Tangier: England’s first crisis of empire 1661-1684
Gabriel Glickman

The English attempt to build a colony at Tangier has been almost airbrushed from the history of the British Empire. But it amounted to one of the most ambitious and expensive overseas ventures ever undertaken by the pre-modern English state. Through the occupation of the city, the government of Charles II aimed to place control over the Straits of Gibraltar and the trade of the Mediterranean, and planned to build an empire that would extend deep into north and west Africa. Planting a colony on threshold of Africa’s Islamic world, the English entered into contact with people and cultures hitherto unfamiliar, in a place where competing states and kingdoms collided. The collapse of the Tangier settlement in 1684, in an emergency evacuation under a Moroccan siege, provoked England’s first imperial crisis, dividing parliament, destabilising domestic politics and raising controversies that cast grave doubt upon the future of the infant empire.

• This new narrative history offers the first full study of English Tangier since 1911, examining the attempt to create an outpost of England on the African shoreline.

• Using letters, diaries and other documents never before examined, it recovers the histories of the men and women who invested lives and reputations in a fragile colonial project and grappled with the cultural and environmental challenges of settling in a region on the frontiers of the known world.

• It explores English encounters with the Muslim and Jewish societies of the Maghreb, and shows how the exposure to Moroccan culture enthralled domestic commentators, entering into newsprint, theatrical productions and luxury markets in seventeenth-century London.

• It shows how the tensions of England’s troubled century were exported into overseas settlements, with Catholics, Protestants and military veterans on either side of the recent Civil Wars thrown into the claustrophobic arena of a city on near-constant high-alert.

• Tangier casts new light on the birthpangs of the British Empire, drawing attention to the trials and experiments that shaped the early colonial project, when the grand ambitions of kings ran up against the fragile reality of English power in the world.

• The book highlights the impact of empire on England itself, showing how events in Tangier polarised political opinion, and how the experience lived on in literary and folk culture, even as it was virtually erased from the public record.

• It reveals how the pressures of overseas expansion gave rise to far-reaching questions over the definition of the national interest, over the moral foundations of empire and even the identity of the English nation.