A Slave Between Empires: A Transimperial History of North Africa by M'Hamed Oualdi

Author:M'Hamed Oualdi [Oualdi, M'Hamed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS001030, HIS055000, North, History/Africa/North, history, Turkey & Ottoman Empire, Africa, History/Middle East/Turkey & Ottoman Empire, Middle East
ISBN: 9780231549554
Google: 1sqWDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020-02-04T00:26:50.443551+00:00

French Colonial Domination and Other Historical Dimensions of Modern North Africa

Each of the individuals involved in the conflicts over Husayn’s estate acted in specific ways and developed multiple, interesting relationships with French colonial authorities depending on their social class, their gender, or their belonging to religious communities and households. Under high scrutiny by the colonial administration, ‘Ali Bey managed to bypass French surveillance and act secretly, relying on his family, former officers, and intermediaries of the precolonial Tunisian government. By allying with the Bu Hajib household, the Italian Angiolina Bertucci became a more effective negotiator than the French-German Eva Keusch, who did not succeed in gaining the French officers’ trust and backing. ‘Amr Bu Hajib had to take into account the pervasiveness of French documents and French language within the Tunisian legal institutions, but also took advantage of the new colonial balance of power to get ‘Ali Bey to compromise. And, although a French citizen from Algeria, Léon Elmilik did not hesitate to cause a scandal and sue the French representative in Italy so as to catch the attention of every character in this story.

In each case, French colonial domination constrained and influenced these individuals’ abilities to act. At the same time, ‘Ali Bey, Angiolina Bertucci, and Léon Elmilik all succeeded in challenging France’s power to oversee and repress individuals and authorities in the Mediterranean basin. To do so, they relied on households, social connections, and Tuscan courts, spaces and institutions that were already instrumental during the precolonial period. Moreover, most of these players did not base their actions on the French colonial agenda, whether they were for it or against it. Instead, litigation about land, credit, or Islamic values (in the case of the Bu Hajib) triggered most of their actions.

Studying these varied sorts of agency allows us to recover dimensions that are often overlooked in the history of colonial Tunisia, such as the lasting role of Muslim households, the clandestine actions of the Tunisian sovereigns, and the importance of Tuscany and the Italian courts as venues for North Africans to challenge French authorities at the end of the nineteenth century. How can we write a history that takes into account colonial domination and these other dimensions of history at the same time? Were these other forms of action, and the histories that they point to, alternatives to the colonial world—as subterranean domains eluding the attention of colonial authorities?108 Or do these actions reveal instead aspects of history that enveloped colonial domination?109

Our attempt to look closely at various forms of agency is not meant to fragment the history of these societies into diverging accounts, in a “limitless and arbitrary proliferation of interpretations.”110 Rather, it aims to problematize the central position of colonialism in the study of the modern history of a particular North African region in order to save from oblivion “other signifying systems which had lost the battle for legitimacy and have thus been ‘forgotten.’”111 The various characters in this chapter might be seen as exceptional, but each nuances and enriches our understanding of this period.

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