Husayn Bey was clearly displeased and complained yet again in 1827 about paupers arriving from the Maltese islands to the British consul, who promised to “inform the governor of Malta of His Highness’ observations . . . I have already written about this subject to the governor of Malta. If he has not found that the number of Maltese is rising in Tunis now, it is because usually there are as many who leave as who arrive. This fact can be verified easily by the number of passports which are always deposed at the British consulate [in Tunis].”1
But things scarcely improved in the next years. In 1829, a formal protest “was made by Hassuna [al-Murali], the Bey’s interpreter, by reason of the increase in the number of Maltese settling at Tunis during the time of the country being in a state of distress, and which it has been for sometime past owing to the failure of the crops of oil and grain.”2 More grievous problems lay ahead. As gale-force winds gathered off the Gulf of Tunis, a ship arrived in the winter of 1836 bearing Maltese passengers of “different ages, sexes, and conditions.” The initial refusal by Mustafa Bey to allow British protégés to land in La Goulette created an international “boat people crisis.” While negotiations dragged on, the hapless passengers remained on the ship battered by high seas. In London’s view, withholding permission to disembark when peace prevailed constituted a violation of treaties between the British Crown and the Ottoman Regency of Tunis. Threats of involving the Porte in the standoff and warships dispatched from Valletta eventually convinced the bey to change his position by April 1837.3 Several years later, a ship from Istanbul sailed into La Goulette with a Circassian mamluk, Khayr al-Din, recently enlisted to serve the new Husaynid ruler, Ahmad Bey. The young man proved a loyal servant as well as enthusiastic reformer and brilliant statesman. Later appointed minister of the navy, Khayr al-Din grasped the implications of immigration into the regency and, through his own wide-ranging travels, realized that the world had become a smaller place.
Incessant squabbles over Maltese immigration and Khayr al-Din’s arrival in 1839 from the Ottoman capital are emblematic of the changing dynamic of trans-Mediterranean mobilities that marked the century. From the 1820s until 1881, Tunisian officials, European consuls, and capital city inhabitants struggled to come to grips with the newcomers whose social class and sheer numbers gave alarm. That the pile of Maltese passports on Reade’s desk remained more or less the same in 1827, no matter how many protégés departed, suggests that a pattern of “circular migration” was emerging—indeed a diaspora was in the making. Not mentioned is that the exact number of people coming and going could never be ascertained, since a lively trade in undocumented migrants was taking shape. Genuinely concerned, Reade had repeatedly contacted Malta’s governor, apparently without much success, because British authorities were either indifferent to or openly welcomed the loss, however temporary, of “surplus” population. North Africa was on the cusp of becoming a social dump, a political landfill, for Europe’s human castoffs. How might the historian think about the tangled problems raised by people on the move in the central Mediterranean corridor and beyond?
Over a decade ago, Leslie Moch underlined the importance of “mundane movements”—seemingly insignificant displacements from village to nearby town or from town to city. Somewhat in contrast, Mary W. Helms observed that “the morally (and politically) uncontrolled frontier need not be geographically very far away to be perceived as a ‘distant’ place.”4 Taken together, these reflections on distance and mobility suggest the ways in which migration transforms the far and near, the foreign and strange, and how danger and displacement can be either connected or uncoupled. The notion of spatially inconsequential, but critical, movement invites us to consider if the passage over the narrow waterway separating Tunisia from Malta or Sicily was mundane and how and why that might have altered after 1830, 1850, or 1881. Did the fact that the Maltese spoke a language distantly akin to Tunisian Arabic, or that Italo-Sicilian dialects constituted the regency’s diplomatic lingua franca, render the voyage to North Africa less daunting? Since most subsistence migrants were Catholics, while Tunisia was a Muslim land, did religious difference make the journey seem perilous, at least in the years after abolition of the Christian slave trade? How did France’s decision to make Algeria a settler colony transform migratory patterns in the central Mediterranean, notably the Tunis region? And why leave home in the first place? What forces encouraged or compelled island folk and others to depart for North Africa—and not another destination? Ultimately, one must ask whether the people in motion regarded themselves as migrants per se and, if not, how they experienced their own subjectivities in the places of self-exile.
This chapter provides a macrolevel charting of diverse population movements from the eve of France’s invasion of Algeria to the Protectorate—as if the observer occupied a point somewhere above the sea—and an up-close ethnographic treatment of the people who left home temporarily or permanently, willingly or unwillingly, or somewhere in between. The primary coordinates are first and foremost North Africa, particularly Mediterranean Tunisia and Algeria. We observe people in motion mainly, but not exclusively, from the Gulf of Tunis, which offers front-row seats for viewing the full spectrum of migratory behaviors, their causes and consequences. One principal argument—that Algeria’s conquest provoked not only substantial immigration to precolonial Tunisia but also displacements across the Mediterranean—takes the story farther afield. But first: what did older geographies of movement and travel look like before 1830?
