Sourcing them is the critical path — nobody's plan can accelerate a French academic title arriving in Algeria. That task moved to this week.
Ould Cadi Montebourg, Alger, une cité turque au temps de l'esclavage (PULM 2006), built on the journal of Francisco Ximénez, the Trinitarian who ran the Algiers hospital 1718–20. Not a gate book — a targeted patch for the two starved brief sections: the Trinitarians were the ransom brokers, so chapters VII–IX are the brokerage desk itself, and chapter VI is a whole chapter on captive legal status. Two cautions, permanent: 1718–20 needs a bridge to 1785; and this is the European side of the desk, not the Algerian tradition — it does not move the two-traditions gauge, and it gets read against Belhamissi when Les captifs algériens arrives. Read free at OpenEdition (HTML only; the PDF is the paid product, so no Notability copy). In Zotero: counter-source-european. Full study mode — vocabulary, lens, quiz, patch sheet ›
Merouche II, the «La vie à bord» passage. One paragraph, two different kinds of value — so it becomes two slips, thirty seconds apart, via “another from the same page”. Splitting is not extra work; it is the work.
« Les récits… sont rarement des témoignages directs… allant du tout noir au tout rose, ils traduisent en partie les différences de situation et en partie l'état d'esprit des auteurs. »
Source criticism of the captivity corpus, performed by a Maghreb historian, decades before you arrived. Citable armour: when a reviewer objects that the two-filter procedure is undue scepticism toward Foss, this is not imported suspicion — it is Merouche's own caution, extended. Variation in the accounts has two sources, real difference and authorial temperament, and you cannot read one without controlling for the other.
« …les responsables étaient tenus de rendre compte à Alger de tous les événements… Des peines graduées étaient infligées, y compris aux raïs à leur retour. Des navires d'Alger se sont réfugiés à Salé, à Tunis, à Tripoli… pour échapper aux punitions. »
Harder to say: that the course was lawless piracy. Reporting upward, graduated penalties reaching the commander — and captains fleeing to foreign ports to escape sanction, which is Bloch's witness in spite of itself: conduct that cannot be staged for the record, and you can only flee a jurisdiction that exists. Ledger rows logged prospectively against Foss and Tyler; question banked: is discipline institutional in the American texts, or individualised into “the cruel Turk”?
Contrast the galley passage from three pages earlier: 120–150 rowers, the bench mixed on purpose against mutiny. A good fact — but era-bounded (galleys were mostly gone by 1785, so it needs a bridge) and phrased in the scholar's own French. The ladder runs fact → mechanism → constraint → behavioural proof; the higher a passage sits, the more of the article it has already written. Vie à bord outranks the galleys because a mechanism plus a method plus a behavioural proof persists into your period; a manning table for a dead technology does not.
The brief is assembled, not composed. Every reading session below carries a ✎ button that opens a Bear note already headed with the section it feeds — so by December these six buckets are full and writing is a matter of ordering what you already have. A thin bucket in November is information, not failure: it tells you which book is missing.
How the Regency's captivity economy actually worked: ransom brokerage · the fiscal role of la course · the legal status of captives · the vocabulary. Not notes — a description you could hand to someone else. It is also the thing the ledger adjudicates against, and the thing that reveals what the American texts omit. Omission is where the findings are, and only a positive description exposes it.
The categories the corpus collapses. You will learn what they actually meant from the two books, not from a glossary — these are the headings to read for.
One question through both books: what problems is this state actually solving — revenue, the militia's pay, the beyliks, the Porte, the European treaties? Keep the running list. It IS your governing question, being answered before the corpus can misdirect it.
Cuts snap to chapter boundaries, never mid-chapter; spans are the printed pages you cite from. 17.5 hours is the whole book — that does not fit Sept–Oct. The gate core below is the six hours that actually bear on the captivity economy and 1785–1816: chapter 10 (the institution), 11 (the taïfa), and 17–21 (your period, the prize registers, the quantified data). The rest is the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century formation of the institution — real history, background for this article. Read core first; if the core raises a question the background answers, go back for that chapter.
11.6 h. Not required before the brief. Good drafting-months reading.
Marine et marins d'Alger (1518–1830), BNA 1996, three tomes, 646 pages — not the gate book, but the same author's framework in his own words, and it closes four of the brief's five sections. Targeted chapters only: 11 h of the 646 pages. The starred ones are where your period actually lives — including Tome III ch. XX, which quotes your 1795 treaty's article IV as one instance of Algiers's passport practice. That is your reframing, already performed from the Algerian side.
Not a frame. Grammont wrote 57 years into the occupation, inside the tradition that produced "piracy" and "despotism" — the tradition Merouche writes against. He transcribed a great deal of archival material and that material is usable. Mine him for documents, dates and the chronology skeleton; take nothing from him about what the Regency was. These spans are where his transcriptions and dates cluster for your period. In Zotero (tagged document-quarry), Notability, and free at Gallica / Internet Archive.