigenous merchants and to the private trade of its own factors.Footnote 34 Upon the East India Company's accession to Bombay, its factors suggested that the city be turned into a free port to attract Indian merchants, citing the success of the Italian ports of Livorno and Genoa to illustrate the value of low duties and commercial openness for the development of port cities.Footnote 35 As seen in the next section, the example of Livorno equally inspired English thinking with regard to Tangier.
Povey's sharp dichotomy between ‘force’ and ‘trade’ echoed a broader distinction regularly drawn by seventeenth-century English writers between empires based on conquest and those based on trade.Footnote 36 As James Howell affirmed when he lauded Charles II's new foreign possessions:
Though the Acquestes aforesayd be a considerable addition to the Honor, grandeur, & interests of his Majestie, yet it is not that, or further Extent of Territories which He aymes at, as much, as at Enlargement of Trade with the security thereof & consequently the Common Good of his marchants & Sea-adventuring.Footnote 37
Defending the sale of Dunkirk to France in 1662, the ever flexible Howell identified two kinds of ‘Forren Possessions’, those ‘got by the discovery of the Marchant’ which would become centres of trade and commodity production and those without commercial benefit but ‘meerely maintained by Praesidial Forces or Garison’. While Dunkirk seemed of the latter variety and promised only expenses and political jealousies, the American colonies were examples of the former and ‘ther are great hopes that in Afric Tanger will prove so, with other extraodinary advantages besides’.Footnote 38
The use of force was implicit even in a self-consciously maritime empire: at issue was how it was to be used and in whom lay the authority to wield it. Tangier's governors repeatedly emphasized their efforts to induce the Moroccans to peace by establishing mutually beneficial trading relationships and just as frequently affirmed that their territorial aspirations extended no farther than the surrounding fields to provide sustenance for the garrison and room for outworks to safeguard it.Footnote 39 They were equally convinced that only naval power and frigates cruising before Moroccan ports would restrain Muslim corsairs and induce Moroccans to come to Tangier to trade.Footnote 40 On the other hand, suggestions that Tangier would be a foundation for conquests in North Africa were rejected in favour of commercial and maritime aspirations for the city. During the summer of 1661, the lords commissioners for Tangier accordingly denied Peterborough's request for a large body of cavalry, on the basis that they intended ‘not to make a warr with the Moores’, but to cement peace with them through trade.Footnote 41 The reaction of the earl of Sandwich to the merchant James Wilson's plans for a territorial empire expanding outward from Tangier highlights the maritime vision that dominated English expectation for the city. Writing in late 1661, Wilson emphasized Tangier's strategic and commercial importance before adding that he did not ‘thinke his majestie will content him selfe with one Port but rather endevor to people all the coast to the East as far as Triply to the south as far as Saphy’.Footnote 42 Commanding the expedition that took possession of Tangier, Sandwich cautioned in response to Wilson's projections:
the designes proposed, mee thinkes are Ill considered, for, to propose the possessing Africa from Gamboa to Tripoly is a vast thing, and one that sees what charge & trouble a Towne is possest that is given and delivered up, will Conceive a great deale more difficulty to posses Townes we must fight for, and not vary certain to prevaile neither.Footnote 43
Sandwich by no means rejected the use of force to increase and project English power; instead, he distinguished sharply between England's interest to develop its maritime power and dreams of territorial empire. Sandwich thus intended to concentrate upon the improvement of Tangier itself which would ‘keepe all europe in Awe’, and to accomplish the goal of creating a magazine and free port that could attract the trade not only of other cities of North Africa, but also of established ports like Livorno.Footnote 44 Sandwich further urged that after securing Tangier, the English should aim to conquer Ceuta from the Spanish in order to gain complete control of the Strait, such that once ‘the Kings Soveraignty maintaynes the Seas’, he would be able to ‘put what Conditions [he] Pleased upon all the World, that passe through the Straights’. From these opening steps, the English could then seek ‘to gaine both ways, upon the Coast of Barbary, the places that are seated upon the Rivers, and are places of traffique, still preserving peace with the Main Land, soe necessary for Tanger’.Footnote 45
