With the exception of several coastal cities captured by the Portuguese (later by the Spanish) in the fifteenth century, Moroccan monarchs routinely saw off European intrusions in their vicinity in the early modern period while they expanded their own territory and influence as with the destruction of the sub-Saharan Songhai Empire in 1591. Among the most significant—but still understudied—of these episodes was the defeat of the English attempt to use Tangier as a Mediterranean operational base. This effort began when the port was acquired as part of the dowry brought to her new husband, Charles II, by Catherine of Braganza in 1663 along with Bombay (Mumbai) and a promise of 2,000,000 livres. Yet, despite the investment of considerable funds and prestige, it ended in an abrupt and humiliating withdrawal from the place in 1684.

The marriage of the English king and the Portuguese princess proved to be a momentous event although not for any reason that the parties have intended. It also proved a particular calamity for the English. In the first instance, it failed to produce offspring thereby leaving James, duke of York whose subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism shook the monarchy to its core, as the heir to his brother’s throne. Nor did the Portuguese ever deliver cash in any amount close to the promised 2,000,000 livres.

More pertinently, though, for this discussion, the Portuguese were keen to offload the money pits of Bombay and Tangier. The former place—it is unclear whether Charles even knew its location in 1661 when the nuptial negotiations began—was under threat from the Marathas and the Dutch. It soon became apparent that the Crown lacked the means to support this remote new interest and in March 1667 finally persuaded the East India Company to take it over. This transfer also underscored the English division of overseas interests along hemispheric lines between the EIC in Asia and an array of chartered interests around the Atlantic Ocean that was implemented at this time. Company management, which included a religiously tolerant approach, famously turned the situation around so that the port with its superior harbour surpassed its rivals on the west coast of India. Bombay, accordingly, followed its antecedent Madras (Chennai, founded in 1639) as a model for the government of English interests in Asia.^[1]

Map of Tangier, 1670, accessed here

Tangier might have followed a similar trajectory. Certainly, Charles II’s advisors found its prospects as an entrepôt that would connect English trade in the Mediterranean trade with other overseas commerce appealing. Certain armchair authorities proclaimed that control of the place might provide a platform for unprecedented expansion of English maritime commerce, especially at the expense of the old enemy Spain as well as the new, more vigorous global rival—and Spanish ally—the Dutch with whom one war had already been fought (1652-4) and another (1664-7) would soon begin. This was a view undoubtedly encouraged by the Portuguese, then engaged in a war of independence from the Habsburgs that would end in 1668. On paper—and succeeding where the Portuguese had failed—Tangier might have facilitated the burgeoning English presence in Guinea and, by extension, America. Ministers were also keen, at the least, to prevent the Dutch bogeymen from obtaining it. Moreover, the place might provide a location from which to curb the longstanding practice of North African corsairs seizing ships and enslaving their passengers and crews.^[2]

Unfortunately for this vision, the situation at Tangier differed markedly from that at Bombay and the Mediterranean plans collapsed almost at the first hurdle. The chief difference was the respective attitudes of neighbouring rulers towards the English presence: at Bombay, both the Marathas and the Mughals were generally content to allow the Europeans to govern the city and to conduct trade under licence. On the other hand, the chief reason for Moroccan failure was the determination of the ‘Alawī sultans, especially Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif (r. 1672-1727), to regain the city; a determination that, of course, entailed the expulsion of the newcomers.

Portrait of Moulay Ismail Ibn Sharif, accessed here

Perhaps counterintuitively in imperial terms, Tangier’s prospects suffered from its unique institutional position. Since it had come into English possession through the marriage treaty with the Portuguese, Tangier was governed directly by the Crown. Its institutional status, though, was unique: unlike even other ‘royal’ colonies, such as New York—seized from the Dutch in 1664—it had no charter or equivalent ‘frame’ providing for a local government; Charles II authorized the creation of a mayoralty and other local offices, but the political situation on the ground in conjunction with the aspirations made for the place required the presence of a significant military presence from the moment of the English takeover. By 1676, Tangier had a 4,000-man garrison and the construction of a mole to protect the harbour was well underway at an average annual cost to a cash-strapped Crown of £75,000. The administrative demarcation between military and civilian administration was never drawn with satisfactory clarity and the resulting conflicts deterred both demographics and commerce.^[3]