Mediterranean corsairs had raided each others’ ships and villages for centuries, hauling off booty as well as captives, both Muslim and Christian, which rendered “the Other,” an object of intense fear and loathing. Bin Diyaf’s chronicle opens the account of Ahmad Bey’s reign with the new ruler’s parentage: “his mother, a slave girl taken in a raid upon the island of St. Pietro, came as a small child with her mother and her sister [to Tunis].”5 One of the last attacks of this magnitude, the raid occurred in 1798 off the southwestern coast of Sardinia and netted treasures from the local church as well as 150 young girls for the Tunisian corsairs. But small-scale raiding persisted into the first decades of the next century. In 1815, the kahiya’s ship arrived in La Goulette with “five wretched Sardinians captured on land in Sardinia” and four Corsican sailors seized while fishing, although their fate seemed brighter since they were delivered to the Bardo palace where they “demanded assistance from the French consul.”6 Until 1816 hundreds of enslaved Christians were held in the Tunis bagnios, although under highly variable conditions; some were allowed to practice trades or crafts on the side, others were condemned to hard labor. Nevertheless, the systematic, legally sanctioned brutality suffered by the poor wretches banished to bagnios in penal colonies, such as French Guyana, was absent for the most part.7
During the heyday of Mediterranean corsair activity, ship captains, adventurers, or sailors serving Christian kings threw in their lot with the Muslim side, at times voluntarily, at others after capture at sea; some switched back and forth as the political winds demanded. Renegades settled in Tunis, Algiers, and other Ottoman port cities, at times marrying into local families; the most talented became ra’is, or captain, but risked imprisonment or death if they fell into Christian hands. This fact may have inhibited legitimate maritime trade between North Africa and Europe in earlier centuries because renegade ship masters were reluctant to put in to ports where they might be snatched up.8 During the corsair centuries, countless North Africans were held as slaves in Europe, although their stories for the most part remain untold.9 In 1816, just before Admiral Exmouth set out for North Africa, an English ship arrived in La Goulette from Leghorn with a Tuscan diplomatic envoy to conclude a peace treaty with the bey. Presumably negotiations entailed exchanges of captives, since onboard the ship “were forty-eight Tunisian slaves who had been found in Tuscany.”10
Older historical treatments of the corsair epoch portrayed the Mediterranean as divided into warring and thus utterly distinct Muslim-Christian zones. This has been challenged on a number of fronts, not least because raiding of whatever sort facilitated transactions between the Maghrib and Europe. A type of maritime brigandage, raiding afforded a livelihood for Mediterranean islands and islanders and at times blurred the lines between privateering and corsair activity.11 In this culture and political economy, captives furnished servile labor—mainly as galley slaves, domestic workers, or concubines—or handsome revenues from the ransom racket. Christian and Muslim maritime powers played the same game, although the elaborate system for ransoming Christian captives in North African ports, largely the work of Redemptionist orders, is better documented than the liberation of Muslims.12 The series of treaties imposed upon North African states and naval expeditions in 1816 and 1819 ended, for the most part, this particular system of forced migration. What about other types of trans-Mediterranean movements taking place across a continuum running from voluntary to involuntary displacement?
The emphasis on Christian islanders or southern Europeans as migrants to the nineteenth-century Maghrib suggests that North Africans were disinclined to travel or try their luck away from home. Earlier scholars maintained that Muslims did not venture freely to Christian lands out of innate hostility, inspired by religious precepts. According to the older historiography, antipathy or indifference, together with lack of intellectual curiosity, conspired against first-hand contacts with, and knowledge of, Europe. Scholarship now argues that, while Muslims did not visit the Christian shores of the Mediterranean in great numbers until the nineteenth century, exchanges had always existed. Recent research has uncovered hitherto ignored Arabic travel accounts narrating sojourns in European cities that contradict ideologically driven claims of Muslim aversion toward all things Christian and Western.13
North Africans from coastal cities, or even from desert entrepôts, took to the sea in search of adventure and fortune, as seen in the story of ‘Ali bin ‘Uthman al-Hammi, born sometime in the 1770s. Originally from the oases of southwestern Tunisia near the Algerian border, ‘Ali made his way to Tunis, somehow joined the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt in 1798, fought against fellow Muslims, and served in Napoleon’s Mamluk Imperial Guard for fourteen years before rejoining his home village on the Saharan fringe. He spent time in Marseilles before being rescued by Tunisian sailors aboard a vessel in port from a “race riot” against the Muslims and other easterners who had accompanied the French army back from Egypt.14
At roughly the same time that ‘Ali journeyed to Egypt with the revolutionary army, a mamluk from the bey’s court, Hassuna al-Murali (d. 1848), was captured by English corsairs and taken to England. Al-Murali spent nine years there, adding English to his command of Turkish, Arabic, and probably Italian. As his countryman ‘Ali had fought with the French, so al-Murali acted as interpreter to the British army under Sir Ralph Abercromby in Egypt during campaigns to dislodge Napoleon’s forces from the Nile Valley. Before his assignment to Tunis in 1825, Sir Thomas Reade traveled to Egypt where he encountered al-Murali in service to the British expedition. As the English consul later reflected: “I myself was acquainted with him [i.e., Murali] . . . in Egypt where he was a general favorite. He is greatly attached to our [i.e., British] interests.”15 Apparently a quick study, al-Murali acquired a familiarity with British naval technology and, returning to Tunis, was named minister of the navy and afterward constantly praised Great Britain to anyone in the court who would listen—so much so that peers jokingly referred to al-Murali as al-inglizi (the Englishman).16 Later travels took him to Marseilles in 1821, Algiers during the turbulent summer of 1830 to negotiate with French forces, Istanbul and Paris in 1833, Malta in 1838, and Paris in 1846, where he addressed the French king in English, a facility acquired in the British Isles.
