Barbary Company

The Barbary Company or Marocco [sic] Company was a trading company established by Queen Elizabeth I of England in 1585 through a patent granted to the Earls of Warwick and Leicester, as well as forty others. When she wrote the patents, Elizabeth emphasized the value of the region's "divers Marchandize... for the use and defence" of England.

The privilege of the company was to benefit from exclusive trade for Morocco for a period of 12 years, until its charter expired in 1597. Queen Elizabeth sent her Minister Roberts to the Moroccan emperor Ahmad al-Mansur to reside in Morocco and obtain advantages for English traders. A treaty signed in 1728 extended these privileges, especially those pertaining to the safe-conduct of English nationals.

The formal beginning of Anglo-Ottoman relations dates back to correspondence between Elizabeth I and the Ottoman Sultan Murad III which led in May 1580 to an agreement between the two rulers that English merchants could pass safely through Ottoman-controlled seas and port in the eastern Mediterranean and the Barbary Coast of North Africa. This essentially granted trading privileges to the English, who for various reasons, mainly piracy, had been unable to trade efficiently in the Mediterranean since the 1550s, and in September 1581, the Turkey Company was established as a joint-stock venture to take advantage of this new monopoly on regional trade.

In 1585, the Barbary Company, separate from the Turkey Company and the Venice Company (1583), who also operated in the Mediterranean and later merged into the Levant Company in 1592, was established with many of the same merchant investors, with a focus on trade along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Morocco was at that point the main source of sugar for the English market, prior of course to the development of the West Indies plantations in the 1600s.

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