The ‘royal’ status of the port also snarled the purposes of overseas endeavour. The East India Company, by definition, merged the governmental functions it had been delegated with the commercial functions required to promote its balance sheet. Despite perennial difficulties with interlopers, less-than-conscientious factors, European rivals, and hostility from Asian interests, the company had established a system that was fit for purpose by 1660.^[4]

In Anglo-America, colonizers, such as the Lords Proprietor of Carolina (chartered in 1663), recruited European colonists who formed local governments and imported enslaved Africans to meet labour requirements. Accordingly, they had established colonies from Massachusetts to Barbados by 1675 despite similar problems with agents and officials, interlopers, and other European interests.^[5]

For Tangier, the Crown, of course, had no capacity to conduct a trade that would offset the massive administrative costs it was incurring. Also, while it recruited colonists, it could not offer the incentives—notably, the promise of land to servants at the completion of their indentures—that Anglo-America could, due to the restricted size of the city. It tried to square this circle by permitting free trade to all comers in the hope that this would generate customs revenue on an appreciable scale.

This hope, though, was quashed by the Dutch, competition with whom had been a primary reason for pursuing the Portuguese alliance—as Spain and the Dutch Republic had become increasingly friendly after the Treaty of Munster (1648) finally ended the Dutch Revolt—and the very reason for acquiring Tangier. In 1664, the Second Anglo-Dutch War broke out with English seizure and destruction of Dutch posts along the Gulf of Guinea and capture of New Netherland (New York). These triumphs, bankrolled by unprecedented grants of revenue by parliament, though, were not sustained and this conflict lurched from bad to worse for the English, culminating in De Ruyter’s embarrassing destruction of most of the mothballed (for lack of funds) fleet in the Medway and the hauling of the flagship Royal Charles back to the Netherlands in 1667. With respect to Tangier, the Dutch and their Moroccan and Spanish allies cut the place off and wholly interrupted English trade in the Mediterranean: in one case, twenty-three prizes valued at £332,500 were seized at Cadiz while the second governor, Andrew Rutherford, earl of Teviot, and four hundred soldiers were killed in a Moroccan attack in 1664.^[6]

The English were never able to recover the initiative, despite the promulgation a series of schemes promoting its importance to imperial progress and the reportedly undiminished enthusiasm of the king and his brother for the Tangier project. The place came under increasing pressure and brought the loss of more men and money, not helped by lack of access to Spanish markets and a disastrous conflict with Algiers. Meanwhile, Sultan Moulay had embarked on a successful imperial campaign that brought his army to the city’s walls while Charles II dealt with the Exclusion Crisis and its aftermath. Given the alternative that the construction of an adequate defence would allegedly require £4 million and an 8,000-man garrison, the Crown opted to cut its losses. The English (now British) would not have their Mediterranean presence until the Spanish cession of Gibraltar in 1713.^[7]

L.H. Roper is SUNY Distinguished Professor History at the State University of New York--New Paltz (USA), a Fellow of the New York Academy of History, and the author/editor of seven books on English overseas trade and colonisation in the long seventeenth century. He tweets @RoperLou

[1] L.H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 183-5.

[2] Gabriel Glickman, ‘Empire, “Popery,” and the Fall of English Tangier, 1662-1684’, The Journal of Modern History 87, no. 2 (June 2015): 247-80.

[3] Glickman, ‘Empire, “Popery,” and the Fall of English Tangier’, 257, 264-5.

[4] David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[5] L.H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

[6] Gijs Rommelse, The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-1667): Raison d’etat, Mercantilism and Maritime Strife (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2006), 123-74.

[7] Glickman, ‘Empire, “Popery,” and the Fall of English Tangier’, 261-2, 273-7.

Title image: Map of Africa by Nikolaas Blankaart (1624-1703), accessed here