Then there is the case of Mahmud, the kahiya of La Goulette and scion of a notable family. Soon after Husayn Bey came to the throne, King Louis XVIII died and the bey dispatched a personal envoy, loaded with rich gifts, to the coronation ceremonies for Charles X. Wisely, the choice fell upon Sidi Mahmud, described by a contemporary in this way: “He is about thirty years old, speaks Italian, has a pleasant, even shy, manner, is without fanaticism or prejudice, eats in European fashion, and is dignified enough to be admitted into the high society [of the Parisian court].”17 For three months, Mahmud “feasted his eyes upon the marvels of France” and resided with his Tunisian entourage in a hôtel in the chic Faubourg Saint-Germain. During a grand reception at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, complete with lavish banquet and a bevy of French ladies as dinner guests, Mahmud showed a marked preference for champagne, which, he took pains to make clear, was prescribed by his physician for health reasons.18 Intrigued by the “Oriental” gentleman, the French press fell all over itself, singing his praises and regaling readers with detailed information on his clothing and skin color, which one newspaper reported was “similar to that of a very brown Frenchman.” The Journal des Bouches-du-Rhône reported in March 1825 that “he is very imposing physically due to his height and his great strength. He wears a very rich costume indicating his high social rank which confers upon him much dignity. Moreover, he is very affable.”19 After a smashingly successful diplomatic mission, the envoy returned—perhaps reluctantly—to Tunis in August 1825 on a French frigate, a year before the Egyptian Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873) arrived in Paris with students from Cairo pursuing education in the French capital.
A few North Africans ventured west far beyond the pillars of Hercules—as in the case of Sidi Sulayman Mellimelni, who headed a delegation to Washington in 1805 to negotiate the release of Tunisian vessels seized by the American navy.20 Troubles with the Kingdom of Naples erupted in 1832 after Husayn Bey accused its subjects of engaging in contraband in a Tunisian port. In the ensuing diplomatic uproar, another court favorite, General Salim, was dispatched in June 1833 to soothe the king of Naples with lavish offerings, thereby avoiding military hostilities.21 Well-established traditions of diplomatic and commercial exchange with Europe explain why a Tunisian ruler became the first Muslim prince to make a state visit to a European court. In 1846, Ahmad Bey embarked on a tour of France accompanied by Khayr al-Din, Hassuna al-Murali, and Bin Diyaf. The visit ultimately exerted a tremendous impact upon the country’s destiny, and Ahmad Bey took pride in being the first Husaynid ruler to sail across the sea.22 Another kind of travel was occasioned by personal troubles at court. As the nineteenth century wore on, Malta offered haven to Husaynid officials fallen into disgrace. The Jalluli brothers, part of the ruling elite, fled Tunis for Valletta in 1840 after defrauding the central treasury; other state swindlers preferred Paris, as was the case with Mahmud bin Ayyad in the 1850s.
Although by no means as heavy as north–south traffic across the Mediterranean, displacements in the opposite direction brought city notables and even provincial types, such as ‘Ali al-Hammi, to Europe driven by an array of motives, producing an equally wide array of outcomes. Muslim North Africans preferred Istanbul, Egypt, the Levant, and Hijaz as places of piety, pilgrimage, knowledge, trade, escape, or settlement more than other destinations. The same was true for North African Jews, who moved about from Morocco to the Red Sea to visit shrines, synagogues, or centers of learning or for family or commercial reasons. Transversal religious or economic orientations slowly gave way in the nineteenth century to vertical axes of movement, especially for North African notables drawn to Europe for medical care and, above all, modern education.23
Standard narratives of nineteenth-century encounters between North Africa and Europe dwell on diplomatic envoys, state visits, or official missions that brought students from Cairo or Istanbul to European capitals for studies. Less attention has been paid to journeys by people of ordinary means or to forced expatriations. Many North Africans who made the Mediterranean crossing after 1830 were involuntary exiles, the vast majority Algerians. Best known is the religious and political leader Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir, who surrendered to General de Lamoricière in 1847, was imprisoned in France until 1852, and subsequently relocated to Bursa in Turkey; in 1855 he settled permanently with a large retinue from his home province, Oran, in Damascus on a pension from the French state and was later awarded the Légion d’Honneur.
