Abstract
In a letter dated November 1883, Paul Cambon, the resident minister of France’s protectorate of Tunisia, confided to his wife that “if the Capitulations aren’t suppressed, we’ll find ourselves backed into a corner [nous voila accules].”1 These Capitulations—similar to legal arrangements prevailing in the Ottoman Empire, of which Tunisia had been a semiautonomous province until the French conquest in 1881—granted a number of legal immunities to foreign nationals and holders of foreign “patents of protection.”2 Why would the senior administrator of France’s new protectorate worry about the legal status of nationals belonging to the rival states it had outmaneuvered to win Tunisia? After all, France had just signed a treaty promising to protect the Tunisian bey’s dynasty in exchange for the right to “occupy all areas deemed necessary for the reestablishment of order and security of both borders and
Highlights
792 Lewis coastline.”[3]. The treaty seemed to settle the question of which European state controlled Tunisia
I will argue, it marked the beginning of a new phase of imperial rivalry, as European powers found novel ways to compete for influence in the protectorate by exploiting fissures in the rule of law
The present article explains why French colonial governance in Tunisia shifted in nature, from an insistence that Tunisia was a “foreign” territory under the sovereignty of the bey to a claim that France shared in the bey’s sovereignty and that the territory itself was in some way “French.” It accounts for this transformation by reconstructing the connection between international relations in the Mediterranean basin and the social uses of the law in Tunisia during the first fifty years of protectorate rule.[5]
Summary
In suggesting that the international order in the Mediterranean basin and the Tunisian civic order mutually constituted one another, I am calling for a new way of thinking about what Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler have termed the “tensions of empire.” Cooper and Stoler, along with other “new imperial historians,” fruitfully pushed past the nationalist paradigms that had dominated histories of empire and suggested instead that scholars place metropole and colony in a single analytic field.[18]. Cooper and Stoler, along with other “new imperial historians,” fruitfully pushed past the nationalist paradigms that had dominated histories of empire and suggested instead that scholars place metropole and colony in a single analytic field.[18] Very few scholars, have broadened this scope of inquiry beyond the presumed closed circuit of metropole and colony.[19] In connecting local social strategies to imperial rivalries, I integrate approaches to the history of empire that, because of their isolation from one another, have missed the specific ways in which imperial power has been exercised, contested, and transformed. International disputes and local-level conflicts challenged French authority in the protectorate and, in turn, reshaped the imperial game across the Mediterranean and North Africa
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