Sandwich's hope that Tangier would serve as the foundation of a maritime empire commanding the Strait of Gibraltar reflected widespread expectations that control of the city might be only the first step towards English domination of the Mediterranean. Admiral John Lawson warned that Tangier was of such importance that, if the Dutch should get hold of the city, they would be able to ‘keep the place against all the World, and give the law to all the trade of the Mediterranean’, a verdict that, according to Clarendon, left Charles II ‘very much affected’.Footnote 46 Shortly thereafter, Giovanni Luca Durazzo, Genoa's ambassador to the newly restored monarchy, reported that England's commitment to Tangier echoed Henry VIII's ambition to develop his naval power in order to ‘open and close the ocean at the strait of Calais’, a goal Charles II now aimed at ‘with more reason’ through control of the Strait of Gibraltar.Footnote 47 The French engineer, Nicolas de Clerville, was particularly worried that the English would seek further possessions within the Mediterranean that would allow them to sustain and justify their ‘pretended monarchy of the sea’. Writing to Colbert in early 1662, he warned that, if the English gained control of additional footholds in the Mediterranean, ‘they would not only by this means establish a new right to their pretensions of empire in the Mediterranean as well as in the Ocean’, but would also be able to establish a toll at Tangier by virtue of controlling both sides of the Strait.Footnote 48 This toll might fall on traffic passing Tangier or on trade to the Levant but, in either case, it posed a threat to France, first putting the French king to the shame of being tributary to the English (‘la honte de se voir tributaire des Anglois’) and secondly threatening his subjects’ commerce in the Levant, already outpaced by English competitors.Footnote 49
The prospect that possession of Tangier would allow England to exercise sovereignty over the mouth of the Mediterranean proved misplaced. As Henry Rumbold, the former English consul at Cadiz, later pointed out, it was naive to think that England could control access to the Mediterranean when Spain, at its military height, had failed to obtain that same objective.Footnote 50 Tangier's engineer, Sir Hugh Cholmley, similarly recalled that more cautious voices had warned, ‘exacting tribute upon trading vessels was a thing of so universal a consequence as not to be maintained by the power of a single nation’.Footnote 51 In a sea where competing empires and states collided, domination over the Strait of Gibraltar represented an unsustainable extension of English sovereignty. In the final section, we will return to the limitations imposed on the expansion of English empire into the Mediterranean by the sovereignty of Mediterranean polities.
At a time when the conception of England's empire as a transatlantic political community was still in its infancy, descriptions of that overseas empire evoked not an emergent imperial polity, but a maritime empire marked by its commercial and naval power.Footnote 52 The only English port near the Mediterranean, Tangier appeared essential to protect English navigation in that sea, as naval wars against the North African regencies established the near-permanent presence of royal fleets there.Footnote 53 Tangier's advocates, however, also linked the city's naval role to its wider place in a trading empire. As the engineer, Sir Henry Sheeres, was later to ask, regarding Tangier and its role in English commercial and maritime strategy, ‘What is it has rendered England so formidable, so rich, and so renown'd a Kingdom; but the strength of our Navyes, and Universality of our Commerce?’ Continuing to describe the ‘Machin’ of commerce upon which England's power rested, Sheeres further asked his readers, ‘because there are many various Wheels and Motions therein, why should not Tanger be esteem'd among the principal of those movements, which keep this vast Engin going?’Footnote 54
II
How Tangier was to fit within the ‘vast Engin’ described by Sheeres proved a contentious question. Clearly, the city's development depended on its ability to attract trade and a trading community; as the secretary of state, Sir Edward Nicholas, wrote to the earl of Peterborough, ‘it must be trade & Comerce that must improve the interest of that important Place’.Footnote 55 While recent research has examined the links between Tangier and England's North American empire, the crown's efforts to transform the city into an entrepôt for trade passing through the Strait of Gibraltar oriented it towards the trading world of the Mediterranean.Footnote 56 Particularly, English plans for the colony emphasized its development as a free port and open