In addition, hundreds of Algerian rebels were exiled to bagnios in Corsica or to penal colonies scattered across the French Empire; a few were transported to Nouvelle-Calédonie.24 Some eventually made it back home; but their life stories as captives in imperial internment centers have yet to be fully narrated. Muslim children were forcibly dispatched overseas; during the terrible famine years of the 1870s, Catholic missionaries sent Algerian orphans to religious houses in Italy and in France. And those deemed mentally unhinged and dangerous by the colonial regime, including Algerian Muslims, suffered transportation to asylums in Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence, or Montpellier.25
As for North Africans seeking opportunity elsewhere, the journey of “la Belle Fatima,” is particularly arresting. Rachel bint Eny, Belle Fatima’s real name, was the daughter of an Algerian Jewish musician who had long resided in Tunisia. As a young girl, she accompanied her father from Tunis to Paris, where he performed in the Oriental orchestra at the 1878 Exposition Universelle on the Champs de Mars. After the exposition closed, Fatima’s family settled in Paris, where she remained for the rest of her life. She became a well-known performer and opened her own boîte, or nightclub. Another force that fed south-to-north currents was Europe’s insatiable demand for Islamic exotica cum religious performance. After the “discovery” by the French public of the ‘Isawiya Sufi order, with its purportedly strange rituals, members of the order made regular theater appearances in Paris and London; some stayed on.26
As North African notables and ordinary folks began to travel to Europe under a wide range of circumstances, a reverse migratory current, numerically larger, gained momentum. Given that as late as the 1820s, when slave raiding had ended, the image of the Moors as “corsairs, pirates, and pitiless enemies of the Christians” persisted, how was North Africa transformed in the collective imagination from a site of captivity and apostasy into a migratory labor frontier?27 What large-scale, middle-range, and local historical forces explain why Maltese or Sicilian peasants no longer saw Barbary as a land of “idolatrous oppression” but rather as a place of good fortune?
The Napoleonic Wars and French occupation of Egypt shook loose large cohorts of people from home; some ended up in Mediterranean Africa, blown there by chance or choice or both. For example, the famous circus strongman, Giovanni Battista Belzoni, born in Padua in 1778 to an impecunious barber, ended up in Egypt by serendipity in 1815, where he attempted to cajole Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha into investing in a new irrigation system.28 In addition to swarms of hucksters, like Belzoni, who went to Egypt freely, there were many others who were compelled to relocate to the Nile Valley. As part of the 1798 naval expedition to Alexandria, Napoleon rounded up laborers in Malta for transportation to Egypt as a coerced workforce. However disagreeable this experience may have been, some Maltese elected to remain there, despite long-standing apprehensions about Islamic lands. After seizing power in 1805, Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha embarked on a Mediterranean-wide search for technicians to drive state modernization programs; among those recruited were the Maltese, because a small community already existed in Alexandria. Master carpenters and masons from the Maltese and other islands proved instrumental in reconstructing the port’s defensive works and expanding docking facilities for the western harbor, which was opened to Christian shipping.29
Some of the people who ventured to Egypt during the Napoleonic interlude and settled permanently later sent family members to Tunisia, thereby creating new transversal currents of skilled labor exchanges between Mashriq and Maghrib. When, in imitation of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, Ahmad Bey embarked on state reforms after 1837, his agents in Marseilles, Valletta, Leghorn, and Istanbul engaged military and scientific personnel from across the Mediterranean. Among Ahmad Bey’s interpreters in the newly organized Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was Elias Mussalli, whose father had emigrated from the Levant to Egypt during the French occupation. Born in Alexandria in 1829, Mussalli exercised the profession of dragoman from an early age at Muhammad ‘Ali’s court. He was later recruited by a Tunisian diplomat stationed in Egypt, Muhammad Badr al-Din, who, like other agents, was scouting talent. An Orthodox Christian, Mussalli entered into Husaynid state service in 1847 and insinuated himself into local creole society by marrying the beautiful daughter of a resident Genoese merchant. Mussalli’s counterpart, Antoine Conti (1836–1893), whose origins lay in Corsica rather than the Ottoman Empire, came from a family also established in Egypt during the Napoleonic years. Born in Alexandria as well, Conti arrived at some point in Tunis, where his linguistic abilities and deep understanding of Arab and Islamic customs brought him to Ahmad Bey’s attention; Conti’s considerable talents won him a posting in the highest circles.30 Individuals such as Conti and Mussalli acted as conduits of information, as bearers of ideas regarding political and social reform programs, between the Egyptian and Tunisian states. At the same time, the presence in Tunis of a relatively large expatriate community either directly employed by the Husaynid state or in trade and commerce functioned as a recruiting center for new labor migrants.
