Mediterranean transformations: From the security of mercantilist trading empires to a modern security regime*

In early modern times, European international relationships with the Ottoman Empire and in the Mediterranean were characterized by a complex system of consular networks privileged by the sultan or the North-African deys and beys by way of capitulations. Security was mostly addressed in terms of safety for the free practice of trade and commerce. The transformation of this situation between the late eighteenth century until around 1840 is characterized by complex entanglements of continuity and rupture between early modern and modern realities: the infrastructure of the consular system persisted for a long time, while the invasion of Egypt (1797), the continental Napoleonic Wars, the Greek War of Independence (starting 1822) and the invasion of Algeria (1830) were profoundly changing the region. «Security», as conceived by liberal men of politics like Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant and Jeremy Bentham, became a central term to order the emerging new realities in terms of state and international politics. At the same time, while one conceives of the European allies’ invasion of Greece as perhaps the first modern humanitarian * Thanks go to Stephen Walsh († 2018) for editing the English, Emmanuele de Champs for a reading and inspiring discussions about Bentham research in Erfurt (2017), Friedemann Pestel for important comments. A version had been orally presented at a conference of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen in Amsterdam; thanks to the organizers, Beatrice de Graaf and Ozan Ozavci. Funding for this research has been provided by Heisenberg-Stelle GZ Zw 164-8/1, 9/1. 324 cornel zwierlein Pedralbes, 40 (2020), 323-366, issn: 0211-9587, doi: 10.344/pedralbes2020.40.12 intervention, more or less the same type of military intervention in Algeria is conceived of as France’s first modern act of colonization by military forces. This dialectic of the two-sided face of interventionism under different labels as an exception from the rules of the post-Vienna system of international relations was producing new conceptions of security in and of the Mediterranean.

The earliest forms of applying the crucial dialectics between modern colonialism and modern humanitarianism on the level of international and, more precisely, inter-imperial politics can be traced back to the 1820s-1830s. The question of the Greek struggle for independence from Ottoman rule, the intervention of France, Great Britain and Russia on behalf of the Greeks, are nowadays commonly accepted as first instanc- Pedralbes, 40 (2020), 323-366, issn: 0211-9587, doi: 10.344/pedralbes2020.40.12 olutionary and Napoleonic era; and third, the 1820s, when the aforementioned post-Vienna system was emerging. For all three periods, I try to determine what were Western empires in the Mediterranean at that time, how they were relying on governmentalities and «tools» for providing security, and how the politico-economic contexts changed during those decades. At the end stands a comparison and confrontation, with the colonial legitimating the French conquest of Algeria. Perhaps only now a real colonial nineteenth century had begun in the Mediterranean. 4 The emphasis, if not a proper hypothesis, is on the complex relationship between highly traditional forms of imperial practices in the Mediterranean-both Western and Ottoman-and what might be the points of rupture and change.

1
In the late early modern period, Western powers were acting in the Mediterranean purely as trading empires. Looking back from the nineteenth century, one might ask if the term «empire» is appropriate for France, Britain, the Dutch, and even the Austrians, who started to enter the Mediterranean from Trieste in the eighteenth century. But it is not only a historiographical parallel to the so-called European expansion, in which we are used to conceiving of the Portuguese and Spanish establishment in the Americas as «imperial» outreach, rather the governments and actors themselves were developing explicit concepts of empire and imperial lordship in and even 'over' the Mediterranean. 5 erlein, «Storia della sicurezza in Europa/Storia europea della sicurezza», De Europa. European and Global Studies Journal, 1, 1 (2020), pp. 19-35.
5. The oldest fifteenth century roots for such an imperial ideology were developed with regard to the Venetians and (to a lesser extent) to the Genoese: «Venetiani [...] sunt domini maris Adriatici, & littorum etiam, scilicet in genere, non in specie Admittedly, we are not dealing with real territorial conquest or settlements here, but only of Western merchant colonies and a network of consular and ambassadorial representations under the formal supremacy of the Ottomans or, in Northern Africa, of the Barbary regencies, where the bonds of suzerainty of the Porte vanished partially, enhanced by a complementary network of missionaries. 6 Since the seventeenth century the Barbary regents had recognized the French king as «emperor», 7 and in the 1720s the British king claimed the monopoly on representing at the Porte the English Church toward the Greek Orthodox church for him, as king of the «Imperium Britannicum». 8 And both the French as well as the British-certainly more than the Dutch-de- veloped an imperial ideology, following but modernizing the older Venetian one rooted in medieval terms, 9 that became a part of their Atlantic and global concepts of imperial outreach: as we learned some years ago, those «ideological origins of the Empire» trace far back to the sixteenth century in the British case. 10 The infrastructure of those self-declared «empires» was certainly quite small and it differed in what concerned the relationship between state and «private» sector. The backbones of that imperial structure were the consuls, with their chanceries and households being embedded in but also partially «governing» the merchant colonies at each major trading place, the colonies being called «nations». After the Colbert reforms between 1664 and 1669, the French consular network grew quickly during the eighteenth century, which mirrored the economic victory of the French over the other European powers and was cemented with the famous 1740 capitulations negotiated by the ambassador Louis Saveur de Villeneuve with the Porte. From its modest beginning in the sixteenth century (one French consul in Alexandria), the network had grown in 1715 to fourteen major consulates and at the end of the eighteenth century had reached seventy-seven consular positions in the Mediterranean (general consulates, normal and vice-consulate positions, sometimes only an agent). 11 Of all other places on the globe, consular representation was chosen only for the young United States after the War of Independence, while in its own 9. Zwierlein, Imperial unknowns, pp. 72-113. 10 colonies the French could govern on their own. 12 Since 1691 the consul was an officer of the crown and, while usually chosen from a big merchant family, typically from Marseille, by taking his position he was forbidden to conduct commerce on his own account, in order to separate private and state interests. Though directed by the Ministry of the Marine (only for short periods switching to the Ministry of Foreign affairs), the consular network was clearly a part of the late mercantilist form of French imperial outreach and commercial politics. Instructions given to the consuls, dispatches exchanged between Paris/Versailles and the consuls, the chancery serving the functions of a state notary in foreign parts, and the communication system established strongly resembled a diplomatic network, although it was mostly concentrated (but not at all exclusively) on political economics. The ambassador at Constantinople, usually a high-ranking nobleman, was directly appointed by the crown. 13 The British infrastructure was different. For the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant Company kept its trading monopoly by the charter granted first under Elizabeth and renewed under Charles II (1662) until 1824. It was the company that also paid the ambassador at Constantinople who, at each appointment, received two sets of instructions: from the king on what concerned state affairs; and from the company on what it considered the ambassador's primary function, commercial affairs. 14 The company had fewer factories and consuls than the French, the main ones being the three of Smyrna (Izmir), Aleppo and Constantinople; later, some consuls on Greek is- lands were appointed. One might say that it was only in 1824, when the Levant Company gave back its charter, and access to the Levant trade was opened to all merchants (while the so-called Italian merchants, not being members of the Levant Company, were restricted to sailing no further than Livorno until the reforms of 1753) 15 and the appointment and payment of all consuls was taken over by the Crown, that the British were equalizing the infrastructural choices that the French had already made in the late seventeenth century. All Western ambassadors and consuls in the Barbary regencies were central to negotiating the peace treaties and capitulations with the Ottomans, which established a certain sphere of commercial, religious and jurisdictional autonomy granted by the Porte to the Western powers. 16 Looking back, once again, from the times of the massacre of Chios and the Greek struggle, one has to remember that it was still, in principle, this network of Western merchant colonies, of consuls, and even of the old Levant Company that was the backbone of the seemingly 'new' imperial communication networks; 17 much had changed, but there was also much that had remained.