city that would attract Mediterranean merchants and their trade. The instructions issued to the earl of Middleton upon his appointment as governor of the colony thus emphasized that the king had incorporated the city in 1668, ‘as the most likely Meanes to advance our Free-Port, diminishe our Charge, and invite Inhabitants and Comerce thither: Which were the Only Ends aimed at by us, in possessing that Place, and making a mould there’.Footnote 57 The charter granted to Tangier similarly affirmed that it would be a ‘free-city’, whose corporation included all the city's Christian residents; foreigners were admitted to Tangier's common council and to official positions.Footnote 58 The substantial Catholic contingent within both Tangier's garrison and civilian population, as well as its Jewish residents, ensured a measure of religious toleration within the city.Footnote 59 Uniquely, Tangier was also granted a court merchant comparable to French and Italian tribunals that operated according to the law merchant. As an anonymous Spanish account of the city emphasized, ‘neither the city of London, with its great emporium of merchandise, nor any other city in the British dominions’ possessed such an institution.Footnote 60 Since courts merchant had disappeared in an England dominated by the common law, the creation of the court at Tangier testified not only to the crown's commercial aspirations for the city, but also to the extent of the colony's integration into the culture and political economy of the Mediterranean.Footnote 61
Occupying an important place in seventeenth-century economic thinking, free ports were central to the political economy of the early modern Mediterranean as rulers responded to the sea's fiercely competitive commercial environment by aiming to attract foreign merchants and shipping through a combination of low duties and favourable trading conditions.Footnote 62 The instructions issued to the earl of Peterborough when he took command of Tangier thus emphasized that the transformation of the city into a trading hub and free port lay at the centre of the crown's wider aspirations for its new possession. After explaining that he had put himself ‘to this great charge for making this addition to our Dominions’ in order ‘to gaine to our subjects the trade of Barbary & enlarge our Dominions in that sea & advance thereby the Honor of our Crowne & the Generall comerce & weale of our subjects’, Charles II ordered Peterborough to announce that ‘no dutys Customs, or other taxes whatever’ would be laid on goods imported or exported from Tangier, the city remaining a free port for five years.Footnote 63
Opening Tangier to foreign merchants and exempting goods bought and sold in the city from customs and most duties, the crown drew on the example of Mediterranean free ports. While free ports were by no means limited to that sea, it is indicative of the Mediterranean context within which the English viewed Tangier that they looked to the success of Livorno, which had become one of the chief trading ports of the Mediterranean under the patronage of the grand dukes of Tuscany, as a model for Tangier's development. In the seventeenth century, Livorno emerged as the focal point of English trade in the Mediterranean as it became a distribution centre where exports of manufactured and colonial products could be offloaded and reshipped and where return cargoes of Italian and Levantine goods could be procured.Footnote 64 Tangier's advocates appear to have imagined that the colony would fulfil this same role. Wilson and Sandwich both anticipated Tangier replacing Livorno as an entrepôt for Mediterranean trade, while George Downing advised Clarendon that, if the king were to make Tangier ‘as Legorn a place for all nations to lay up their goods in upon very little or no custome … it may grow a very wonderfull & considerable place’.Footnote 65 The example of Livorno was especially attractive to English officials since it illustrated that an open and inviting port could flourish even without a hinterland. In 1670, Cholmley advised William Coventry that, following his discussions with Tangier's merchants, he was increasingly optimistic that the city could be made ‘a place of Trade’, noting that ‘it is not the Continent of Italie makes Ligorne flowrish, by takeing off the Commodities that are brought thether, ten parts for one being transported unto other places’. Instead, the dukes of Tuscany had used offers of low rents and excellent port facilities to entice merchants and trade to their free port, knowing that ‘it was a Conflux of people that much enrich the towne’.Footnote 66 For the length of its possession of Tangier, the crown similarly sought to create a regulatory and political environment that would attract foreign merchants and their accompanying trade.