As for the flow of people in the other direction—from the Mediterranean’s African shores to the north—after Napoleon’s army was forced out of Egypt in 1801, French forces returned to Marseilles, bringing with them various and sundry Egyptians and Levantines compromised by their association with the occupiers. Upon arriving in France with an official Egyptian delegation, the Egyptian imam al-Tahtawi expressed utter dismay in 1826 at finding:
In the city of Marseilles, are many Christians from Egypt and Syria, who left with the French army during its retreat. All dress in French clothes. There are few Muslims among those who left with the French; some have died and others converted to Christianity—God forbid—especially the Georgian and Circassian mamluks and women taken by the French [from Egypt] when they were very young, although I met an old woman who had retained her religion. Among those who converted to Christianity, there was a certain ‘Abd al-‘Al . . . who had been appointed by the French as agha of the janissaries during their time [in Egypt]. When they left, he followed them, remaining a Muslim for some fifteen years then he converted because of his marriage to a Christian woman.31
The precipitous increase in the number of Muslims or Eastern Christians residing in France’s Mediterranean ports after 1801 might have made the sea’s southern rim seem less menacing or foreign; yet tolerating “strangers in the city” during political tumult was quite another matter, as the peripatetic ‘Ali discovered during the anti-Bonapartist “White Terror” of June 1815 that began with a popular campaign directed against the “Turks” in Marseilles.32 Indeed, the rebirth of Marseilles after the Restoration was a direct consequence of the invasions of Egypt and Algeria, whose expeditions modified collective perceptions. If North Africa came to be viewed as a place where one could “make it,” what role did artistic, literary, and propagandistic representations of those conquests play in these shifts?
The 1816 Exmouth expedition, with its widely commemorated bombardment of Algiers, reveals another crucible for changing attitudes, because the event was memorialized in an enormous panorama depicting the British navy pitted against the “Algerines.” Painted by the English artist Henry Aston Barker (1774–1856) and exhibited in London in 1818 and later on the Continent, the panorama drew record crowds for years. Other painters of monumental landscapes immediately took up the challenge; in 1823, the Dutch artist Martinus Schouman, produced Het Bombardement van Algiers, a huge canvas full of fire and brimstone portraying the Algerian defeat. Another source in the demythologizing of North Africa as a place of danger and abjuration may have been the 1816 visit that Princess Caroline of Wales, unhappy wife of the prince regent (who later became King George IV in 1820), made to Tunis only days before the Anglo-Dutch fleet showed up. As touched upon in the introduction, Princess Caroline’s presence in Tunisia, where she was chaperoned by a Husaynid prince on sight-seeing excursions and given a splendid palace for her retinue, complicated Exmouth’s plans for attack. After returning to England, Caroline was accused by her unpopular husband of adultery with her Italian tutor, Bartholomeo Pergami, who accompanied her on the Mediterranean tour. The House of Lords debated the king’s divorce action against his wife for weeks. The tumultuous proceedings were portrayed in a monumental painting, The Trial of Queen Caroline 1820, by Sir George Hayter, completed between 1820 and 1823. While the Lords “upheld her honour,” and London’s populace staunchly supported Caroline (which induced George IV to flee for fear of mob attacks upon Westminster), the by then queen died soon thereafter in 1821, a broken woman. Nevertheless, one can speculate regarding how the high-profile scandal surrounding Caroline’s travels and the famous tableau of her trial and tribulations might have again influenced collective visions of the Barbary Coast. Certainly, her observations about Tunis were nothing but favorable:
After I had visited Sicily for the sake of the antiquities I came here [to Tunis] and . . . I am quite in astonishment that all the wonderful curiosities of Carthage, Utica, Savonny, Udinna never have been taken much notice of. . . . I can assure you the soi-disant Barbarians are much more real kind and obliging to me than all the civil people of Europe for which reason I shall certainly remain with them as long as I can. . . . I have never been so happy in my life. . . . I am living a perfect enchantment. The dear Arabians and Turks are quite darlings. Their kindness I shall never forget.33
The smashing success of Barker’s panorama inspired numerous painters, among them, Charles Langlois (1789–1870), to produce vast canvases depicting the 1830 invasion of Algiers. Langlois’ “realistic” panorama of the French conquest was mounted in Paris and showed for eighteen months in 1833 and 1834 to sell-out audiences.34 At least one artist, the Swiss painter Adolphe Otth (1803–1839), who worked in Algiers during the 1830s, decided to venture to North Africa to paint precisely because of the intriguing images of Algeria circulating throughout Europe. Leaving his native Berne in 1837, Otth journeyed to Lyon, the Rhône Valley, and Toulon, where he embarked for Mahon; from Minorca, the ship made a stop in Bône, where the Swiss traveler witnessed the small port’s virtual destruction by the French army. By then Algiers, if not Algeria, had been under French military rule for seven years and had already attracted not only adventuresome artists and travelers but also uninvited laborers and settlers from the Mediterranean islands and southern Europe. Otth, whose truthfulness we have little reason to doubt, stated that he had made the somewhat perilous trip to North Africa to ascertain the veracity of the images seen in Europe.35 Unlike many artists from the period, who were either French officers or employed by the army to document its exploits, Otth was purely motivated by artistic and intellectual concerns, which confers upon his work a certain authority, which is not to deny that his were value-laden images. One wonders if Otth himself had viewed the panoramas exhibited in Paris by Langlois, since the Swiss artist had studied drawing in the French capital for six months prior to setting off across the Mediterranean.
