How the Fatimids, locally considered foreign easterners and heretical Shiʿa, negotiated sufficient acceptance in the Maghrib to withstand fierce opposition from Maliki Sunnis and Ibadi Kharijis, raises key issues concerning the formation of Islamic empires. Despite a plethora of enemies among the population, their rule endured and even prospered. What we know has grown substantially with new sources about the interaction of Ismaili authorities with the local ʿulamāʾ and the inner dynamics of their daʿwa and its allocation of restricted knowledge to members. Conversion of sections of the local elite and the demotion or expulsion of hostile elements helped. An internal document preserved by the daʿwa explains how its adherents were expected to prove their loyalty and the reward for doing so. The Ismailis existed both as one component in the new society and yet also remained apart as a community of Believers within the broader society of Muslims.

At the end of 1939, the newly established 18th Infantry Brigade consisted of four battalions: 2/9 Battalion, 2/20 Battalion, 2/11 Battalion and 2/12 Battalion. As part of the 9th Infantry Division, the brigade was scheduled to depart Australia in May 1940 to join the British campaigns in the Middle East. In honour of this impending deployment, the 18th Brigade participated in a parade through the streets of Sydney, minus one battalion because the 2/11 Battalion had been detached to leave early for action in the Middle East.1 With the impending reorganisation of Australian brigades from four to three battalions, the 2/11 Battalion would not return to the 18th Brigade for the duration of the war. The 2/11 Battalion would, however, join the 19th Brigade in North Africa to participate in more than a dozen battles and campaigns across North Africa, the Middle East and the SWPA.

The creation of a new order of security in the Mediterranean revolved around shared conceptions of threat and a common apparatus of cooperative repressive practices. This conclusion explains how the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, which European contemporaries perceived as one of the most urgent and persistent threats to security, was used to bring significant changes to the traditional diplomatic and maritime practices of the Mediterranean region. In fact, the fight against this imputed piratical threat fostered new ideas of the Mediterranean as a regional whole that could be rendered secure through policing efforts and imperial interventions. As a result, the political appearance of the Mediterranean Sea and its shorelines changed profoundly between 1815 and the closing years of the 1850s, when the Mediterranean seemed perfectly secure from piratical threats.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the anonymous Stadiasmos, written no later than the 3rd century AD but possibly as early as the 1st, whose surviving extracts add up to a gazetteer of towns, harbour facilities, and distances from Tunisia around the eastern Mediterranean as far as the southern Aegean. The chapter introduction discusses the author’s use of technical terms and their meanings, and the work’s relationship to the Latin Maritime Itinerary, suggesting that in light of its detailed navigational content it was probably a ‘piloting manual’ rather than a desk-based study for an ‘armchair geographer’ or an administrative document. Four new maps show a selection of places along the coasts described.

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 Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 delineated territorial settlements, coronated several newly independent monarchs and resulted in an official declaration on the abolition of the slave trade, but it did not treat the issue of piracy. This paradox is the key concern of this chapter. Vienna’s Final Acts were the end product of these talks, and though they did not mention ‘Barbary piracy’, their conclusion would nevertheless have a great impact on the international treatment of this newly perceived threat to security. The years 1814–1815 were an important turning point because they initiated a period of transition. The congress created an international context in which North African corsairing could be reconceived as a threat to security. This new perception of threat hinged upon misconceptions of the supposed fanaticism and irrationality that allegedly characterised North African privateering. It also disregarded the long history of diplomatic and commercial contact between both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

This chapter takes stock of the many consequences and conflicting legacies of the French invasion of Algiers. It analyses the effects of this climactic event in the fight against Mediterranean piracy. The invasion’s immediate consequences allow us to reflect upon the security goals French actors and their allies had attached to the expedition – and uncovers the long-term impact of those goals. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the two decades following 1830. These were the years in which French expansion commenced and soon posed international problems in Algeria’s environs. Lastly, I discuss how earlier European security efforts against piracy featured at the Congress of Paris that ended the Crimean War (1853–1856), particularly in the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856, which abolished privateering as a legitimate wartime practice. That text finalised the steady delegitimation of North African corsairing and the violent engagement with the Barbary Regencies. It served as a memorial, a recorded legacy of all the preceding negotiation, repression and destruction. It both marks a new era of international law and denotes, in the light of piracy repression, an ending to the old traditions of Mediterranean corsairing.

The current countries in the Middle East and North Africa were all formed, or transformed, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century by processes of partitioning and territorialization propelled by European colonial expansion and local responses to those interventions. As the region’s political topography was remapped before and after the First World War, collective identities were activated, reimagined, and mobilized within and across these newly delineated units. From Northern Africa to the Iranian plateau, an array of nationalisms emerged over the course of this transformation, pairing notions of peoplehood and political sovereignty in new frameworks of identity. For the Middle East and North Africa, the related questions “what is a nation?” and “when is the nation?” are best answered by focusing on a third question: how has the nation (and nationalism) worked in the region over the past two centuries?

The period after Augustine saw no decline in catechesis. The writings associated with Quodvultdeus and several other anonymous sermons from North Africa in this period attest to the ongoing vibrancy of catechesis. In particular, these sermons highlight the way in which knowing God was understood in an apocalyptic age, when new threats from Vandal invasions and heretical resurgences destabilized many aspects of social life.