While free ports had formed a central element of commercial proposals advanced by merchants and the commercially minded under the Commonwealth, they were also a departure from conceptions of the political economy of trade that increasingly dominated English mercantile thinking, resting on an open approach to trade even as England otherwise restricted and regulated its commerce along national lines.Footnote 67 Thus, although Tangier, as a port open to foreign trade, became a model for those in the American colonies who called for repeal of the Navigation Acts, its place in England's wider colonial empire proved problematic.Footnote 68 A report on proposals to re-establish the former ‘composition port’ at Dover from the commissioners of the customs pointed out that Mediterranean free ports responded to particular mercantile and political conditions that were starkly distinct from England's actual interest. Instead, the commissioners noted that England had no need of free ports ‘according to such settlements as are in Ligorne & Genoa’, for whereas they belonged ‘to petty States that gaine Trade from one another to serve the Countries’, England already enjoyed an abundance of commodities to fuel its commerce. Consequently, while the policies of the Italian free ports aimed at attracting foreign merchants and shipping, England had no need to ‘decoy it hither upon other Terms his Majestie being the greatest King of Waters in Europe’.Footnote 69 The writer, Francis Brewster, later echoed this opinion, arguing that the success of Livorno had given free ports an excessively positive reputation for, although creating one might be ‘a good Expedient’ for states that ‘hath neither Natural or Artificial Provision for Trade and Navigation, yet it may be prejudicial to a Nation that hath both’.Footnote 70 Indeed, the original establishment of the free port at Tangier specifically excluded ships coming from English colonies and from beyond the Cape of Good Hope, maintaining the distinct separation between European and colonial trade laid down by the navigation laws.Footnote 71
Consequently, when reports circulated that ships were sailing directly to Tangier from the American plantations under passes from the governor of Jamaica, the privy council voiced its concern as to both the potential of this practice to deprive the crown of customs revenue and the larger impact it might have on English trade.Footnote 72 Called before the privy council's Committee of Trade in January 1669, the farmers of the customs argued that trade between Tangier and the colonies violated the Navigation Acts and, in the process, offered a cogent interpretation of the economic logic of England's navigation laws. The farmers emphasized that these laws explicitly aimed to tie the plantations more closely to England, employing English shipping, providing a vent for English manufactures, and, above all, ‘makeing this kingdome a Staple not onely of the Comodities of those Plantations but of the Comodities of other Countries for Supplying them, it being the usage of other Nations to keep their Plantations trade to themselves’. Conversely, it would be easy for any person living in Tangier ‘to colour the Shipps and Goods of Strangers and by that means and the easy and cheap accesse to the port as aforesaid draw the Trade from England and Englishmen’.Footnote 73
In response to these arguments, Tangier's mayor, the merchant John Bland, emphasized how Tangier could fit in the framework of England's restrictive navigation laws. Although Bland owned plantations in Virginia and had earlier written in defence of free trade for the colonies, he appears to have viewed Tangier not merely as a legal loophole to send colonial goods directly to Mediterranean markets, but rather as an integrated component of England's wider commercial empire that bridged the trading worlds of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.Footnote 74 Bland thus argued that Tangier was ‘a parte, & an oute Porte of England, Governed by the same lawes, & Councills, suplyed with the same treasure and wholly dependant upon, and subservient to the trade, navigation, and strength, of England’.Footnote 75 Customs on colonial goods could be collected at Tangier and the goods reshipped to their Mediterranean markets at lower cost, not only ensuring Tangier's success, but also promoting England's dominance of trade in the Mediterranean.Footnote 76 Carrying these arguments before the Council of Trade, to which the question of Tangier's participation in colonial trade had been referred by the privy council, Bland and his fellow advocates for permitting trade between Tangier and England's plantations affirmed that Tangier could be ‘reputed no other but a Plantation of ours’ and thus permitted to trade with the other, American colonies.Footnote 77 Stating that Tangier was ‘a free port as well as an English Plantation’, the authors further asked ‘how shall its Neighbors bee invited to bring Aught to them if they can have nothing thence to carry back’, and pointed out the town could hardly succeed as a free port unless it could use colonial goods to attract foreign merchants.Footnote 78 Moreover, the defenders of this trade responded to the customs farmers’ accusations that it would harm English trade and revenues by emphasizing its national character, since it was ‘a Trade att our own Nations, English with English, Plantation with Plantation’.Footnote 79 Would trade be improved or people encouraged to settle at Tangier if ‘all Our English Plantations or Tanger should bee counted Aliens and forreigners’? Instead, on Tangier's maintenance depended the security of English merchants and shipping from North African corsairs and on Tangier thus hung the fate of English commerce, ‘the chiefest Bulk of Our English Trade depending on the Traffick negotiated in the Mediteranian both in reference to the disposing of Our Europian and American goods and bringing Returnes thereof thense so usefull for our own manufactorie’.Footnote 80