The impact that the wildly popular panoramas exerted upon viewers, who might have been tempted by the idea of travel to Barbary, remains a matter of conjecture. Nevertheless, Barker and his imitators had developed a new genre of aesthetic memorializing—a form of modern media extravaganza cum propaganda that promoted the idea of a subjugated North Africa, a place tamed enough for Europeans to settle and explore. It is indisputable that after 1830 the volume and velocity of textual and visual materials, however fanciful, circulating in Europe about North Africa and its indigenous peoples multiplied exponentially. Works such as Chateaubriand’s Voyage de Tunis, part of a longer travel narrative appearing in 1811, had already exerted no small influence among the bourgeois classes, although both texts and images drew upon a much older fund of European artistic representations of the East, beginning with Nicolas de Nicolay’s Travels in Turkey (1567).36 But how did ordinary people become aware of new opportunities, however meager or ephemeral, in northern Africa?
Contemporary scholarship on global migrations stresses that access to information circuits exerts a decisive impact upon migratory behaviors and flows.37 From 1815 on, Malta operated as a huge informational intake or bellows, sucking in and spewing forth all manner of news about work to be had, higher wages, and free land or, conversely, about dangers “over there” in North Africa. With the introduction of steam navigation in the early 1840s—one of the first steamers arrived in Tunis from Valletta in March 1842—Malta evolved into the premier communications clearinghouse for the Mediterranean. Hearsay, tidings, and rumors from the Black Sea, Indian Ocean, and Atlantic world also went into the mix. Malta’s supremacy in rumormongering resulted from the fact that British legal restraints on publishing were less restrictive than elsewhere. Orally transmitted news, tall tales, and plain falsehoods were committed to print with greater ease, legitimizing them; subsequently, greatly enriched information was folded back into oral circuits. A striking example was the utterly spurious report that a Catholic priest, Father Thomas, and his servant had been ritually murdered by Jewish rabbis in Damascus in 1840, a story that spread like wildfire throughout the Mediterranean, partially due to reporting in the Maltese Times.38 Nevertheless, the year before, an accurate report from Tunis made La Valletta’s papers with astonishing speed—a Maltese vessel loaded with smuggled gunpowder had exploded right outside Ahmad Bey’s palace in La Goulette.39
Geographical location, the quantities of ships docking, and the number of people passing through—sailors, soldiers, travelers, diplomats, and traders—explain Valletta’s brokerage position in collecting and disseminating news, however factual or fictitious. Let’s take a typical shipping report from the period. In November 1839, merchant vessels arrived from Tunis, Newcastle, Sicily, Tripoli, Constantinople, Odessa, Wales, Greece, Trapani, Algiers, Glasgow, Gibraltar, and Jersey. Commercial ships departed for Smyrna, Messina, Odessa, Djerba, Oran, Bône, Alexandria, Trieste, Sicily, and Falmouth, although the destinations, crews, and cargoes of smaller vessels do not figure into this list nor does the hefty military traffic.40 Thus, the central Mediterranean corridor, with its increasingly vibrant borderland culture, was constructed of lines of transmission conveying people, goods, and information in ever greater circulation densities. What push or pull forces, frequently acting in tandem, coaxed or thrust people from homes and villages?
