Some of the earliest settlers on Long Island, originally a Dutch colony, were Barbary pirates. Some Dutch converted to Islam and worked as pirates. They raided the English lands, bringing their captives to Ottoman rulers in Libya, Algeria or Tunisia who would sell or trade them through the empire. The breakup of this trade is part of the story of the United States Marine Corps and is referenced in the Marine Corps hymn line - "to the shores of Tripoli!" It is also one of recognize the independence of the new United States (1777). France was the second and probably the first to establish diplomatic relations. We have had a long friendly relationship with the Moroccan leadership since then with a treaty in 1786 being the oldest treaty that the US has not violated or broken.

Read about the sack of Baltimore, where inhabitants of an Irish village were captured and enslaved to the Ottoman Empire in 1631. The man leading that raid ended up on Long Island and has been listed as an ancestor of several relatively famous American personalities according to the book.

It is not surprising, in that light, to find that coinage from Muslim countries would find its way to the east coast of N America considering that pirates used the relative safety of those waters and many settled there using the spoils of their trade, and their connections, to establish themselves as legitimate citizens in the new lands. These coins are connected to different events but the existence of other world coinage in colonial America should be no surprise.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4881890-the-stolen-villa...

When it comes to US - North African relations, Morocco was a world apart from the Barbary states. Morocco was friendly towards the US and never enslaved American citizens, it even tried to protect them diplomatically.

Dey of Algiers etc., well that was something different. Any infidels who hadn't paid protection money were a fair game for them. The British paid protection money and had free passage around North Africa - to the detriment of their Italian competitors who could not afford to do the same. Americans, after trying to negotiate via France, decided to crush the enemy instead of paying ransom.

Thanks for the additional context. It was fascinating to me to discover the story behind our deployment of Marines to Libya and especially to find that it happened so long ago when our nation was just starting out. That was an additional nugget of knowledge that I learned in the telling of the story of enslavement of Irish people which was the reason that I originally bought the book. I had no idea that the British had shipped so many into slavery in the Caribbean to provide labor on sugar plantations. For years, my understanding was that most of the non-native labor was supplied from east African slave markets. There is so much to unpack in that story.

Don't forget the intermediate stage: the privateers that fought for independence.