Despite the case made by Bland and his associates, the Council of Trade ‘utterly rejected’ their proposal to open Tangier to the plantation trade.Footnote 81 A few years later, the Lords of Trade and Plantations would affirm that within the context of the Navigation Acts, Tangier was not to be ‘deemed a Plantation of His Majesty in Asia, Africa, or America’.Footnote 82 As a matter of economic policy, the crown's divergent approaches to the development of Tangier and management of colonial trade were not contradictory. As the writer, Roger Coke, observed, ‘Even the Act of Navigation with reason prohibits the Trade of our Plantations to Forreigners, because thereby, though it would enrich them by how much more their Trade would become great, yet this would be so much to the loss of the Nation: and permits a free Trade to Tangier, because it may enrich the place, and make it more frequented’.Footnote 83 The legal separation of Tangier from England's Atlantic empire does, however, reveal how different approaches to the organization of trade divided the trading world of the Mediterranean from the increasingly exclusive zones of colonial trade in the Atlantic Ocean. The effect of this separation was not only to deprive Tangier of its predicted role as a nexus of global trade, but also to accentuate a process whereby legal and commercial regulations defined the oceanic boundaries that marked England's imperial development. The division of Tangier from England's wider trading empire reflects the rise of the ‘ocean regionalism’ that Lauren Benton has recently dated to the end of the seventeenth century.Footnote 84 Whereas Benton concentrates on the emergence of distinct legal regimes in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as the English state and East India Company confronted a global upsurge of piracy, the case of Tangier highlights how different trading regimes equally differentiated the Mediterranean and Atlantic.
Despite English efforts to encourage Tangier's development as a free port, the colony proved to be a disappointment as a commercial centre. As a small port cut off from the circuits of England's Atlantic trade and exposed equally to storms and Moroccan attacks, Tangier never attracted a sizeable merchant community. Instead, the colony's population consisted almost entirely of the soldiers stationed there and the merchants who supplied them; trade to Tangier, meanwhile, centred primarily on provisioning the garrison.Footnote 85 Under these conditions, Tangier had little chance of rivalling the more established entrepôts and port-cities of the Mediterranean. Yet even as Tangier proved ever more costly, unprofitable, and politically divisive, its supporters continued to praise the commercial and strategic potential of a city ‘situated in the midst of the trading world’.Footnote 86 Tangier's location at the mouth of the Mediterranean appeared to give the colony an importance out of proportion with its economic value. The separation of Tangier from the trading world of the English Atlantic thus did not lead directly to the colony's failure and abandonment; however, the fact that Tangier was never even remotely self-sustaining made it highly vulnerable to the pressures of England's domestic politics and to external threats.
III
Although Tangier's status as a free port marginalized it within England's burgeoning commercial empire, the colony's political and strategic situation nevertheless closely resembled that of other English fortresses and ports around both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. With the declining power of the Saadi dynasty of Morocco from the early seventeenth century, Tangier's English garrison and inhabitants initially encountered a fluid political environment and the colony's promoters and governors well understood that its success depended on managing an array of competing dynasties and warlords to expand England's commercial and maritime foothold. Yet, even as English governors and company factors took advantage of emerging fractures in Asian, American, and African polities to establish and legitimize fortified ports, a different process dominated in Morocco. While the millions of pounds and thousands of lives poured into Tangier testify both to its prospective place within England's growing empire and to the growing willingness of the English crown to maintain such an imperial commitment outside the British Isles, Charles II's North African project was ultimately doomed by processes of Moroccan state-building. The rise of the new and assertive Alawi dynasty under Moulay al-Rashid and his successor, Moulay Ismaïl, fundamentally altered Tangier's position in Morocco. For these Moroccan empire-builders, holy war directed against Tangier and other Christian settlements on the North African coast legitimized their rule and helped them to unite the tribal groups that challenged efforts to centralize their growing empire.Footnote 87 In 1673, the earl of Middleton prophetically warned, ‘if once the Country should be reduced under as absolute monarchy as Taffaletta [Moulay al-Rashid] was in prospect and pursuite of, I am afraid this part of Barbary might prove very troblesome to other places of Christendome as well as to Tanger’.Footnote 88 The lengthy siege of Tangier by the forces of Moulay Ismaïl in 1680 demonstrated the new and serious threat posed to Tangier by Moroccan forces. Though Tangier was relieved and the siege lifted, the attacks revealed the city's vulnerability before the weight of Moulay Ismaïl's assurgent empire.
