Satirizing English Tangier in Samuel Pepys’s Diary and Tangier Papers

Abstract

The writings of Samuel Pepys seem an unlikely source for satire of English colonial pretensions in the Restoration period. Little of the English colonial world is given any attention in Pepys’s famous Diary, and, judging from its nine mundane references to Virginia and New England, the American colonies were simply not an important part of Pepys’s mental geography. The only major overseas establishment that consistently held Pepys’s attention was the outpost in Tangier (1661–84), which, in most accounts of English colonial history, is considered to be peripheral if it is mentioned at all. In one respect, the focus of seventeenth-century scholars on English overseas activity in the Caribbean, North America, and the East Indies is understandable, given the centrality of those areas to the later British Empire. In contrast, Tangier produced no line of colonial succession, and it was not the staging ground of a later British empire in North Africa, making it easier to underestimate the importance of Tangier to the government of Charles II. It is hard to build a narrative of the “rise of the British empire” on the ruins of English Tangier.