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This book uncovers a forgotten story in the history of relations between the West and Islam: three centuries of Muslim corsair raids on French ships and shores and the resulting captivity of tens of thousands of French subjects and citizens in North Africa. Through an analysis of archival materials, writings, and images produced by contemporaries, the book fundamentally revises our picture of France's emergence as a nation and a colonial power, presenting the Mediterranean as an essential vantage point for studying the rise of France. It reveals how efforts to liberate slaves from North Africa shaped France's perceptions of the Muslim world and of their own “Frenchness.” From around 1550 to 1830, freeing these captives evolved from an expression of Christian charity to a method of state building and, eventually, to a rationale for imperial expansion. The book thus advances new arguments about the fluid nature of slavery and firmly links captive redemption to state formation—and in turn to the still vital ideology of liberatory conquest.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595-1657), the Ukrainian Cossack leader who led the 1648 rebellion against Polish magnates, has been memorialized in Ukraine as a national hero and as the author of a fatal compromise. In Russia he has been viewed as a dangerous but important ally. He is seen as an enemy to Polish Catholics, and among Jews, as the perpetrator of a horrific massacre. Stories of Khmelnytsky juxtaposes literary accounts of Khmelnytsky that appeared in Ukrainian, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and Hebrew. The twelve chapters in this edited volume of literary studies collectively illustrate how a figure can simultaneously remain a hero, traitor and villain, from the event’s immediate aftermath to the twenty-first century. The book is divided into four parts: the first treats the century following the Cossack uprising, including chronicles written in Hebrew, Yiddish and Ukrainian, and the relationship between the uprising and the trans-continental Sabbatean Movement in Judaism. The second section explores the figure of Khmelnytsky in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Romanticism, as well as post-Romanticism. A section on the reinvention of national traditions explores the figure of Khmelnytsky in Jewish and Ukrainian Modernist literature, as well as the role of the Cossacks in turn-of the twentieth-century national revivals, including Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism. The final section discusses the figure of Khmelnytsky in the twentieth century, including the image of the Hetman in the Red Army, and the role of Khmelnytsky in twentieth-century East European literature and film.