In economic terms, the average value of the whole Levant trade to Europe was between 22 M (eighteenth century) 18 and 30 M livres (at the turn to the nineteenth century), and the French had taken over the biggest share of this after 1740. At that point, British and Dutch trade was declining in the Mediterranean, with both oriented toward the Atlantic or East Asia-while one has still to remember that until ca. 1750, the British Levant trade was equal to or of greater importance than the Atlantic trade with the plantations. Newcomers in the eighteenth century were Sweden, Denmark, and Austria, while the old powers Genoa and Venice had also lost importance. At the very end of the eighteenth century, the Greeks (though Ottoman subjects) were growing stronger in terms of their own shipping and the balance of commerce. This situation would be changed profoundly with the beginning of the revolutionary wars.
When investigating the link between empire and security during this prerevolutionary period, we should address the question on two levels: on the first, general level, the whole mercantilist imperial ideology heavily relied on a concept of security, expressed in many published pamphlets and internal advisory reports about securing one's own nation against its competitors in politico-economic terms. 19  was a field of competition and the security of the nation was defended outside its own frontiers: by providing the mother country with necessary goods and keeping up a positive balance of trade, but also by maintaining strongholds and access to each important port. Specially in the British case, since the Navigation Acts, each warship on the oceans as well as in the Mediterranean was conceived of like a British territorial exclave, like a swimming commercial fortress, and its Englishness, as well as its armed status, were scrupulously controlled. 20 On a second level, for the everyday practice of living under Ottoman rule, the aforementioned complex system of capitulations created multilayered spheres of security for the members of each European nation. The capitulations with the Porte first were intended to guarantee the security of each French ship encountered by an Ottoman (or, in the case of the Barbary regencies, a Barbary corsair), and this protection could be transferred to non-French and non-British captains, for instance to Greek ones. In certain cities, the capitulations granted certain jurisdictional and religious autonomy, such as precluding any Ottoman subject from involvement in legal disputes, as well as granting exemptions from Ottoman taxes and customs in exchange for a fixed rate and contribution; the capitulations also decreed the liberty of each European merchant while traveling through Ottoman lands. To a certain extent, the ambassadors and also the consuls could partially include Ottoman subjects under their own «umbrella» of higher freedom granted (freedom of several taxes) by way of a barāt (or berath or berāt) given to those non-Muslim subjects (Greek or other dragomans, for instance). During the eighteenth century, the commercialization of that barāt system began. The Dutch, French and British usually took advantage of about 30-50 barāts, which included the family of the grantee; a certain «feudalization» of that system became visible. Likewise, the problematic issues of mixed marriages between Europeans and Ottoman non-Muslim subjects or, only on the Western side, forms of naturalization of persons formerly subjects of other sovereigns, and the change of ship «flags» according to the status of war, peace or neutrality, all these complicated the whole situation tremendously. But in principle, the capitulation system created spheres of privileged jurisdictional status and, thus, spheres and zones of protection and security for the merchants in the factories and quarters belonging to 'the nation', their families, their ships and their goods, and meant that these zones of specially securitized status could merge and entangle with the environment of primary Ottoman rule and jurisdiction itself. Western trading empires, besides being in a state of competition and often an open state of war among each other, acted, on what concerned the Ottomans, in those zones of security as if under a broad umbrella and negotiated with the Porte and the North-African regencies themselves.
Despite a long tradition of imagined conquest plans, often focused on the Barbary regions, 21 the biggest military efforts in those centuries remained some brief attacks on port cities, islands, the Venetian-Ottoman wars concerning Crete-but certainly nothing of the dimension of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. As is widely accepted, the plan for the invasion of Egypt was worked out by Talleyrand for Napoleon. It was this option then favored for how to beat England indirectly (instead of crossing the Channel directly), by interrupting the Levant-Asian trade connections. 22 Talleyrand, as bishop of Autun, a representative of the clergy and member of the 1789 National Constituent Assembly, but fervent defender of the republican principles of nationalizing the clergy's property, had been elevated in the elitist circles of clergy education, at the Sorbonne, and had been a good friend of the Choiseul family: in his mémoires he still 21. Cfr. for references to some archived mémoires on that, Zwierlein, Imperial unknowns, p. 82, n. 225.
