Paying or fighting the Barbary corsairs

How could a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century navy keep Barbary corsairs away from its ships?

Negotiated payments and Ottoman diplomacy could protect trade more cheaply than repeated punitive expeditions against separate corsair centres.

Payments are presented as a potentially cheaper way to protect trade than repeated fighting. The corsairs belonged to multiple centres: action against Algiers would not necessarily deter Tripoli or another authority. Ottoman connections added a diplomatic complication and could also provide a route to an agreement. Elizabethan trade and relations with the Ottomans illustrate an arrangement in which commerce and protection of English ships reinforce each other. The suggestion that payments were deliberately priced just below the cost of suppression remains an interpretation, without a documented calculation.