The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: How a Remarkable Woman Crossed Seas and Empires to Become Part of World History. Linda Colley
to sit on the floor, ‘lamenting our miserable fate’. As a result, when they are finally let out, brought outside the palace gates and, after more hours of standing, at last see the acting Sultan, it is through a haze not simply of exhaustion and European preconceptions, but also of more personal preoccupations. Elizabeth does register some things with conspicuous accuracy. She takes note of the acting Sultan’s concern with dignity and ritual: ‘He was mounted on a beautiful horse with slaves on each side fanning off the flies, and guarded by a party of the black regiment,’ that is by members of the ‘Abid al-Bukhari, forcibly recruited dark-skinned Haratin and black slave soldiers. She reports, correctly, that this encounter occurs in the open air. Unlike their fellow Sunni Muslims, the Ottoman Sultans, Moroccan rulers do not traditionally receive envoys, petitioners and supplicants in rich interiors. Nor do Moroccan Sultans customarily issue their pronouncements at audiences in writing by way of scribes, but – as on this occasion – personally and through the spoken word. She notes too how the ‘Moorish admiral and his crew’ fall on their knees before their ruler, kiss the ground ‘and, as they arose, did the same to his feet’. As a Moroccan envoy later records, it is a ‘custom with our Sultan, when we are close to him, we kiss the soil, which is considered as a prostration of gratitude [to God]’.42 All these things Elizabeth Marsh sees and later writes down. But what does Sidi Muhammad see in this meeting?
In 1756 he is in his mid-thirties, very tall by contemporary standards at five foot ten, and in the words of one of his British slaves at this time, ‘well made, of a majestic deportment, of a dark chestnut colour, squints with his right eye, but still an agreeable aspect’.43 Indeed, Elizabeth Marsh judges him, wrongly, to be about twenty-five. Sidi Muhammad is determined to restore and expand the Sultan’s authority over his divided, partly tribal society, and he can be ruthless in response to foreign and domestic enemies. As more percipient European envoys are increasingly willing to acknowledge, however, the new acting Sultan is also conspicuously charitable, highly organized and hard-working, sharply intelligent, and possessed of wide interests. Robbed in his youth of a conventional, princely education by Morocco’s civil wars and the need to fight, he now operates according to a fixed and demanding schedule. His custom is to get up very early every morning, ride out to inspect his city and the work of his outdoor slaves, breakfast alone sitting in his gardens, and then combine governance with intellectual and religious study. He has set up a small council with which he can discuss works of Islamic literature and history, and he meets daily with the scholars who are attached to his court.44 As this suggests, Sidi Muhammad is devout, and deeply attached to a kind of pan-Islamic world-view. All too aware of the growing wealth and aggression of the major European powers, he is eager to consolidate defensive alliances with other Muslim rulers, especially with the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, the world capital of Islam. During his formal reign as Sultan of Morocco (1757–90), Sidi Muhammad will dispatch three embassies to Istanbul, in each case to advance pacts of mutual support against the ‘infidels’.45 His desire for a close rapport with the Ottoman Sultan, and his concern to support his fellow Maghrebi rulers in Tunis and Algiers against European predators, also rest on deep religious conviction.
Like Christianity, Islam is a monotheistic religion with universalistic aspirations. Wherever in the world they live, Muslims are linked by Arabic, Islam’s sacred language, by the injunction to carry out the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and by the concept of the dar-al-islam, the land of Islam, which allows them to ‘imagine and experience the local as part of a larger Islamic universal whole’. These tenets of belief inform Sidi Muhammad’s own brand of internationalism, though they do not account for all of it. Unlike his father and predecessor as Sultan, Moulay Abdallah, he has gone on the hajj, and is an attentive visitor to other pilgrimage sites.46 The evidence suggests that he may even have aspired to be recognized as Caliph of the Muslim west: that is, as a politico-religious sovereign acting as a twin pole, along with the Ottoman Sultan in the east, in upholding the entire Islamic world. In other words, the ruler whom Elizabeth Marsh and her fellow bedraggled captives confront this early September 1756, outside the gates of his Marrakech palace, is a clever, determined and reflective individual who possesses horizons that are far wider than Morocco itself. Sidi Muhammad makes this clear even in what he announces to them, through his interpreters, although the captives are scarcely in a position to appreciate the full significance of his words. They are not after all to be enslaved, he tells Elizabeth, James Crisp and the others. Instead, they will be detained as hostages until Britain agrees to establish a proper Consul in Morocco.47
For Consul, read commerce. Sidi Muhammad has perceived that, in order to consolidate his own authority and to restore Morocco’s viability as a stable and prosperous polity, any suspicion of the non-Muslim world must be balanced by more normalized relations and positive engagement based on trade. He may conceivably aspire to be Caliph of the West, and he certainly wants to forge closer alliances with fellow Muslim rulers. But he also wishes to foster connections with other parts of the world in order to develop his country’s commerce and thereby increase his own revenue. He has already, in 1753, negotiated three trade treaties with Denmark. Over the course of his reign, the Sultan will go on to sign some forty agreements with other major European states and entrepôts, with Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Prussia, Sweden, Venice, Hamburg, and with Dubrovnik, an important commercial player in the Adriatic.48 ‘The present Emperor is so very circumspect in all his affairs,’ Joseph Popham will write in 1764, by which time Elizabeth’s onetime fellow captive has been transmuted into British Consul to Morocco, ‘that he concerns himself in the most trifling transactions relative to European matters.’ And Sidi Muhammad looks to the west beyond Europe. He will become the first Muslim ruler in the world to acknowledge American independence. In 1784, he will also order his corsairs to capture a US merchant ship, the Betsey. Once they are taken hostage, the Sultan uses the members of the Betsey’s crew as bargaining tools, and in 1786 the US Congress agrees to a treaty establishing full diplomatic relations with Morocco.49
There are clear and significant parallels between what happens to the Betsey in the wake of the American Revolutionary War, and the fate of the Ann at the start of the Seven Years War. In both cases, Sidi Muhammad has resort to a traditional mode of maritime violence for novel and constructive purposes. He is not in the business of making holy war on Christian seafarers, nor is he straightforwardly in search of ransoms, though to his victims it can seem like that. This is not jihad, as it is conventionally and narrowly imagined in the West, but something very different. These particular acts of Moroccan corsairing are designed not to punish or distance non-Muslims, but to force Western powers into closer dialogue and into negotiation. Sidi Muhammad wants the West’s attention and respect. Most of all, he wants and needs increased access to and influence over Western commerce. The essential reason for this lies in that same semi-desert emptiness of much of Morocco that has perplexed and disoriented Elizabeth Marsh.
Like the rest of the Arab world, Morocco at this time was severely underpopulated. As late as 1800, there may have been only seventeen million people scattered throughout Arabia, North Africa, the Western Sahara, Sudan and Greater Syria. By contrast, the Indian subcontinent and China, both geographically smaller territories, contained respectively some two hundred and over three hundred million inhabitants at this time. In contrast too with India and China, the Arab world – with the exception of Egypt – was not populated overwhelmingly by productive peasant farmers, but substantially by semi-autonomous tribespeople. Outside its great cities, many of Morocco’s inhabitants were what Elizabeth Marsh chose to style as ‘wild Arabs’, peoples who were often nomadic and beyond the ruling Sultan’s easy control.50 All this influences Sidi Muhammad’s determination to build up Morocco’s overseas commercial connections, while at the same time exercising some authority over them. His country is too arid, and too sparsely cultivated,