For both Alawi and Stuart dynasties, Tangier was a site of empire-building where they asserted their imperial sovereignty and defended it from foreign and domestic rivals. As seen, the colonization of Tangier exemplified the restored monarchy's commitment to take a leading role in England's commercial and colonial development. The acquisition of Tangier through Catherine de Braganza's dowry also brought the city into the personal possession of Charles II. Tellingly, when Tangier's merchants suggested to the earl of Sandwich that they would be more confident to invest in the city if it were annexed to the crown, and thus not able to be sold as easily as Dunkirk, Sandwich thought this, ‘a greate point of state, How farr it is good in order to Preserve the Crown upon the Head of my Master & his family to part with Regalities; & whether emergencies may not happen wherin it may be of great use to his Majestie to have such a place in his owne personall power’.Footnote 89 The constitutional status of Tangier as described by Sandwich was not unique; Sir Matthew Hale noted that the king could acquire overseas possessions either in the ‘capacity of king of England … or Charles Stewart’.Footnote 90 A bill passed by the House of Commons to unite Dunkirk and Jamaica to ‘the imperial crown of this realm’ died in the House of Lords since the formal annexation of the two Cromwellian conquests would have provoked the hostility of a Spanish government to which Charles II had promised the return of the colonies.Footnote 91 A similar effort was made in 1679 to annex Tangier to the English crown in order to ensure that the city was not sold to France.Footnote 92 Amidst the political crisis that grew up around the Popish Plot and Exclusion Bill, however, Tangier's expense and close association with the crown focused parliamentary suspicions on the city. Although he still held Tangier to be a ‘Jewell of such inestimable value’, John Bland warned the earl of Shaftesbury in 1680 that Catholics dominated the garrison and the civilian government and that both the city's foreign residents and Irish soldiers were of dubious loyalty.Footnote 93 The inclusive and tolerant environment that integrated Tangier into the commercial and social patterns of the Mediterranean world also rendered it politically controversial in a Protestant empire. Containing a garrison that comprised a large number of Catholic soldiers and officers, Tangier seemed at best superfluous in a time of apparent national crisis and at worst appeared a foundation for future Catholic absolutism. When parliament made the allocation of additional funds for Tangier in the aftermath of the siege of Tangier in 1680 contingent upon the exclusion of the duke of York from the succession, the city's abandonment became all but inevitable.Footnote 94
If the acquisition of Tangier pointed to the grand imperial ambitions held by the later Stuart monarchs, the colony's failure instead highlights the relative weakness of the seventeenth-century English state. As the Restoration monarchy poured money into the development of Tangier's harbour and fortifications, it anticipated the authoritarian empire of the later eighteenth century, but also engaged in a project that far exceeded the crown's actual capacity to project its power overseas. Although Charles II and his ministers did not intend Tangier to be a mere garrison, the city was never even remotely self-sustaining and left the state to bear the full burden of its costly defence. As early as 1667, during the financial crisis precipitated by the Dutch raid on the Medway, Hugh Cholmley warned Tangier's lieutenant governor, Henry Norwood, that sentiment was turning against the city in favour of retrenchments necessary ‘to preserve our Antient Dominions in a flourishing Condition then by Exchausting our Treasure to impoverish our Selves in hopes to make our Posterity more glorious by a Remote accession to the Crowne’. For Tangier's sceptics, projects like the transformation of this exposed site into a naval and trading centre were works ‘rather of noise and reputation then any solid benifitt & therefore sutable to plentifull & larger monarkys’, not those struggling to reduce their expenses.Footnote 95
Weakness alone does not, however, account for Tangier's failure: the East India Company found itself badly mauled after launching its war against the Mughal empire in 1686 and, seventy years later, it was the capture of Fort William by the forces of Nawab Siraj ud-Daulah that precipitated the Company's conquest of Bengal.Footnote 96 Moreover, the impetus to conquer European footholds on the African coast was not the only factor that shaped Moroccan relations with Tangier. For both the local rulers that the English first encountered upon occupying Tangier and the centralizing emperors of the Alawi dynasty, the English town and the remaining Spanish possessions on the Moroccan coast were equally valuable as targets for regimes legitimizing jihad and as sources of the gunpowder and arms on which their state-building depended.Footnote 97 This complicated relationship belies Nabil Matar's conclusion that by 1680 England's ‘encounter with the Moors had become completely grounded in colonial desire and religious difference’.Footnote 98 In the fractured political environment of Morocco in the mid-seventeenth century, these two dimensions of Muslim–Christian relations were intertwined and had even encouraged an element of interdependence between Tangier and its sometime enemies.
