Lauren Benton

Barbarous Raiding and Civilized Ransom: Cultural Lessons from Captive rescue in the South Atlantic

Narratives of captivity, from the Mediterranean to the New World, constitute their own genre and feature, among other tropes, the contrast between captives' own, more "civilized" communities and the "barbarous" practices of their captors. The narratives themselves largely omit, though, the ongoing and organized efforts of captive rescue. These efforts, though also informed by ideas about entrenched cultural and religious difference, nevertheless depended on an understanding of captor societies as orderly and amenable to legally sanctioned exchange. This paper examines the practice of ransom negotiations as an exercise in institutionalized learning about law and culture. In the same way that comparative studies of narratives of captivity have emphasized continuities in European representations of Muslim and American Indian captors, the paper explores similarities in the organized European legal response to captive-taking across the South Atlantic. The paper will rely on secondary sources to develop the broader inter-regional framework and will use published primary sources to analyze in detail a case study of "lawful" cross-cultural ransom negotiations.