22. Having been accused of royalist tendencies, he returned to Paris in September 1796, being appointed by Barras on 16 July 1797 as Minister of Foreign Affairs. admired this famous Minister of Foreign Affairs (1758), of the Navy (1761), and of War (1761) during late Bourbon times, 23 and he befriended Choiseul-Gouffier, who had undertaken an important voyage to the Levant and Greece and became, in 1783, ambassador to Constantinople. 24 Though being among the earliest republican prelates, and at the same time educated in those Ancien Régime circles, it is crucial to see how Talleyrand was using the still existing early modern royal apparatus for his purposes in 1797-1798. He referred to a plan or an idea by Choiseul dating back to the late 1760s or 1770s that suggested, in the case of the separation of the American colonies from England and the partition of Poland, it would be necessary for France to obtain Egypt to replace its American colonies. 25 It was thus not just an anti-English strategy, but also an active politics for finding a new geopolitical and commercial balance: though France had been on the American side in their War of Independence, it suffered heavily-by the Hegelian irony of history-from that «victory» against England, the balance of exports to the Americas being decreased from 11.5 M livres tournois to 1.8 M livres within ten years after the peace of Paris 1783. 26  . Also, after 1793, imports from the Americas were increasingly taken over by the pre-revolutionary problem was still worsened by the early developments of what became the Saint-Domingue Revolution (Haïti), leading finally to its independence, and depriving France from its economically most important colonial commerce. 27 All that put pressure on French decision-making processes to re-direct from an Atlantic to a Mediterranean axis of politics in search of replacements for those losses. 28 The plan to invade Egypt was considered at the same time, but first only as a second option while the Directoire was urging the invasion of England. Bonaparte, with his generals Kléber and Desaix instructed by Talleyrand, turned back to the indirect plan to weaken England through the conquest of Egypt: «L'Egypte comme colonie, remplacerait bientôt les produits des Antilles, et, comme chemin, nous donnerait le commerce de l'Inde», wrote Talleyrand to Napoleon on 23 September 1797. 30 As in the times of Ancien Régime projects of diplomacy and war, recent mémoires and documents about Egypt were collected from the dépôt de la Marine that served as France's «memory» of foreign affairs, organized in a proto-geopolitical and chronological manner by successive strata of descriptions and analytical texts. Among them are a 228 pages dossier, which is considered to be the main assemblage of documents for orientating the general as well as the minister. There were also late-1780s mémoires by vice-admiral Rosily and by Truguet on the present state of Egypt, but also by Talleyrand's old friend Choiseul-Gouffier about the administration of the Compagnie des Indes, and letters by Charles-Claude Magallon from 1787: 31 Magallon had been at that time an auxiliary officer (adjoint) to the then general consul of Cairo, Mure (since 1774), and he became himself general consul in 1793. He had developed several projects, together with Choiseul-Gouffier in the last years of Louis XVI, and had negotiated with the local Egyptian pashas to enforce French commerce and the link between Suez and the Red Sea to India. 32 He then returned to Paris, and Talleyrand based his elaborate mémoire for Napoleon on information from him as well as on an analysis of the past consular correspondence with Egypt over the previous decades. eyrand was suggesting to be communicated to the Porte for that invasion still referred to the early modern form of coexistence between Europeans and Ottomans: as the French merchants had been vexed, their commerce seriously interrupted by several inflictions from the local Egyptian pashas-by avanies, as he used the traditional term 34 -the Porte had broken its promises of protection and therefore its capitulations with France. The invasion would therefore be a just war according to the law of nations. 35 The end of the old order of trading empires under Ottoman protection was legitimated by reasons absolutely belonging to that old system. While already the late enlightenment precursors of their techniques of political planning had a strong impetus for geopolitical calculation, during the Napoleonic period, this way of reducing politics on a macro-scale to calculations and balances of the geopolitical, populationist and military strength of competing nations and empires had become completely unbound. Direct territorial conquest and colonization would replace the earlier form of «soft» networked trade imperialism under the formal overlordship of the Ottomans (and in Egypt, the Mamluks, also in increasing tension with the Porte). Thus, forms of political analysis changed gradually and the notion of security had to be transformed into that system of revolutionary and post-revolutionary balancing of imperial powers.
The foundation of the Empire itself was legitimated in 1804 by the willing members of the Tribunate, who argued that only a hereditary supreme magistrate would guarantee the stability of the French state as a whole. 36 Heredity in contrast to an elective system of power transfer would be the only «haven where the ship of the Empire can find asylum for centuries». 37 Only through transforming the republic into the Empire could one assure «external security» as well as «internal security». 38 Likewise, only that way could the whole European system of states and international relations be stabilized, because France would be its central power. 39 Taking Montesquieu's vision of Charlemagne as a blueprint, 40 Napoleon's political system was conceived as an empire in terms of that interdependency of internal and external security, and the ongoing every-day political planning after 1804 was rooted in those principles: every decision and every political goal was to be subordinat- 38. «Alors sera raffermie la sûreté extérieure; les relations subsistantes entre la France et les puissances étrangères seront confirmées par une plus grande évidence de l'avenir, et la stabilité de notre gouvernement sera pour elles, comme pour nous, un gage de la stabilité des traités. Alors croîtra la sécurité intérieure. [...]» (Tribune Gillet, ibidem, p. 39). «Tous les citoyens enfin se livrent avec sécurité aux travaux, aux spéculations de leur commerce, de leur état, de leur profession» (Tribune Siméon, ibidem, p. 47).
