Map of Barbary, Containing the Kingdoms of Marocco, Fez, Algier, Tunis and Tripoli.

Title

Map of Barbary, Containing the Kingdoms of Marocco, Fez, Algier, Tunis and Tripoli.

Description

Map depicts North Africa, stretching from Morocco in the west through modern-day Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Above it, the Mediterranean Sea is shown, along with Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and parts of Turkey. From Dunn's atlas work "A New Atlas of the Mundane System".

c. 1786

Artist

Sayer Robert (1725-1794)

Robert Sayer (1725–1794) was one of the most influential and commercially successful English publishers and dealers of maps and charts in the 18th century. His famous workshop was located at No. 53 Fleet Street in London – for decades the premier address for British cartography. Although he was not a cartographer himself, he shrewdly acquired valuable printing plates. He became famous for publishing the highly innovative charts of Captain James Cook and the atlases of Samuel Dunn ("A New Atlas of the Mundane System"), thereby significantly shaping geographical knowledge during the American Revolutionary War. Depending on the era, his maps bear different publisher names; following a partnership known as Sayer & Bennett, the company was continued after his death in 1794 by his successors under the world-renowned name Laurie & Whittle. Around 1765, he also invented the so-called "harlequinades" – the very first flap-based pop-up books for children.

Historical Description

North Africa in the broader geographical sense is the area of the continent of Africa that includes the Sahara and the coastal strip to the north, west and east of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Red Sea. Religiously, North Africa is mainly characterized by Islam, ethnically by Berbers, Moors and Arabs, in the southernmost area also Nubians, Amhars and Black Africans. The core states of North Africa include Morocco with the Western Sahara, Algeria, Tunisia (small Maghreb), Libya (Greater Maghreb), Egypt and Sudan. Especially during the ongoing desert phase, contacts between North and sub-Saharan Africa were therefore limited almost exclusively to trade along the east and west coasts of the continent and to certain routes where there were sufficient water points, due to the difficulties of crossing the world's largest sandy desert. At the same time, this meant ethnic separation, and although North African culture has both African and Middle Eastern roots, with the Berbers possibly even European. With antiquity in the narrower sense, the interests of the Mediterranean peoples, which had previously been focused primarily on Egypt and the Near East in terms of power politics, gradually changed. As so often in history, it was trade that paved new paths; and the first people to devote themselves entirely to Mediterranean trade, even to the neglect of their own state structures, were the Phoenicians, but the place in North Africa where territorial state structures did develop, at least to some extent, was Carthage. In the period between the destruction of Carthage and Rome taking control of the Maghreb, there was a brief flourishing of local kingdoms. Two largely sedentary ethnic groups, the Moors and Numidians, were of particular importance. After the victory over Carthage, Roman culture and, above all, Roman administration spread relatively quickly from east to west along the Atlas mountain ranges across the new territories in North Africa. The North African provinces quickly became economically central to the Roman Empire, and between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, Rome's survival actually depended on grain and olive supplies from there, as the climate in North Africa at that time was wetter than it is today. When the Romans took power in the Mediterranean, a development came to an end in the course of which North Africa in particular finally became part of the Mediterranean world.