eastern border. This was hardly the only way France could have tried to control its new imperial acquisition. Given Tunisia’s diverse population—the result of its location at the crossroads of traditional Mediterranean commercial and trans-Saharan trade routes—one might have expected French officials to practice “divide and rule” tactics, manipulating or even fabricating factions among colonial subjects in an effort to achieve a more secure “imperium”—as the Latin phrase divide et impera implies.4 Instead, the French in Tunisia confronted a problem of “divided rule.”
MAP 1. Map of Tunisia showing the region of the Khmir tribe. Map by C. Scott Walker.
I call French rule over Tunisia divided because the protectorate arrangement institutionalized many sources of authority in the territory, dividing rule not only between France and the Husaynid dynasty of beys, as one might expect, but also between France and other European powers—especially Italy and Great Britain—whose prior treaty arrangements with the Tunisian bey secured them pockets of influence through consular courts, commercial accords, and other special privileges. The fragmentation of authority that was built into the original protectorate arrangement had profound effects on the whole arc of history in colonial Tunisia. Rather than serve unequivocally as a means of imposing French power, divided rule in Tunisia often frustrated it. For France, recognizing the bey’s sovereignty meant preserving Tunisian institutions, including the native courts, the bey’s army, the tax system, and more. To placate rival European powers, France also preserved the exceptional rights and privileges European governments had previously negotiated with the bey for their own nationals, including exemptions from native justice for many matters and immunity from conscription and head taxes. Thus, an intricate series of divisions—between the rights of Christian migrant “foreigners” or “Europeans,” on the one hand, and Muslim or Jewish “natives,” on the other, to cite one example—were institutionalized under the protectorate system. A consequence of the compromises France had made in order to claim Tunisia as part of its growing empire while at the same time preserving the “Concert of Europe,” divided rule thereafter presented a problem that French authorities continually struggled to overcome.
Above all else, France’s rule over its coveted protectorate was fragmented because ordinary Tunisians constantly took advantage of the protectorate’s system of divided rule, as they maneuvered within and between Tunisian, French, and foreign institutions to pursue material, legal, and social gains in their everyday lives. Individuals living in the Mediterranean region had, of course, long practiced affiliation switching to “improve their lot in life.”5 But while such “forum shopping” had been an irritant to local rulers for several decades, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it became a matter of high state.6 The Crimean War (1853–56), after all, had erupted in part over which power (France or Russia) had the right to protect the Christians of the Ottoman Empire. Now, the very act of jurisdiction jumping in Tunisia exploited and even altered imperial rivalries in North Africa more generally. By illuminating the dialogic relationship between personal politics and international power politics, this book tells the story of how efforts to address the problems of divided sovereignty often opened up new fissures in French rule.
French authorities initially had preserved beylical sovereignty partly in order to avert violent clashes such as those triggered by outright annexation in neighboring Algeria. Yet over time they sought to replace divided rule with undivided rule—instituting reforms that, by the 1920s, undermined the very sovereignty they originally had pledged to protect. As France’s leaders sought more authority over Tunisia in the 1920s and 1930s, however, they began to lose control of it, for their attempts to consolidate power helped engender challenges that eventually crystallized into a powerful independence movement. Although Tunisia had been designed as a kind of anti-Algeria in 1881, imperial governance in the protectorate came increasingly to resemble that of its neighbor by the 1930s. In turn, like annexation, protectorate rule provoked resistance, as Tunisia became home to one of the most precocious and organized nationalist movements in all the French Empire.
Uncovering this story does more than bring the twists and turns of Tunisian and European history to light. It also integrates many different strands of colonial, imperial, and international history. In recent years, the study of “empire” as a category of governance has flourished, as scholars have sought to define it and characterize what made it distinctive.7 Some have concluded that no empire has ever been unitary, in contrast to the ideal-typical nation state.8 Yet so much attention has been paid lately to the whole (the “empire” rather than individual “colonies”) that, at least for the so-called new imperialism dating from the late nineteenth century forward, scholars all too rarely have considered why imperial governance took the specific forms it did in distinct places and at different times.9 On the other hand, earlier studies of modern colonialism often presented the opposite problem, by focusing so intently on particular colonies that they gave the false impression of a closed-circuit relationship between colony and metropole. This organized colonial history, as James McDougall has critiqued it, “along the lines of colonialism’s own legitimate axes of movement” and neglected how a particular colony fit within the framework of imperialism or the world system writ large.10 Try as French officials might to contain Tunisian affairs within this small territory, the very structure of the protectorate instead made Tunisia a pivot for “interimperial politics” (between European powers) as well as intercolonial and intracolonial exchange (with neighboring Libya and French Algeria).11 Accordingly, understanding how and why governance in the protectorate changed between the 1880s and the 1930s demands a reconstruction of relationships along hitherto underappreciated axes of political and diplomatic as well as social exchange.
These axes ran not only from Tunis to Paris but also from Tunis to Marsala (Sicily) and from Sicily to Rome. They went from Bizerte to Valletta (Malta) and from there to the British Foreign Office in London. And they traversed across the Sahara from the oases of southern Algeria to those of southern Tunisia and Libya, and from each of these to the imperial offices responsible for each territory.12 Such an observation builds on the insights of the “new imperial history,” which demonstrated that metropole and colony are “interconnected analytical fields.”13 In much the same vein, competing imperial powers and neighboring territories should also be analyzed as “interconnected.” That is, instead of studying imperialism as a “centripetal” force rather than as a “centrifugal” one, the way the new imperial history did, I suggest that we look at the larger force field or “geographies of power” in which imperialism and colonialism operated.14
MAP 2. Tunisia as the gateway to the Eastern Mediterranean (map shows shipping routes). Map by C. Scott Walker.
The reorientation of imperial and colonial history I propose is not just geographic but also methodological. With the development of “postcolonial theory,” scholars often shifted away from focusing on factors we might characterize as “structural” to borrow instead from poststructuralism. For Edward Said, whose Orientalism is broadly credited as having founded “postcolonial” theory, imperialism was an epistemological system. Thus, while he acknowledged that “[t]erritories are at stake, geography and power,” he also contended that the contest over geography was “complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”15 If Said was convinced, even in his later work, that the material aspects of imperialism had been overemphasized, three decades after the publication of Orientalism, studies of “coloniality” and “postcoloniality” now abound.16 Yet for all these analyses tell us about the cultural facets of imperialism, important historical questions remain. If imperialism was about form, how did change come about? If the colonial encounter opened spaces for subversion, as Homi Bhabha suggests, then how can we explain the stubborn persistence of