39. «La France se trouvant placée pour le premier rôle dans la grande société de l'Europe, et la stabilité de ce bel empire étant une condition indispensable pour le maintien d'un système régulier de politique entre les autres nations, la tranquillité générale pourrait-elle paraître bien assurée tant que notre organisation intérieure ne serait pas fixée par un principe qui offrît une garantie suffisante?» (Tribune Fréville, ibidem, p. 53  86-92. ed to the general concept of guaranteeing France's external security. As there is no single political intellectual genius behind Napoleon's politics that one could use to represent the ideological backing and inspiration of his endeavors, one of the best sources for studying the mental framework guiding his politics is again to be found in the environment of and between Talleyrand and Napoleon, with the pensionnaire Montgaillard, who wrote many long manuscript mémoires and current analyses of the European state of affairs at the service of the minister and the just-crowned emperor himself. 41 Napoleon had long left Egypt, leaving the country under his generals in a state of turmoil and constant struggle, with the British as well as with the local powers, but the Oriental question still played a huge role in the overall sketch of European relationships between what were now three formal empires (France, Russia, Austria) alongside Great Britain. While the concept of «protection» granted by European nations in the Mediterranean -as subordinated to «security»-had been, in the early modern era, mostly a question of protecting individual and small groups of merchants, ships, voyagers, and members of the clergy based on the system of capitulations, now the concept of protection became an important geopolitical notion in the French system of imperial governance and the building of an empire consisting of the core (France), its colonies, and the semi-sovereign states under its protection. This had, again, precursors in the early modern politics of protection and alliance-building between states. 42 Still, the acceleration of political change in revolutionary and Napoleonic times transformed that form of long-term politics into a hasty mode of arranging territories and of conceiving regions, nations and empires to be quickly configurable. Politics had entered a new state of scenario-building. Under these conditions, the assemblage of regions and states was conceived not only in terms of granting security to the protected, but also to secure the core country from any possible quick assaults and, in regions further afield, to ensure their situation. As the Bonapartist concept and practice of politics was, in the end, building a first «liberal Empire» by combining strong aspects of revolutionary civil and liberalist principles with imperial and neo-feudal ones, a political advisor like Montgaillard thought in terms of the interdependency between liberalism and protection. 43 The closest collaborators of Talleyrand, such as Hauterive and also Montgaillard, were analyzing interdependencies on the Continent in terms of natural affinities and natural enmities, sometimes placing Russia and Britain outside of the «system». Russia and Britain, the argument went, would exercise constant pressure on the continental center, forcing France as its central power to organize its hegemony, thereby building and maintaining a stable système fédératif. The natural interest of Russia and Austria as well as of Britain, which exercised its despotisme maritime «everywhere on the four parts of the globe», 44 was the complete destruction and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire to allow a renewal of an Oriental and an Occidental empire built on the re-emerging Greek forces out of the ashes of the Ottomans. As in a game of dominoes, the destruction of the Ottoman Empire would simply be the first element in a series of causalities that would lead to the destruction of the whole «système politique» of France; meanwhile, and vice versa, for the «stability of the imperial dynasty of France [...] the destruction of the house of Austria» had been thought to be necessary in 1805. 45  was thus advising Napoleon to orient rather toward the earlier periods of French politics, from François I to Richelieu until the renversement des alliances, and not toward later periods -here he departed partially from Talleyrand-on what concerned the natural alliance with the Ottomans. As a second argument, naval power had become as important as terrestrial forces («Mais puisque la mer est devenue rivale du continent, puisque la puissance maritime a obtenu en Europe, depuis environ un siècle, une influence en quelque sorte décisive dans la balance du pouvoir [...]»). 46 The political system could therefore not only be concentrated on the maintenance of security and stability of the continental système fédératif, but France had to secure again, despite and after Abukir, «French domination and influence» in the Greek seas and in the Mediterranean as a whole. 47 The Ottoman Empire had therefore to be protected. The security of the whole system depended on the strength of the secured, and protection was only possible by maintaining the stability of the «system», according to the political language used. This was brought down to concrete questions and points in the decision-making process: the Ionian Islands should be given to the Ottomans in exchange for Crete, and a dominating if not colonial position in Egypt as part of this system of protection and stability.
But in contrast to those scenarios imagined by the analysts and advisors of Talleyrand and Napoleon, the British tended to dominate the Mediterranean maritime space completely after Abukir. When the Porte was in open conflict with France because of Egypt, British Levant commerce was suddenly reaching unheard-of profits. The old Levant Company had never made such gains during early modern times as it did shortly after 1800, and the island of Malta provided another important port and stronghold that enabled important flows of goods and values into the Levant despite Napoleon's attempt to enforce the «Continental blockade» also in the Mediterranean. 48 In the long run, ; the most precise summary of the import and export numbers from the custom records is to be found with Pedralbes Abukir was not just an episode in the Napoleonic Wars, it also marked a decisive new period of British commercial ascendance in the Mediterranean, alongside Russia, while the long-time dominating French were losing ground despite their impressive military presence in Egypt.
What is important in the following period is the approach towards the peoples and nations themselves as part of the politics of those inter-imperial competitions. One might detect here quite a paradoxical form of, on the one hand, ignoring the people as autonomous agents, objectifying them to numbers, soldiers, and coefficients of the calculations in dimensions that older Bourbonian politics had never reached; and on the other hand, of re-discovering them as aggregations of individuals that were to be educated by the «liberal principles» that each soldier in the French army was already obliged to disseminate with the help of broadsheets and revolutionary catechisms. This is also discernable on the side of the British, who started to rediscover the value of the «modern» Greeks not only as reprobate counterfeits of the times of Homer or Pericles.