People have always and everywhere left home for a whole gamut of reasons: to trade and traffic; to secure land or a living wage; for adventure, romance, or out of curiosity; to flee conscription, the law, arranged marriages, or murderous vendettas. If decades of warfare followed by peace convinced some to pack up and move, so did critical changes in state policies toward population movements. After 1815, older mercantilist opposition to emigration from the British Isles gave way to the imperative to relieve social adversity at home by populating the empire with “British stock.”41 Permanent white settlement in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada was encouraged, although many of those cast out to the imperial margins did not go freely. In contrast, Spain continued to—or attempted to—restrict emigration until the mid-1850s, with varying degrees of failure or success, which encouraged clandestine settlement, mainly in western Algeria. After 1830 France followed a slightly different path dictated by the urgent need to people Algeria, which primed the migratory pump in the central Mediterranean corridor and in turn influenced migratory flows to Tunisia. But first, what local conditions might have induced individuals or families to strike out? In some islands, ecological degradation, boom-and-bust capitalism, the persistence of latifundia, and overpopulation operated as “distress” or push factors in varying combinations. A relative concept, population overshoot is measured by a complex of elements—kinship organization, inheritance practices, legal regimes, and resource allocation in dynamic relationship with fertility, mortality, and environmental structures.42 Sicily, the Mediterranean’s biggest island, and, above all, Malta suffered relentless population pressures after 1815. “Malta for centuries has been one of the most densely populated parts of Europe . . . and social problems of great imperial significance have grown up around such an intense concentration of people.”43 In stark contrast, Tunisia counted fewer than one million inhabitants, averaging about three persons per square mile. Proximity to Sicily and Malta positioned it close astride a critical demographic frontier—more so than Algeria.44
Since Malta furnished the most immigrants to Tunisia and eastern Algeria for decades after 1830, and represented the largest expatriate community in Tunis until the massive Italian immigration of the 1860s, we begin with the archipelago of seven islands, only three inhabited, that lie virtually dead center in the Mediterranean, 58 miles south of Sicily and 179 north of Africa; Gibraltar is 1,118 miles to the west. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the island fortress functioned as a hub for privateering; indeed privateers’ balance of payments depended upon plundering mainly Muslim ships and enslaving North Africans, although Christian vessels were not always spared. What do we know about the fairly large number of slaves from the Maghrib and Egypt? When Napoleon invaded Malta in June 1798, his forces discovered two thousand Muslim slaves from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli condemned to the galleys of the Order of Saint John of Malta.45 At least one Tunisian qadi (judge) had resided on the islands along with free North Africans in the eighteenth century, about which, unfortunately, little is known. Enterprising Maltese acted as intermediaries for ransoming Muslim slaves held in the bagnios in Malta and traveled to Tunis and the interior, where they made considerable fortunes by locating slaves and delivering them to Tunisian families in return for money, horses, or grain.46
What about relations between North African slaves and the Maltese population? This is a critical question about which little is known, aside from recent research on earlier periods. The presence of numerous enslaved Muslims constituted a source of grave anxiety for Church authorities, who were especially alarmed about their impact upon Maltese women, “who eagerly sought out Muslim slaves to learn from them popular magical superstitions attributed to Islam.”47 One detects the myth of the “ignorant,” lowly woman, always prone to religious error, at work here. Nevertheless, fears of heretical exchanges were nourished by the fact that many Muslims worked for households in the intimacy of the family; although, the vast majority labored in the galleys. If the Maltese corsair economy ended, for the most part, after 1815, the earlier defeat of the Knights of Saint John by Napoleon’s army dealt a mortal blow to island prosperity. While rapacious, the knights had financed most public works and infrastructure—charity, education, even the water supply—so their abrupt departure wreaked havoc, as did the French army’s seizures of Church properties. In addition, Malta’s textile industry had provided supplemental income for peasants in spinning and weaving during the second half of the eighteenth century. When the Spanish government prohibited foreign imports of cotton goods after 1800, Malta lost one of its biggest markets, although smuggling may have attenuated the blow somewhat.
FIGURE 6. Street in the Tunis madina, c. 1860–1900. The octagonal Hanafi mosque is in the background, with passersby whose dress indicates that most were North African. The image is unusual because the three people on the right edge—man, woman, and child—are dressed in a manner suggesting that they are Maltese or Sicilian of ordinary status. Professional photographers in the period rarely portrayed street scenes with indigent Europeans. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, LC-DIG-ppmsca-04985.)
