government,” which would be “unacceptable from every point of view.”51 In this case, recognizing the bey’s sovereignty worked to help the French maintain a particular colonial civic order—one that relegated Muslims and Jews to secondary status.
Yet the preservation of beylical sovereignty did not constitute a tool to be deployed at will by French officials, for it also sometimes frustrated their aims. To contend that the bey remained sovereign meant recognizing all existing treaties between him and the same foreign powers whose influence French authorities wished to curtail. While indirect rule had been, at the height of the Ottoman Empire, a secret to its power,52 in the new “age of empire,” it squared uneasily with the zero-sum game of imperial rivalry, which discouraged power-sharing arrangements. Concessions to foreigners in Tunisia conflicted with attempts to assert French primacy there. At every turn—when France set out to abolish extraterritorial justice, open an appeals court in Tunis, or change the nationality code, among other reforms—its imperial rivals invoked treaties with the bey in an effort to block (or at least influence the direction of) change. In the 1920s, some forty years after the establishment of the protectorate, the French still struggled to bring Tunisia’s European residents under the umbrella of a “common law.” In their effort to do so, they now contended that at a minimum France was the bey’s “co-sovereign” rather than just his protector. Imperial rivalry, and its effect on the rule of law in the protectorate, had brought France to abandon a central tenet of protectorate rule: that Tunisia was foreign territory. French leaders increasingly tried to have it both ways but found themselves in a trap, for their efforts to assume greater sovereignty over Tunisia fostered new conflicts with France’s rivals as well as Tunisians themselves. To be sure, Tunisia was never annexed. But neither did it resemble any longer the hands-off protectorate it once had promised to be.
This transformation in colonial governance was not just the inexorable result of what today might be called mission creep. France’s “mission” in Tunisia did not just grow. It grew in response to the mutually reinforcing nature of domestic and international conflicts of the time. Tax evasion and draft dodging, property and usufruct disputes, and divorce, custody, and inheritance battles were all common enough in any colonial context. What made them particularly vexing to French authorities in Tunisia, however, was that what might have been mere struggles for social authority often implicated, thanks to divided rule, foreign interests. As a result, conflicts that began between individuals could engender new international disputes, and changes in international relations could raise the stakes of matters normally confined to hearth and home. It was this compounding nature of local social life and international rivalry that led French authorities to seek to close the room for maneuver that divided rule had opened.
ONE
Tunisia in the Imperial Mediterranean
THERE WAS NEVER SUPPOSED to be a protectorate. Or at least the bey of Tunis did not think so. After all, he already had a protector in the Ottoman sultan—albeit one from whom he had long asserted his independence and whose ability to protect any of his regents had been compromised by the Crimean War and its aftermath. In part because of that war (and the cost of raising a Tunisian army in defense of the Ottomans), Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey had found his finances under international receivership for over a decade.1 Nonetheless, he clung to what remained of his autonomy. In fact, the bey was caught between two imperial systems that clashed in the late-nineteenth-century Mediterranean: the Ottoman Empire and the New Imperialism.
Claiming autonomy from the Ottoman sultan, the beys had cultivated relationships with Western European governments and their consular representatives for decades, even negotiating separate capitulations treaties with them.2 Similar to agreements by the same name that the Ottoman sultan had entered into with European states in other parts of the empire, these treaties granted European governments the right to judge their subjects under their own laws and thereby avoid their subjection to Islamic law, which was perceived to be prejudicial.3 By brokering these arrangements, the bey had deliberately sought the support of European powers as counterweights to the sultan. In the late nineteenth century, however, as Western powers scrambled to divvy up the African continent in a “new” phase of imperial acquisition, older forms of empire such as Ottoman suzerainty began to look more attractive to the bey.4 The trouble was that the sultan, like the bey, increasingly confronted challenges from those same Western European powers and struggled himself to maintain control of his many provinces. In an effort to capitalize on these dynamics, French leaders had tried to convince Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey that the Ottoman sultan was scheming to install a pasha in Tunis, as had been done in Tripoli. Arguing that the bey’s independence would be better safeguarded by France, the Quai-d’Orsay had offered to “protect” the bey in February 1881. In reply, the bey repudiated the charges and declined the offer as unnecessary.5 Later that spring, when the French used the Khmirs’ activities on the Tunisia-Algeria border as an excuse for intervention, the bey protested French military encroachment on his territory, even sending his own troops to try to quiet the Khmirs himself.6 But nothing he did could satisfy the French, who forced his hand on 12 May; the resulting Treaty of Ksar Said (Bardo Treaty) established the protectorate without mentioning the word.
Like the bey, top officials in the British foreign office also had not regarded a formal protectorate as necessary, even though they had made clear to the French for some time prior to the spring 1881 invasion that Queen Victoria’s government harbored “no jealousy” with regard to French interests in Tunisia.7 That did not prevent her majesty’s government from expressing dismay at how the defense of French interests had mushroomed from a quick securing of the Algerian border into a full-scale occupation of Tunisia and its placement under French protection. Meanwhile, the advent of the protectorate was so upsetting to members of the Italian parliament that it helped bring down the cabinet of Benedetto Cairoli, who had served as Italy’s premier and foreign minister during the Tunisia crisis. For a while, it even looked as though the French parliament, too, might oppose the occupation-cum-protectorate, since debate in the National Assembly called into question the wisdom of an endeavor supported by Bismarck just ten years after France had lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany.8
The Tunisian crisis accompanied the dawning of the “Age of Empire” or the “New Imperialism,” in which the acquisition of colonial territory was viewed as a zero-sum game, where one nation’s gain was another’s loss. In North Africa, this territorial competition helped set in motion the gradual dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.9 Yet, as the case of Tunisia exemplifies, this game was played not only on a purely geopolitical level, with sparring over boundary lines on a map. It was also about human beings and the boundaries of their allegiances. That this was so explains why Italy and Great Britain, both of which had substantial subject populations in Tunisia, were more exercised than other European powers about France’s establishment of a protectorate. Yet alongside this early phase in the “Age of Empire” coexisted the notion of a “Concert of Europe.” Whatever their misgivings, neither Italy nor Great Britain found France’s conquest of Tunisia worthy of upsetting European peace. Nor, evidently, did the Ottoman sultan, who, confronted at the same time with Western European powers encroaching on territory closer to his imperial center, did not raise an army to defend Tunisia—partly because France threatened him with war if he did.10 Nonetheless, even as Western European powers acquiesced to the expansion of territory falling under France’s influence, they remained concerned about what the conquest meant for their ability to defend their commercial interests and the rights of their own subjects or citizens who lived there, as well as what impact it would have on international relations in the Mediterranean more generally.
Once the protectorate over Tunisia was a fait accompli, France’s imperial rivals quickly became invested in ensuring that it never became an annexed colony. To this end, they defended a set of premises they saw as distinguishing the protectorate form of governance from outright annexation: first and foremost, the maintenance of the bey’s sovereignty and the recognition of the beylical state in international law and, second, as a corollary, the continued recognition of all treaties and agreements the
