Security measures aimed at the repression of corsairing continued apace in the wake of 1816. ‘Barbary piracy’ remained a subject of negotiation and cooperation during the late 1810s and early 1820s. It was dealt with at ambassadorial conferences in London, during meetings of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), in combined talks with the Ottoman Porte, and through an Anglo-French expedition to the coasts of North Africa. Increasingly ambitious efforts to enact maritime security and an increasingly vocal opposition to such efforts marked the eight years following the Anglo–Dutch bombardment of 1816. The authorities of the regencies managed to thwart several European security practices, ranging from concerted communications to defensive alliances. To understand the starts, stops and reversals of the fight against Mediterranean piracy, local activity needs to be analysed. This chapter foregrounds the role of actors who were deemed piratical threats. The contestations of these threatening actors influenced the shape and success of European security practices.

In order to appreciate the imperial impact of the new security culture, the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 ought to be seen within the framework of the post-1815 Congress System and the Concert of Europe. Though the invasion of Algiers was essentially a unilateral action undertaken under the national flag, it nevertheless took shape through extended multinational deliberation and involved a fair share of diplomatic concertation among the different European Great Powers. French imperial aspirations became intertwined with the repression of Mediterranean piracy, which was understood as a shared, European project. In attacking Algiers, members of the French government sought to reassert the country’s position as a nation on par with the other Great Powers of the European continent. The conflict with Algiers allowed French officials to assert status through the much more ‘disinterested’, ‘European’ goal of ending piracy and bringing security to the Mediterranean Sea.

The introduction situates the book at the intersection of two flourishing historiographical fields. One explores the rise of the modern territorial state, and the other the emergence of novel political ideas and in particular of liberalism. As the book argues, the formation of modern statehood was not only the result of wars and the global restructuring of territory. It was also the result of critical thinking about political and social arrangements and institutions, and the imagining of new ones. By drawing on recent works by historians working on contexts other than the core European countries, the introduction incorporates the Greek case in the ongoing discussions on nineteenth-century liberalism. At the same time, it challenges the reluctance of some historians of liberalism to link political thought to political change and the intellectuals they are studying to institutional contexts, by assessing for example how they thought about and were influenced by institutions (in this case institutions such as the judiciary, the university, the cabinet or the legislature with which the jurists were associated). Along with some methodological points and the general structure of the book, it offers a brief survey of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century Greece.