Overview

With potent echoes of the current War on Terror, this book tells how the leading Great Power of the 19th century organized a coalition to eradicate a deep-rooted aspect of anti-Western policy in Moslem countries. This confrontation between Europe and Islamic North Africa, and eventually the Ottoman Empire, concerned Christian slavery, a trade pursued by the piratical Barbary States. For centuries weaker trading nations had paid them protection money to leave their shipping alone, but the basic principle of slavery was unchallenged. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 this cause reached the top of the political agenda and in 1816 a large Anglo-Dutch fleet attacked Algiers and forced the local ruler to release 3000 European slaves. This was the beginning of a concerted, and essentially naval, assault on the practice, which the Moslem world came to see as a religious and racist war, a revival of the crusades. When the Greeks rebelled against the rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1821, they too were seen as Christian slaves. After a long and bitter struggle, the turning point was a sea battle, at Navarino in 1827, which proved a crushing defeat for the Ottoman forces. It was inflicted by a British-French-Russian peace-keeping force operating under confused and contradictory rules of engagement, and initially it was dismissed by an embarrassed British government as an untoward event . However, Greek independence was effectively assured. This story, full of larger-than-life characters, is told with all the verve to be expected from Tom Pocock, the author of many bestselling books on the Nelsonic era.

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9781909609556

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Tom Pocock is the author of 18 books (and editor of two more), mostly biographies but including two about his experiences as a newspaper war correspondent. Born in London in 1925 - the son of the novelist and educationist Guy Pocock - he was educated at Westminster School and Cheltenham College, joining the Royal Navy in 1943. He was at sea during the invasion of Normandy and, having suffered from ill-health, returned to civilian life and in 1945 became a war correspondent at the age of 19, the youngest of the Second World War. After four years wth the Hulton Press current affairs magazine group, he moved to the Daily Mail as feature-writer and then Naval Correspondent, becoming Naval Correspondent of The Times in 1952. In 1956, he was a foreign corresponent and special writer for the Daily Express and from 1959 was on the staff of the Evening Standard, as feature writer, Defence Correspondent and war correspondent. For the last decade of his time on the Standard he was Travel Editor. He wrote his first book, NELSON AND HIS WORLD in 1967 on his return from reporting the violence in Aden and his interest in Nelson has continued. Indeed, eight of his books are about the admiral and his contemporaries; his HORATIO NELSON was runner-up for the Whitbread Biography Award of 1987. Tom Pocock has contributed to many magazines and appeared on television documentaries about Nelson and the subject of another of his biographies, the novelist and imperialist Sir Rider Haggard.

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