The expedition to Egypt is renowned also -despite the Saidian discussion on Orientalism which takes its starting point just here-as the beginning of a new area of deeper scientific engagement with the country, its monuments, with the Orient, its languages and culture as a whole. 49 This has certainly a long history which cannot be recounted here, but it is important to stress for the prior period, that in the late eighteenth century serious changes had happened, not least a multiform and increasingly explicit recognition of the ignorance that prevailed concerning the present state of countries and peoples and their more recent history. Already Chandler, one of the most read travel accounts through Greece that served many Europeans and emerging Philhellenes around 1800, had noted «a chasm of near seven hundred years» that ensued from Athenian history after Alaric's invasion. Then, after a brief period of revival in medieval times, Athens was «again in a manner forgotten» after the Ottoman conquest. 50 More generally, Douglas noted in 1813 that, «This country, however singular it may appear, had in a manner been forgotten by the rest of Europe». 51 We are so much accustomed to glance at once from the classic ages to the present, that we are apt to believe that nothing more is necessary than In fact, such a strong and urgent recognition of oblivion and ignorance was not so new in Douglas' times, but it had grown and diversified since the Enlightenment, not only concerning the Greeks but also the histories of the Arabs and all other ethnic groups in the Levant. 53 Yet what had been a recognition of oblivion on the side of scientists and observers now became a driving force behind the political movements after Napoleonic times. It was a complex form of romanticist blending of Ancient and Modern Greece, of Spartan heroes defending liberty against their Persian oppressors and modern Greeks revolting against Ottoman oppression (by Western Philhellenes as well as by the Greeks themselves) when it came to creating forms of propaganda. There was also a distinct recognition-as seen here-of the possible misunderstandings and errors committed by just such an approach of unconsciously blending and mixing up periods and completely different states of histories and ethnic developments, a central feature of the post-Vienna period. Already in 1782, Choiseul-Gouffier had tried to discover the remains of the spirit of liberty among the modern Greeks oppressed by the Ottoman «tyrants» with an attitude close to that of an ethno-historian, using archaeological metaphors. 54 This late enlightened, not yet really politically engaged lamentation, partly driven by a self-inculpation for the West's own ignorance and negligence towards non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, partly driven by a civilizational mission to reawaken that forgotten spirit among the Greeks themselves, reached a different level after 1815. But in the actual political planning and strategy of Napoleon during the years before, it is not really present as a factor. Instead, any civilizational mission and scientific engagement were, at a certain point, subordinated to and obscured by the political agenda of security and empire-building.

3
As mentioned above, it is well established by research that one can, with good reasons and textual evidence in the diplomatic sources, understand the circumstances of interventions by Britain, Russia and France in favor of the Greeks before and, above all, following the Battle of Navareno and during the consequent international conferences and negotiations, as an early instance of the enactment of «human security» and «humanitarian intervention» on an international level. All Western powers were conscious of the problem that they were definitely committing an infringement to the Porte's sovereignty and it was -at least partially-legitimated as an action to prevent «calamities and atrocities against humanity» and to provide «security» to the Greek subjects of the Ottomans. 55 A second use of «security» is discernable when the  56 At first glance this seems to be like the creation from zero of a modern arrangement of a securitized zone, in so doing, breaching the still very germinal post-Vienna system of states with its principle of non-intervention. Since the agreements among the anti-Napoleonic quadruple alliance of 1814 at Chaumont, the principle of non-intervention was part of conventional diplomatic thought. It was at the center of Canning's European politics in general 57 and it was also brought forward concerning the Greek question, as Chateaubriand had summarized. 58 But that constellation and the circumstances of politics had de  58. François-René Chateaubriand, «Note sur la Grèce [first ed. July 1825]», in idem, OEuvres complètes, vol. ix, L'Avocat, Paris, 1826, pp. vii-lxiv, p. l («les publicistes [...] ont prétendu qu'on ne devoit pas se mêler de ces affaires, par quatre raisons principales: 1° L'empire turc a été reconnu partie intégrante de l'Europe au congrès de Vienne: 2° Le grand-seigneur est le souverain légitime des Grecs, d'où il résulte que les Grecs sont des sujets rebelles; 3° La médiation des puissances à intervenir pourroit again many older roots, and the supposed «intervention in terms of human security» was perceived to some extent differently and through older «frames of thought» than the view back from the twentieth century discourse of international relations might suggest. Even more often than to the violation of vaguely defined «principles of humanity», the allies referred to the reestablishment of the peace and security of the Sea, of sailing and doing commerce in the Levant as a legitimation for their intervention. 59 This was rooted rather in the very old practice of the Western powers, which were still to some extent the old trading empires, to defend the liberty and security of commerce despite all international politico-economic competition. Here the Greek case, though being a case of revolt and upheaval, was a threat to security functionally equivalent to the resurgent attacks of Barbary corsairs in the first and second decades of the nineteenth century against which Britain and the young US navy had sent their fleets. 60 The French put particular emphasis on another line of tradition. Though the appeal to common Christian roots with the Greeks was all-European and shared by all Philhellenes, 61 in terms of foreign diploélever des difficultés politiques; 4° Il ne convient pas qu'un gouvernement populaire s'établisse à l'orient de l'Europe»   63. Chateaubriand had himself visited the Mediterranean in 1806-1807 in a privately financed voyage, recommended to the French ambassador at Constantinople by Choiseul-Gouffier (cfr. above n. 23). He had been hosted in each city by the French consuls, e.g., the consul Fauvel at Athens, the consul at Smyrne, the consul Dovretti in Alexandria, the famous protégé of Talleyrand, the general consul Devoize at Tunis. Retrospectively, that voyage served therefore as something like an informal 'visite d'échelles' as otherwise sometimes officially ordered by the secretary of the Marine and was essential in forming Chateaubriand's intimacy with the Levant and France's servants abroad, cfr. Jean-Claude Berchet, Chateaubriand, Gallimard, Paris, 2012, pp. 451-483. from a short Venetian period of government. 64 In fact, it is obvious why the French diplomatic apparatus still remembered that affair, because it was, though first of all a Venetian-Ottoman conflict, also a crucial moment in the strengthening or crystallization of the idea of France as the «protector of [all Latin, sometimes even of all] Christians» in the Mediterranean. The French traced this back to the earliest capitulations with the Ottoman Porte under François I, but a closer analysis shows that they had slowly enlarged what was first meant just as the granting by the Porte to the French king and its representative the privilege to protect its own French subjects in their religious services (e.g., the Catholic rite in the consular and ambassadorial chapel) to be quite a strong and powerful tool of proto-imperial claims. In 1695, however, the Ottomans also threatened the position of the French as protector of the Catholics, as they tore down churches, transformed them into mosques and forbade all missionaries any contact with the Greek orthodox, who were oppressed even more strongly. 65  iii 235, nr. 53) from the archives of the secretary of the Marine gives a contemporary French interpretation of those events and how the French saw their role: an Ottoman edict had been given to the French ambassador Chateauneuf communicating the prohibition to all missionaries of any further contact with the Greeks. This edict «seems to be contrary to the capitulations, at least contrary to the use since the times that the French are established in the Levant as a corporate nation». The edict was felt as a violation of the relationship between the Porte and France and a violation of the dignity of the affair in 1695 and ultimately following the 1740 capitulations, the French crown tended to exercise its function of «protector» of Latin Christians in the Levant also through the network of Catholic missionaries, a great many of which were French, sent out under Richelieu in the 1620s. The special status of France as «protector of Christians» was still a subject of international law in early twentieth century doctoral disputations. 66 It is not surprising, then, that in the mémoire of David to Chateaubriand, what one often conceives to be one of the early ethnic massacres or atrocities and crimes against «humanity» in a modern nineteenth and twentieth-century sense, was first of all interpreted as standing in the old line of tradition of inter-religious conflicts; the Venetian 1694 intervention to reconquer Chios was interpreted as the last «European intervention», and the option of Western military intervention in 1824 was thus likewise inscribed into a long series of precursors which one would perhaps see today to be rather isomorphic than homologous. The security that France might lend to the Greeks could be understood still to be in the tradition of France as protector of all Christians, as in Ludovician times. There is no real expression of a sense of crucial ep- ochal difference between both instances of cruelty in that tradition of consular perception. Instances of the relationship between empire and security of the third "modern» post-Vienna period could be interpreted in terms of the relationship between empire and security of the first, early modern period.
