This is not a new research area. It is the spine of Article 1, with the method now demonstrated at scale. Article 1 already is a misattribution study: slave for asīr; Algerine aggression for a Portuguese squadron withdrawal; a plunder economy for a state running on grain with the course under 5% of receipts in ordinary years. What was missing was not a theme but the proof that this kind of study can be done rigorously. Merouche has now done it, and the three steps above are the transferable part.
Only checkable misattributions belong here. Every entry must state how it can be checked — a name, a document, a count. Where the correction is interpretive it is disagreement, not misattribution, and it goes in the claims ledger instead.
Stricter form of the same rule, and the one to actually apply: never label something a misidentification until the alternative identification is independently established. Not established by the same source that prompted the suspicion — independently. A difference between an American description and Merouche's reconstruction may equally be simplification, metaphor, genre convention, translation, political rhetoric, incomplete information, a different conceptual system, or the author knowing something you do not.
The reason is simple: one instance is an anecdote, and a series with truth conditions is a finding. "Europeans were biased" cannot be published because it cannot be falsified. "Brahîm Kulughlî was a kouloughli, and calling him a Canarian renegade is not knowing what the word means" can.
Dating, and a distinction worth keeping: ch. 11's counts are Siècle-de-la-course material, pre-1700, and are not evidence about 1785–1816 — they answer a claim about the corsair century, and they stay there. But the cases are evidence about the European library, not about Algiers, and a library has no period. The Kulughlî error is as checkable in 1979 as in 1650. So: counts are period-bound, cases and mechanism are not. Merouche's own present tense makes the point — the mindset «continue à polluer la recherche historique».
Second boundary: this does not swallow Article 1. Article 1 is the terminology article and this series is its evidentiary spine, not a replacement subject. If it outgrows that, it becomes Article 2 — and the question there is why the errors were useful, not merely wrong.
Grading by how a case is checked is not enough — the kinds do different work. Institutional and terminological are the two that bear directly on Article 1. Note that the fifth is called agentive rather than "genealogical", to keep it distinct from the source-genealogy below: one asks who is credited with doing it, the other asks where the Americans got their account. Different questions, and conflating them would cost the argument its precision.
Merouche's explanation of the renegade myth, and the template for handling the American case. Three groups who agree on nothing else converge on a single factual distortion, because each has a different use for it. A claim that simultaneously serves three incompatible agendas is maximally suspect — filter two operating on a whole historiography rather than on one author. The question to carry into the corpus is not whether a claim is false, but whose purposes its falsity served, and the answer should be expected to be plural.
The second faction's argument sounds favourable to Algiers: Europeans converted because Islamic society offered a tolerance and cosmopolitanism that Christian Europe, tearing itself apart over religion, did not. A pro-Algiers argument, apparently.
And it still makes the European convert the protagonist. Algiers is the setting in which a European becomes interesting. The praise runs through the same channel as the contempt, because the explanatory agent is European in both.
The lesson, and it governs the whole project: a discourse can be entirely favourable and still structurally eurocentric, if Europeans remain the necessary explanatory agents. So the test is not whether a text is hostile or admiring. It is who is allowed to be a historical agent. That is also why replacing negative representations with positive ones is not a correction — it leaves the agent question untouched, and the nationalist counter-myth fails on exactly this point.
No single interest sustained it, so no single interest's decline could kill it. The redemptionist orders faded; the anticlerical polemic lost its occasion; the colonial project ended. The claim survived all three because it never depended on any one of them. Distributed support, no single point of failure — which is also the reason it could still be sitting, unexamined, in an American dissertation of 1979.
Note the circularity in the Mezzomorto case, because it is the mechanism in miniature: the nickname was given to him by his enemies, and then read back as a fact about his birth. European sources named him, then cited their own naming as evidence.
The step that converts this from a complaint into an argument. If the American texts are downstream of the European accounts — if Tyler and the rest were working from guidebooks and compilations rather than from observation — then Merouche's demolition of those accounts is simultaneously a demolition of the American texts' sources.
That changes what the article claims. Not "the Americans were wrong," which invites the reply that everyone was. Instead: here is exactly where they got it, here is who made it, and here is what each maker wanted from it. A checkable genealogy, running from the redemptionist fundraising pamphlet through the European compilation to the Philadelphia novel.
The map of that library is already on the shelf. Ben Rejeb, «Barbary's "Character" in European Letters, 1514–1830: An Ideological Prelude to Colonization» (Dialectical Anthropology 6:4, 1982) is precisely a study of the European library the Americans inherited, written by a Tunisian scholar. It was filed as background on the Grammont problem; its real function is this one. Read it against ch. 11 and the genealogy has both ends: who built the library, and what was wrong inside it.
⚠ To verify before it is written: the claim that Tyler's Algiers came from guidebooks is attributed to Spengemann and arrives second-hand. Get the reference and read it. If the derivation holds for Tyler, check Markoe and Rowson too — the genealogy is only as good as the sourcing of each link, and this is the load-bearing one.