The relationship between Tangier and its Moroccan neighbours parallels the vulnerability and mutual dependence that defined European forts and factories along the African coast and around the Indian Ocean. Ideological factors help to explain the divergent histories of Tangier and of the outposts that would become foundations of the British empire. Describing the brief French occupation of the eastern Indian city of São Tomé, English travel writer John Fryer asked, ‘Why Gulconda, being a Potent Prince, should permit Garisons to be in the hands of Aliens?’Footnote 99 Fryer's explanation that Indian rulers were ‘weak at sea’ and thus preferred to leave their port cities to foreign allies to defend at their own cost appears increasingly problematic as the commercial and even maritime interests of these figures become more evident.Footnote 100 Nevertheless, Fryer's question remains pertinent, especially considering the fate of Tangier. Tribute payments and custom revenues encouraged African and Asian polities to permit European forts and factories to be situated on their lands. More broadly, these outposts also testified to the willingness and ability of companies to accept the sovereign authority of African and Asian rulers in order to develop their own political and commercial foundations. Although the construction of fortifications reflected a widespread belief that the safety of European communities depended on the threat of force, European strongholds generally rested on grants bestowed on their founders by neighbouring rulers and were often sustained through judicious acknowledgement of indigenous suzerainty.Footnote 101
A similar dynamic appears to have been at work in North Africa, where the Moroccans sought to establish the terms on which the English might be permitted to remain at Tangier. In 1683, the former Moroccan ambassador to England, Muhammad ben Haddu, wrote Charles II a letter in which he warned the English king that Moulay Ismaïl was preparing to attack Tangier, having used the promise of holy war to unite under his command those tribal groups that had originally resisted his rule.Footnote 102 Moreover, the Moroccan diplomat recounted an exchange between Moulay Ismaïl and the Ottoman sultan over disputed territory between Morocco and Algeria. According to ben Haddu, the Ottoman sultan responded to Moulay Ismaïl's initial communication regarding this territory by promising that the people of the land in question would serve the Moroccan emperor whenever he again engaged in war against the Christians, but also by asking how the Moroccans could ‘have patience and endure in your countries four Christian Garrisons’.Footnote 103 Warning again of the coming assault on Tangier, ben Haddu proceeded to suggest how the English might avoid war and the expense it would entail, advising Charles ‘to open your hands with gifts and to have pity on the city of Tanger’ and to ‘make it a Jewry (mallah) and storehouse for whatsoever my Master shall demand of powder and armes and whatsoever else he shall want and ask from your parts and do you write to him and beg of him his grace and Peace’. He went on to reiterate his suggestion that the English turn over Tangier, explaining that this would allow Moulay Ismaïl to justify the English presence in the city:
Do you therefore with all diligence behave your self well in my Masters service and give him whatever he demands of powder and armes and all other things to the end that he may have some excuse to make to the Ottoman Emperour that he does not make war on Tanger and may write him in the Letter that he now intends to send him that he keeps it as a place in obedience to him and that payes him taxes and customes and supplies him with whatsoever he commands.Footnote 104
Significantly, ben Haddu specifically called on Tangier's residents to pay the jizya, or poll tax, which would have signified their incorporation into the Moroccan empire as non-Muslim subjects.Footnote 105 Thus, according to ben Haddu, while the Moroccans would no longer tolerate an independent garrison at Tangier, the English could remain there on condition that they acknowledged Moroccan sovereignty over the city.