In terms of pro-Greek propaganda, the religious factor becomes even more central, yet also decidedly modern in the sense of a secular religious or modern politico-theological approach with Benjamin Constant. One may dispute if he can be taken as representative of "France», but at least he wrote his Appel aux nations chrétiennes en faveur des Grecs in 1825 officially by request of the Paris Greek committee. 67 Constant and Chateaubriand -who had joined the committee in March 1825had long differed on many aspects of their monarchical or republican liberalist principles and concerning their vision of "religion». But both -Chateaubriand being dismissed as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1824were united in their opposition to Charles X even though coming from different lagers, and joined forces on that which related to the Greek question. 68 Chateaubriand recommended explicitly Constant's Appel in his own Note sur la Grèce. 69 Constant's liberal thought, as he had developed it earlier regarding the French state and society in its transition from revolutionary to post-revolutionary times, was here superseded on the international level, and in confrontation with the non-Christian Ottoman Empire, with a secularized form of Manichean dualism. While regarding the internal affairs of a nation-state, he had supported a pluralist concept of liberal tolerance regarding religion; 70 in his pro-interventionist plea no such moderating view was possible: 71 the Greek struggle was for him notre cause, because it marked the current frontier between islamisme and christianisme, a struggle between civilizations and religions which could not been separated. Creating an independent Greek state was described by him in secular-apocalyptical terms as a necessary katechon, as the task of all peuples civilisés against the threat of Muslim invasion. As no one in the sixth or seventh century had imagined that the Muslims would conquer the whole Orient, and as the Byzantines had not imagined in the eighth century that those forces would eventually lead to the transformation of the church of St Sophia into a mosque in the fifteenth century, within the Greek struggle now, the European powers had to put a brake on «l'empire ottoman, exception monstrueuse aux moeurs et aux lumières de notre âge». 72 If there is «liberalism» in this position, it is posited only on the one side of the civilized Western world. Though the term «security» is not mentioned as a central aim of politics, the aim of the politics of all European civilized people-nations together against «barbarism» was understood as something like a preventive defense abroad of their security at home.
On the British side, which was not at all monolithic, one is urged today to pick up the voice of Jeremy Bentham and the circle of Philhellenes in contact with him, though this has not to be confounded with the position of the government. In any case, British views were not dictated by such politico-theological Manicheism as visible with Constant, though religion was certainly also of importance, but instead, there was the idea of the security of their own nation and empire, regarding commerce and regarding the powers and states in the Levant. This concept was put into the foreground and applied and used on many different levels. Jeremy Bentham became in contact with the Greek emissaries to London in 1821 73 and wrote his observations on Greece and the Greek constitution in 1823. But one has to distinguish between what we know today, after a long time of professional study of that author and his manuscripts left initially in the collection of University College London and published in 1821-1823-and known to the European public-and what was communicated eventually in manuscript form directly to the Greeks. We know today that Bentham's «turn to security» as a fundamental aspect of his own view on liberalist constitutionalism happened quite early, around 1776, starting perhaps from some passages in Montesquieu, as a series of manuscript sheets of that time reveals. He then was adamant that the idea of liberty is «purely nega- tive»: «That which under the name of Liberty is so much magnified, as the invaluable, the unrivalled work of Law, is not liberty, but security». 74 But in his published works at the moment of the outbreak of the Greek struggle, the Fragment of Government (1776) and the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), a systematic approach to «security»/«securities» as a guiding principle of constitutional thought was not yet visible. Bentham was a decided proponent of a republican solution within the discussion on the Greek constitution, while the leading men of politics in Europe tended more and more towards monarchy. The crucial question seems to have been which form of constitution might grant the higher degree of «security». He was perhaps responding more to the Greek provisional government led by Mavrokordatos than the other Philhellenes from Europe. The Greeks expressed far less of an adherence to an ideological form of liberty as the driving force behind their uprising, 75 but always referred to their need for security against the Ottoman threat. 76 Bentham wrote to them: Grecians! Some there are among you who say, -Give yourselves to a king! [...] In a republic, they will tell you, there is no security. No security in a republic? say, rather, no security anywhere else. Look to the Anglo-American republic: what security, what prosperity, what constantly increasing prosperity, was ever comparable to theirs? so it has been these forty years; and every year brings a vast increase. 77 Pedralbes, 40 (2020), 323-366, issn: 0211-9587, doi: 10.344/pedralbes2020.40.12 This was Bentham's general thought about constitutions; he was applying it also to the English one and in a universal sense: Toujours le dilemme -le noeud Gordien -se reproduit. Sans constitution, et même sans constitution democratique, point de sureté pour le peuple: avec cela tel est l'etat de la societé que le peuple n'est pas capable de jouer son rôle dans l'exercice une constitution. 