Swedish reciprocal ransoms and multinational solutions to insecurity in the Mediterranean, c. 1720–1740
This article compares the Swedish government’s legal practices to secure protection for its trade and shipping with the legal strategies for protection which circulated among sailors and consuls along the Swedish trade route to the Mediterranean in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. One major threat to Swedish commercial interests at the time were the ‘Barbary corsairs’, and the challenges wh