questions. To address them, scholars need a methodological framework that transcends neat oppositions between colonizers and colonized, without denying uneven distributions in power.18 Beyond the circuit of metropole and colony, historians are beginning to expand their vision to include neighboring colonial territories, the full variety of imperial powers active in an area, and individuals who either traversed colonial boundaries or called them into question through their behavior.19 Such boundary crossing was not just ideational; it depended on and contributed to the geopolitics of empire. By this I do not mean simply the defense of colonial borders by soldiers or cannons, but rather the many other ways in which the act of defending interests and exercising influence in the context of imperial rivalry affected the entirety of what one might call, following Elizabeth Thompson, the “colonial civic order.”20
Tunisia provides a case in point. If, within the halls of the Quai-d’Orsay, Whitehall, or the Italian Consulta, the question of who controlled Tunisia in territorial terms seemed more or less settled by France’s treaty with the bey,21 consular dispatches from Tunis and other local records tell a very different tale. Instead, these on-the-ground records reveal the onset of a sub-rosa form of imperial rivalry that penetrated everyday life, affecting the most basic matters of justice, taxation, property acquisition and transmission, and even burial rites. France’s invasion of Tunisia coincided with the rise of an international state system that was based on distinct sovereign states and apparent zero-sum games.22 To be sure, this “new nationalist calculus,” as Anthony Pagden has termed it, meant that “the more of this earth you could take away, the greater you became.”23 Yet this scramble for empire did not cease upon the carving up of territory, and it was measured by more than colors on a map. European governments still tried to broker influence in lands claimed by their rivals, and locals engaged in their own scramble for power over their everyday lives by adroitly recognizing the opportunities divided rule provided them. These two forms of power struggle did not merely overlap; they were intertwined. Local disputes—between husbands and wives, creditors and debtors, bureaucrats and taxpayers—had the power to both reveal and exacerbate divisions between European states. As this example suggests, social life and diplomacy were not two isolated arenas of the Tunisian colonial experience; accordingly, my method integrates social and diplomatic history to show how deeply connected the two really were.
Not all colonial situations lent themselves to the power plays I describe here. In North America, for instance, as Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron have shown, natives “lost the ability to play off rivalries” as nations claimed exclusive sovereignty over their respective territories.24 In North Africa, by contrast, the advent of colonial competition altered the significance of these local efforts by native Maghribis, foreigners, and people of all religions. The bey’s 1881 capitulation to France did not signal the acquiescence of Tunisians to a rigid system of colonial domination constraining their room for maneuver. Instead, the international order in the Mediterranean and the civic order in Tunisia now mutually constituted each other in a fluid and dynamic system. This dialogue drove French decision making about colonial governance in the protectorate for the first half century of its existence. By the late 1930s, the burgeoning nationalist movement in Tunisia had begun challenging the very premise of the protectorate. In so doing, nationalists helped usher in a new, more overtly confrontational, relationship between Tunisians and their would-be “protectors” that culminated in Tunisia’s independence in 1956. This, too, altered the imperial game in the Mediterranean in new ways, as Tunisian independence in turn affected Algeria’s own independence struggle.
In connecting local social behavior in Tunisia to imperial rivalries throughout North Africa and the Mediterranean, I aim to combine approaches to the history of empire that, in their compartmentalization, often have overlooked the specific ways in which imperial power has been exercised, contested, and transformed in different colonial settings. By adopting this perspective, I wish to offer a fresh approach to the study of imperialism generally, while also finally putting to rest the Manichaean categories through which French imperialism and colonialism, in particular, are often understood.25 Especially in the past decade, the history of French imperialism and colonialism has been presented in absolute and often moral terms. Like the Black Book of Communism, French scholars also produced a Black Book of Colonialism, whose very title gives away its perspective.26 Exposés such as the Black Book helped bring the long-neglected history of French colonialism to public attention. But the new spate of scholarship condemning colonialism’s “crimes” also encouraged equally passionate reactions in defense of the “positive side” of French imperial expansion.27 These analyses respond to contemporary political debates more than they do justice to the historical record, for terms such as positive and negative are not very useful for understanding history unless we can be more specific about their application: Positive or negative for whom? In what ways? With what trade-offs? There is no binary framework that can account for the diversity and complexity of colonial situations found in the French Empire.
In Tunisia, as elsewhere, this was true because the opposition between “colonizer” and “colonized,” where meaningful, told only part of the story.28 Even the class of “colonizers,” for instance, was not unified. Italians outnumbered the French for most of the protectorate’s history, and Maltese British subjects also constituted a significant portion of Tunisia’s “European” population. The importance of non-French Europeans in the protectorate, as well as Tunisia’s strategic position at the gateway to the eastern Mediterranean (see Map 2), meant that French colonial authorities had to think constantly about the impact their decisions would have on both Italy and Great Britain as their principal rivals for influence in this part of North Africa.29 Even issues that seemed to be of a most domestic nature—such as family law—engaged the interests of these other states in a variety of ways and meant that in virtually no domain could the French act with absolute autonomy as the colonizing power. International competition amounted to much more than gunboat politics and cannot be explained primarily as a strategic response to intermittent local crises.30 In fact, it provided a constant backdrop to life in the empire with subtler but nonetheless profound effects on the territories under competition, and Tunisia in particular. Indeed, Divided Rule suggests that France even had a kind of imperial conflict with itself, as it had to constantly consider what impact decisions taken with regard to Tunisia would have on neighboring Algeria, and vice versa. After all, the boundary line between Tunisia and Algeria was not just an intracolonial one; it was an international border.
International and domestic affairs were inextricably linked in Tunisia in part because of the extent to which domestic rights intersected with questions of international law. Wittingly or not, Tunisia’s residents—“European” or “native,” Christian, Jewish, or Muslim—engaged in social behavior that played European powers off each other. Maneuverings within the justice system exemplified such behavior. In keeping with the more “indirect” and less expensive approach of “protectorates” (as opposed to annexed colonies), the French had refrained from overhauling the native justice system and had merely instituted French courts alongside it.31 Having done so, they then confronted the problem of “forum shopping” now recognized as common in legally pluralist societies.32 In order to inherit property, disinherit siblings, request or contest a divorce, or settle countless other intimate disputes, residents of Tunisia exploited the ambiguity of legal pluralism, moving between jurisdictions. Within the same family, one might find a wife who claimed to be “French” in order to sue for divorce, while her husband might insist she was “Italian,” which would make the divorce illegal. In Jewish families, brothers wishing to inherit the entirety of their father’s estate could claim, as “Tunisians,” to fall under rabbinical law, while their sisters often demanded recognition as “Europeans” to assert their access to some portion of it. A Muslim man might view himself as “Tunisian” regarding marriage or property matters, but “Algerian” (and thereby French) when it came to claiming exemption from Tunisia’s onerous head taxes or conscription for the bey’s army. In these and myriad other ways, individuals at once displayed the fluidity of their social identities and exploited the impact of the “new nationalist calculus” on local jurisdictional boundaries. These strategies, and