78 While most other European liberals tended to write first of all about the «freedom» and the «liberty» of the Greeks that had to be defended, protected, and reconquered, Bentham started to think profoundly from the opposite point of view. And it seems that this was resonating in Greece just because it was a notion that was truly felt to be positive and not just a negative cry to be free from oppression without defining what would come next. For many liberals, security was the effect of liberty, while for Bentham a complex framework of securities gave the first and only way to the liberty of humans, of citizens, of commerce, of the press. Early instances of that way of thought published at that time are to be found in his Fragments of Government. 79 But usually, in his earlier works, he still uses the language of «liberty» and «rights». 80 It is precisely in cornel zwierlein Pedralbes, 40 (2020), 323-366, issn: 0211-9587, doi: 10.344/pedralbes2020.40.12 April 1822 when news of the Chios massacres arrived in England and when he re-started working on his major project, the Constitutional Code, that «securities» became the key notion of his whole political theory. 81 His proposal for the transformation (or founding) of the Tripolitine constitution was built on just such a concept of the institutionalization of «securities» as a check on despotic power. 82 He formulated all that had been in the younger tradition of constitutions and declarations since 1776 and 1789 as an enumeration of individual natural rights of public law in terms of securities that were granted once and forever by the governing prince to its subjects, who were by that granted and entitled those «securities». 83 The chapters already finished of the Constitutional Code, of which the first volume would only be published in 1830, were sent in a parcel of manuscript copies to Stanhope, the English chief negotiator in Greece, among which was also the important list of «securities» to inform the English and to help during the establishment of the Greek independent state and its institutions. 84 While this was a specific Benthamian theoretical decision within a sophisticated discourse of Western European liberalists, in the Tripolitine and Greek cases, this was probably more in elective affinity with the customs, expectations and needs in Tripoli. In the latter case, the granting of «securities» was far more easily translatable into the long-lived and accustomed traditions of how the deys and beys had always granted privileges, protection and partial forms of autonomy to their subjects, ethnic groups living under their rule, and to foreigners. It could be received far less as the introduction of a revolutionary break than just as a benign and clement gift of the sovereign to his subjects -though now, in 1822, it was a different situation: in Benthamian thought, this would not belong to a premodern system of granting privileges, but like the Ur-moment of the foundation of the liberal society, secured from misrule by this very monarchical head who, to some extent, ceased even to be the sovereign or at least he ceased to be in possession of his full sovereign powers, as the securities were granted «eternally» to his beloved people». 85 In Tripoli, what was an original Benthamian way of thinking could have the performative status of a camouflage of modern individual constitutional rights -which normally would have been thought to be possessed in a «bottom-up» way by each man by nature-in terms of a top-down system of granting privileges. In the Greek case, it responded to the very basic and immediate need of security from violence and threat. Though, as has been said, the germs of his concept of Liberty as Security was far older, only now he systematically elaborated texts whose very structure was a sequence of detailed and precise definitions of «security», and only now did those texts not just remain on his desk as decade-long works-in-progress, but were communicated to the Greeks and to the Dey for concrete political purposes of constitutional reform. In the Portuguese and Latin American cases roughly at 85. Bentham formulates as the Dey's promulgation address introducing the constitution: «People! Beloved People! God hath given me the power over you. [...] but it is only for your happiness that he has given it to me [...] Receive now from my hands the benefits which, in obedience to God and his prophet, freely and of my own motion I give. I give them to remain to you and your posterity throughout all ages.» (Bentham, «Securities against Misrule», ed. Schofield, p. 78). the same time, the language of security seems to have been less used, less needed. So we may stress that Liberal Constitutionalism was responding to southern Mediterranean contexts and, born from massacres, transformed into the basic language of securities guaranteed and protected by imperial powers.

4
From the point of view of the Muslim rulers -the Sultan and the Dey Hussein at Algiers-the intervention of the Western warships at Navarino in 1827, intended to protect the sultan's 'rebelling subjects', and the landing of the French army in Sidi Ferruch (14 June 1830) because the French consul Deval had been hit with a fly swatter (in 1827), might have been events experienced on equal terms: 86 two Western military invasions. From the Western perspective, however, they were framed in opposite terms: one was a heroic, mostly altruistic intervention for the sake of humanity; the other was, and developed decidedly as, an act of conquest and colonization, though against a supposed aggressor. Proto-Humanitarianism and Colonization could have a nearly identical appearance, and that is why both also belong to the same history of empire/imperialism and security.