While Muhammad ben Haddu's letter at least claimed to offer the English a way to maintain Tangier under the auspices of Moulay Ismaïl, the response of the city's governor, Colonel Percy Kirke, echoed the concern for the crown's authority and reputation that had marked both the initial development of the colony and Charles II's refusal to consider the Exclusion Bill in return for parliament's financial support of it.Footnote 106 Unlike the capitulatory agreements that Venice, France, England, and other states had established with the Ottoman empire, which allowed their merchants to live in Ottoman domains without being incorporated into that empire as subjects, ben Haddu's proposal would not only have integrated Tangier into Moulay Ismaïl's Moroccan empire, but would also have made Charles II tributary to the North African emperor.Footnote 107 Thus, when Kirke reported this letter to the secretary of state, Sir Leoline Jenkins, he recorded that he had expected to find ‘some small and harmlesse artifice’ in it, only to be ‘amazed to find the highest peice of impudence that could have been imagined’.Footnote 108 Meanwhile, Kirke replied to ben Haddu to express, ‘how much I have been surprised at so disrespectfull a manner of address to so great a Prince, and from whom you own to have received such heaps of favours’, and continued, ‘when I hear you advise my Master to make Tanger a tributary place and submit it as a Jewry to the Moors, I cannot consider you but as one of his greatest enemies or that some persons who wish you ill have made use of your name to affront my Master and ruine your credit with him’.Footnote 109
Ultimately, Moulay Ismaïl was as unwilling to tolerate a fortified English settlement on his coast as Tangier's governors were to countenance its submission to Moroccan supremacy. As Muhammad ben Haddu's letter suggests, Christian settlements along the North African coast were particularly vulnerable within the culture and political tradition of religious war that had defined the Mediterranean for centuries. This particular ideological context that made jihad central to the creation of Moulay Ismaïl's empire differed from that which prevailed in South Asia, where state-building tended to be religiously and culturally syncretic.Footnote 110 However, ben Haddu's suggestion that the English could remain at Tangier if they would only acknowledge Moroccan sovereignty over the city also indicates that the political situation of Tangier was comparable to that of English outposts in India. Kirke's steadfast refusal to consider a proposal that he saw as demeaning to the honour of the English crown is thus all the more striking when we consider that the East India Company was simultaneously building its legitimacy in the political economy of the Indian Ocean through grants awarded it by Mughal emperors and other Asian sovereigns.Footnote 111 The politics of England's relations with Morocco offer a striking contrast to those which marked European interaction with local rulers around the Indian Ocean or on the west African coast. Opponents of the Morocco Company had warned that corporate trade was inappropriate for North Africa's political conditions since local inhabitants and their rulers would not tolerate the proliferation of fortified factories along their coast. Yet crown sovereignty over Tangier deprived its governors of the political flexibility East India Company factors skilfully deployed to expand company power and authority under the aegis of the Mughal empire and other Asian polities.
At a time when European military power still wielded limited influence on powerful Asian and African states, the ideological framework that guided the state-based relations between England and Morocco over Tangier provided one of the most subtle but critical distinctions between the histories of Tangier and Bombay. The conceptions of political economy and crown authority that underlay the colonization of Tangier both reflected and contributed to the wider process whereby even as the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and Mediterranean became more intertwined, other forces were at work favouring the evolution of very different systems. From this perspective, the failure of the colony at Tangier was not inevitable, but followed wider developments within both England's wider empire and Morocco. Ironically, the perception of the North African political and economic environment that underlay the crown's precocious effort to establish and administer a colony at the mouth of the Mediterranean also doomed the project. If royal government of Tangier had appeared appropriate precisely because the crown would be able to negotiate with Moroccan princes and rulers, the English state could not yet dominate conditions in a Mediterranean arena of more potent sovereigns.
