Yusuf Pasha Karamanli (1795-1832) was the last great ruler of the semi-independent Karamanli dynasty that ruled the nominally Ottoman regency of Tripoli (approximately modern Libya) from 1711 to 1835. Under Yusuf’s predecessor, Ali Pasha (1754-1795), the regency had suffered political, economic, and social decline, worsened by tribal revolt, drought, and epidemics. By the early 1790s the country was in disarray and the aged pasha was unable to restrain the rivalries of his three sons. The youngest, Yusuf, eventually usurped the throne, first by murdering his elder brother, Hassan, and then, after Ali Pasha’s fall from power and a period of political chaos, by forcing his second brother, Ahmed, into exile and poverty. Yusuf Pasha was a cruel, ruthless, calculating, and unprincipled tyrant, a man of great personal charm, whose main failure was to come to terms with the changing conditions of the age, and whose soaring ambitions for his little country were unfulfilled.
It took him almost ten years (1795-1805) to consolidate his rule at the center of power in Tripoli, restore some financial and economic confidence, build up the military force needed to extend his undisputed, centralizing power inland, and build up the naval strength intended to revive Tripoli’s role as a corsairing state. These Saharan and Mediterranean ambitions were driven by the pasha’s urgent need for more revenues than the primitive local farming and herding economies could provide, or the nomadic and seminomadic tribes of the interior could be persuaded to pay. State revenues were levied on the parasitic activities of the Tripoli corsairs in the Mediterranean and the trans-Saharan traders in black slaves; both sources were irregular and unpredictable but both, Yusuf Pasha believed, could be made to yield more.
The Napoleonic Wars and the Anglo-French struggle for domination of the Mediterranean enabled the pasha to regain a certain local supremacy for his corsair fleet, initially expressed in a pro-French policy. His ability to levy safe-passage tribute from maritime powers was, however, challenged by the newest such power, the United States. In 1801 Tripolitanian corsairs seized several American ships, but American freedom of the seas was asserted in the subsequent war. In the meantime, Britain’s growing Mediterranean ascendancy, and in particular the implications of the Battle of the Nile (1798), which stranded Napoleon’s punitive expedition in Egypt, the capture and occupation of nearby Malta (1800), and the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) were not lost on the pasha.
The British bombardment of the leading corsair base, Algiers, in 1816 finally persuaded Yusuf Pasha that the Mediterranean was no longer a safe or reliable source of corsair revenue. He promoted his Saharan policies accordingly, seeking to impose his recognized and centralizing policy over the few towns, trading oases, and scattered tribes of his regency. He thus pacified much of what is now modern Libya, bringing its eastern province, Cyrenaica (Barqa) under tighter rule and almost eliminating the large and rebellious Awlad Slaiman tribe of the Sirtica that had disrupted transSaharan trade for many years. In 1810 he sent troops to Ghadames oasis to secure the nearest stages of the southwest trade route to the Niger Bend and the Hausa states. In 1813 he overthrew the Awlad Mohammad dynasty that had ruled the southern province of Fezzan for the past 300 years. He thus achieved his objectives of closer control over and further stimulation of Fezzan’s trans-Saharan traffic in black slaves and gold that had always underpinned the province’s rule as a semiindependent but tribute-paying fief of Tripoli.
To speed the flow of black slaves into Fezzan and Tripoli, he mounted slaving raids deep into the southern Sahara and beyond. By 1817 he was ready to project the regency’s power, influence, and lust for slaves into Sub-Saharan Africa. This imperial ambition coincided with British plans to explore inner Africa by the shortest Saharan routes from Tripoli. Such projects were prompted and nurtured by the remarkable British consul general, Colonel Hanmer Warrington, who held the post from 1814 to 1846 and who up to the mid-1820s wielded extraordinary power and influence over the pasha. While Britain took advantage of the close relationship with Yusuf Pasha and his claims to protect travelers right across the Sahara to send three important exploratory missions into the interior from Tripoli (1819-1925), the pasha’s own trans-Saharan ventures were not a success. By the mid-1820s his relations with Consul Warrington had been undermined by the issue of the missing papers of the murdered British explorer, Major Alexander Gordon Laing; Tripoli’s mounting debts to Britain; and a clear revival of local French interests.
The pasha’s serious international debt crisis, with resultant diplomatic and naval pressure from Britain and France, combined with tribal revolt in the interior, disruption of Saharan trade, and an outbreak of dynastic and civil strife, forced his abdication in August 1832 in favor of his son, Ali. But the succession was disputed (with the British and French consuls supporting opposing claimants) and was still unsettled when the Ottoman fleet intervened in May 1835. Ali Pasha was arrested, Karamanli rule was ended and, after 120 years of effective independence, the regency of Tripoli again came under the direct rule of Constantinople, which lasted until the Italian invasion of 1911. Constantinople had intervened to secure at least one North African possession following Egypt’s effective independence under Mohammad Ali, the French conquest of Algiers, and the growing and dangerous local rivalry of Britain and France.
Yusuf Pasha had managed to sustain Tripoli’s independence for nearly forty years against all the pretensions of outside powers. But in the long run he was unable to come to terms with the more complex and pressing political and economic realities of the postNapoleonic world. As the Ottoman Turks after him were to find, the country’s economic base was unable to provide realistic alternatives to such unacceptable activities as Mediterranean corsairing and the trans-Saharan slave trade.
John Wright
See also: Tripoli.
Further Reading
Bergna, P. C. I Caramanli. Tripoli: Plinio Maggi, 1953. Dearden, S. A Nest of Corsairs: The Fighting Karamanlis of the Barbary Coast. London: John Murray, 1976.
Folayan, K. Tripoli during the Reign of Yusuf Pasha Karamanli.
Ife-Ife: University of Ife Press, 1979.
Micacchi, R. La Tripolitania sotto il dominio dei Caramanli. Verbania: A. Airoldi, 1936.
Morsy, M. North Africa 1800-1900: A Survey from the Nile Valley to the Atlantic. London and New York: Longman, 1984. Narrative of a Ten Years ’ Residence at Tripoli in Africa. London: Henry Colburn, 1817.
Rossi, E. Storia di Tripoli e della Tripolitania dalla conquista araba al 1911. Rome: Istituto per l’Oriente, 1968.
World History