Taking the famous Algeria papers of Tocqueville as a good analytical view to be compared with the above mentioned perceptions, 87  can see how the now dominating view of liberalism was somehow in a fix to harmonize its positive self-conception with the results of conquest and war. Between 1837 and 1841, Tocqueville was always stressing the «illiberal character» of the newly established or provisory government in Algiers: not even the most fundamental civic liberty, the liberty of the individual person, was guaranteed. 88 But this was said for what French citizens, potentially colonists, would encounter in Algiers. 89 Access to those civic liberties was not intended to be granted to the conquered. The civilizational inferiority of the «indigenous» is an a priori that legitimates per se conquest and state-building in Algiers, though questions of expropriation, and of acquiring property of the land would remain. Tocqueville tried to find a mid-way which was, at his time, an also moderate view on the Kabyles and Arabs: they would be «half civilized», not completely deprived of seeds of learning. 90 Instead of trying to enforce the implantation of their completely foreign culture among the Arabs, the French should rather grant conditions of liberty to the conquered, in order to improve their own forms of learning, to strengthen the «light (enlightenment)» to which «islamisme» was not completely closed. 91 He warned that «in the middle of the nineteenth century» the French should not commit the errors of past centuries, alluding to the shadows of the Spanish leyenda negra during the fifteenth and sixteenth-century conquest of America. 92 At least the wording seems to opt for a «liberal», «soft» imperialism. The reality of an atrocious war and more than fifty years of military oppression of ever-returning revolts in Algeria was then different. And one should not forget that beyond the «liberal» wording of Tocqueville, the aforementioned fundamental a priori of a civilizational hierarchy between barbarians (as in the perception of Constant and Chateaubriand) or of «half-civilized» tribes was now undisputed. Not long before, the famous former dragoman Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis, a reformer and organizer of the enfants de langues around 1800 -the school system for Oriental languages for boys destined to work as translators or consuls in the French Mediterranean trading empire created by Colbert-who had been in Algeria from 1780 to 1786, was able to describe the inhabitants of the Barbary regencies in an enlightened gesture comparable to Montesquieu's Lettres persanes by mirroring the deprived Europeans in what he recognized to be a virtuous people of diligent citizens governed by Lycurgus-like wise deys. 93 Tocqueville's early high-colonial distinction between developmental states and hierarchies of civilizations would be instead the starting point for nineteenth-century colonialism. The right to appropriate land recognized to be quasi «terra nullius» because it was possessed only by «not civilized» people was becoming part of the late nineteenth-century colonial law of nations, which only «saw» the Western civilized nations as members of the concert of powers and of the system of states. 94 While the French consul Deval, present at the court of the Dey in Algiers, as all Colbertian consuls had been, to negotiate the peace treaties and capitulations for preventing French ships from piracy, still belonged to the old system; in this case, colonial conquest in fact superseded the old order quite quickly and quite completely. Tocqueville, who slightly later became the magisterial voice in comparing the Ancien Régime and new post-revolutionary order regarding his own country of France and all of Europe, used some of the same distinctions and markers to describe the problems of a colonial regime that had to decide between complete or partial «domination», between indirect and direct rule, and between colonial settlement or not: civilizational distinctions, good and bad colonial governments were described with roughly the same interpretative patterns as the differences between estates, levels of enlightenment and civilization, and between despotic and non-despotic government within France itself. In that period of transformation addressed here, the actors therefore decidedly and explicitly evocated their own view of the changes of peinternational dans la Méditerranée du xviiiè siècle», Il Pensiero Politico, 49 (2016), pp. 383-417, 412-414).
94. Property and jurisdiction over colonial territory could be acquired a) by private buying from the indigenous, b) by occupation. The legitimacy of occupation was grounded in the concept of the «territorium nullius»: there, where no state in the Western sense defined by Jellinek (three components of territory, people, state power) existed -and «uncivilized tribes» were lacking «state power» in nineteenth century thought-occupation could be enacted as in an unpossessed country, the «indigenous» were not 'seen' by international colonial law, cfr. quest had been started with the idea «to ensure the security of the Mediterranean» [...] a conquest was «perhaps the sole effective means of bringing a clear and complete security to the seas», however, considered only from the point of view of and for the Europeans. 97 The evolution of the link between «empires» and «security» was marked by profound changes as well as deep strata of continuities and traditions. The forms of security that the mercantilist trading empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth century were searching for in the Mediterranean were the security of goods, strength, and power of the home country in competition with the other European nations; and the security of each man, ship, and servant of the «nation abroad» was still very similar to the main commercial interests defended also by Castlereagh, Canning, and Chateaubriand alongside and beyond the language of humanitarianism. The consular network did not change as much as one might think; Choiseul-Gouffier, Talleyrand, and Chateaubriand used and traveled throughout nearly six decades within more or less that same infrastructure, and even the old Levant Company dissolved only shortly before Navarino. The Napoleonic era had unchained the geopolitical and quantitative-numerical perception of measuring ciétés qui aient naturellement plus besoin de sûreté, de simplicité et de rapidité dans les procédés administratifs que celles qui se fondent dans un pays nouveau. [...] l'homme doit y être moins que partout ailleurs gêné par son Gouvernement. Ce qu'il en attend surtout, c'est de la sécurité pour les fruits du travail et de la liberté pour le travail lui-même» (ibidem, p. powers with regard to their position and relationship to the core of an empire to a level that was uncommon to enlightened politics. This set an epistemic drift in motion toward modern governmentality, which was characterized by the entanglement of opposed epistemic drifts: on the one hand, a growing awareness of the West's own ignorance and the need for empiricist scientific research concerning the «Orient» was leading; on the other, a constant and more or less brutal making invisible of all ethnic, religious, political and cultural subtleties and differences in decision-making concerning the security of one's own empire was at stake. This enabled, in the end, the emergence of the colonial setting of that fundamental civilizational difference between Europeans and non-Europeans, between colonizers and the colonized, also, and perhaps first in this world region, with regard to a post-Vienna concept of security in international affairs, maritime as well as terrestrial. Napoleonic political planning and Napoleonic inspiration of scientific research went side by side. On what concerns the 'liberalist' self-understanding of Western constitutional or even republican imperial action, it seems that the translation into offers and claims of «security» was even more adaptable, or better sold, in the southern Mediterranean. Finally, the establishment of a newly-founded independent state, whose security inside and outside was part of the inter-imperial negotiation on international security as a whole was in absolute synchrony with the emergence of modern colonial conquest and the efforts to securitize the conquered, based on the now fundamental hierarchy between civilizations, different from early modern forms of dichotomies between «us» and «barbarians». The decades between 1780 and 1830 are therefore a time of high-profile merging and entanglement of old and new forms of empire, imperial action, and security, of achronies 98 and of conscious and unconscious translations between these old and new forms in infrastructural terms and, even more so, in terms of political perception. 98. Cornel Zwierlein, «Return to Premodern Times? -Contemporary Security Studies, the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire, and Coping with Achronies», German Studies Review, 38, 2 (2015), pp. 373-392.