A crucial moment in the establishment of a European security culture was the bombardment of Algiers in 1816 by an Anglo-Dutch fleet, after which the Regent of Algiers was forced to sign a declaration renouncing the age-old practice of keeping captured Christian sailors for ransom. Against the dominant depiction of the Anglo-Dutch cooperation as a coincidence, this chapter argues that it was a carefully planned engagement based on shared security concerns. The Vienna settlement provided the context and main incentives for the Anglo-Dutch attack on Algiers. As such, this study of the connections between the Congress and the 1816 bombardment illustrates how peace in Europe fostered cooperative security practices that could bring about violence and destruction beyond the continent.

Ambassadorial conferences formed a primary mechanism of the Vienna system of international relations and of the related European security culture that emerged after 1815. These gatherings offered more flexible opportunities for multilateral consultation and negotiation than did the rarer congress summit meetings. The London conferences of 1816–19 were the first to be planned, as part of British Foreign Secretary Castlereagh's efforts to internationalise abolition of the African slave trade, and they ultimately also took up interdiction of the Barbary corsairs of North Africa. The conferences established connections between these issues that are crucial to understanding European policies toward both abolition and the corsairs, and which reveal how these questions were matters of European – and African – security as well as of humanitarian intervention. As the Vienna settlement extended beyond Europe into the Atlantic and Islamic worlds, the projection of European power overseas to protect security of persons and property could at the same time bring violence in its wake.