From Commercialised Species to Smuggled Object: Red Coral in Algeria

International audience ; The beginnings of coral exploitation date to Classical Antiquity, where it was incorporated into Mediterranean commercial circuits in Asia for export to India and China. Initially, coral was intensively exploited in the northern parts of the Western Mediterranean. However, over time, these areas lost their precedence over southern regions of the Mediterranean and became secondary centres of production. Over the course of centuries, El Kala (the eastern most coastal region of present day Algeria) acquired the reputation for being the most fertile Mediterranean region for coral and became subject to an intensive coral rush from several different kingdoms and empires 1. These, locked into different conflicts with each other, had also been engaged in changing relationships with the Ottoman Empire and its vassals in Barbary 2. Starting from the fifteenth century onwards, eastern Algeria was at the centre of disputes among different European powers (French, Spanish, Italian and British) over coral exploitation (Masson 1908: 30-40 and 70-80). Early in the history of El Kala, the market for coral became internationalised. During the sixteenth century, these kingdoms, which distributed the opportunities for trade to their internal political supporters to increase their external political influence, played a central role in encouraging these initiatives and this led to their prosperity (Masson 1908: 30-80). Trade monopolies started to develop through commercial concessions on the Mediterranean coasts. In the sixteenth century, France formed an alliance with Barbarossa (Barberousse), a pirate from Algiers representing the Ottoman Empire, to counter Spanish and Italian forces in the Mediterranean (Heers 2001: 90 and following). At that time, close ties existed between private and public networks in these maritime spaces. Since private companies were also the armed representatives of the Kingdom of France, they were able to appropriate resources in faraway places and bring them back to French ports, ...