It remains unclear how abolition influenced wage and labor structures in Malta, since some British officials argued that slavery’s end created employment for “industrious inhabitants, whose interests are no longer, as they were then, opposed by the forced labor of slaves.”48 Yet, another dimension of Maltese slaving and corsair activity largely, but not exclusively, directed against North African ships existed that might explain changing economic conditions and in turn emigration. The lucrative traffic in humans—Muslim female slaves fetched the highest price—had permitted the islanders to purchase foodstuffs produced elsewhere, improving diet as well as standards of living. But after 1800, the knights were no longer; and the slavery-corsair economy, which had proved so gainful, was nearing its end. The Maltese were living far beyond their means.49
By the late eighteenth century, the population had risen to a point that the islands’ peasants could only produce wheat and barley sufficient for four months’ consumption; the rest was imported from Sicily, whose grain exports to Malta were regarded as a privilege to be granted or withheld, and from the Maghrib.50 An official British inquiry from 1836 into misery and its impact upon emigration from the Maltese islands conceded:
There is still much room for improvement in the condition of the lower classes here, and great distress prevailing among them is too evident; but whatever may now be the extent of the misery, it may be confidently affirmed to be less than it was in the time of the knights, if we merely consider the greater proportion of wheaten bread consumed within both islands. During the last years of the Order, the annual consumption of foreign wheat was about 43,000 salms or quarters by 100,000 inhabitants; at present, it averages about 57,000 for 115,000.51
By then, the islands imported two-thirds of their food supply; in addition to Sicily, Tunisia and to a lesser extent Tripoli supplied basic foodstuffs, particularly grain, livestock, and raw materials when agricultural conditions permitted, which explains why the Husaynid dynasty maintained commercial agents in Valletta.52
Offsetting negative changes in the islands’ economy was the great natural harbor of Valletta, which served for a century and a half as home to Britain’s Mediterranean fleet. The presence of the navy, a war economy, and the relocation to the islands of English factories from Palermo, Naples, and Leghorn in 1806, as well as free port status between 1803 and 1813, provoked a financial—but also demographic—boom followed by a “bust.” A series of epidemics after 1813 relieved population pressures, but the intermittent imposition of quarantines on ships from Malta until 1826 meant that other ports captured some of its trade.53 Finally, the disorders attendant to the Ottoman-Greek Wars between 1821 and 1829, followed by the meteoric rise of Egyptian cotton, conspired to depress once more the islands’ economy. This came as a massive French expeditionary force landed in Algiers. By then the Maltese “had surpassed the relatively huge figure of 100,000; or more than 800 persons per square mile.”54
The census of 1828 revealed that the native Maltese numbered 115,000, while troops and foreigners brought the total to 120,000. British experts brandished the same menacing statistics: “the island of Malta for its size contains a denser population than any other part of the habitable globe . . . eight times or 800% more densely inhabited than England at the time.”55 Between the late eighteenth century and the 1890s, the Maltese population nearly doubled, reaching at least 175,000 by 1891. While the second half of the nineteenth century brought a another economic boom as expanding naval dockyards provided employment for thousands of workers, Malta’s men and women constituted its principal exports throughout the nineteenth century. British laissez-faire attitudes toward demographic woes did little to alleviate the problem and ironically peopled French Algeria and precolonial Tunisia with British subjects. While the Maltese do not appear to have settled in Algeria in appreciable numbers until 1830, as we have seen, they were sufficiently visible in Tunisia during the late 1820s to elicit protests from Husayn Bey regarding their inadequate means of livelihood.56
British officials were quick to point the finger at the Church’s nefarious influence, and royal commissions on the causes of impoverishment always blamed the people for “multiplying their numbers beyond the demand for their labour.” This 1838 account translates the full force of English Protestant prejudice vis-à-vis Catholic protégés:
Nothing can be more true than this fact; when a lad arrives at state of puberty, he begins to think of marriage before he has made any provision for maintaining a family. The present system of endowing females is the cause of the most distressing consequences, as in numerous cases it is the only attraction which a young woman has for an individual who seeks her as his wife. However small the sum may be . . . when once in the hands of an idler, is soon spent in some hazardous project or speculation, if not in vice; and when he finds he can procure no more, either from his wife or from her relations, he leaves her to her fate, either to be again received under her parents’ roof, or to seek a living for herself and family in the best way she can. This is not an exaggerated picture of very many cases in Malta; and besides this, if the computation were made of the number of females at present on the island, whose husbands have left them for a foreign land [it] would . . . astonish.57
Catholicism, defective family structures, early marriage and the dowry, a dearth of educational institutions or even a credible apprentice system—all created poverty in the official British mind. Here we find classic bourgeois liberalism with its discourse of the “idle poor” as enunciated in Europe at the time; improvidence, coupled with a distressing lack of sexual restraint, characteristic of the “Mediterranean temperament,” created lamentable social conditions in Malta. Of particular note is the statement about the astonishing number of females “whose husbands have left them for a foreign land.” Across the narrow waterway separating the islands from North Africa, consular officials in Tunisia and French colonial authorities in Algeria voiced identical censorious sentiments.
Displaying increasing antipathy toward his imperial charges, Reade lamented that “immense masses of Maltese . . . literally swarm in [to] the Regency especially since the commencement of existing affairs in Tripoli . . . they are continually in litigation one with another [here in Tunis].”58 The “swarming” of the Maltese into Tunisia, the direct result of the reimposition of formal Ottoman rule over Tripolitania in 1835, was a riposte to France’s invasion of Algeria; the defeat of the local Qaramanli dynasty in Tripoli, which had boasted a small expatriate community of Maltese and Greeks, sent them en masse to Egypt or in greater numbers to Tunisia. Clearly good fortune did always not smile upon those forced to leave their island homes for North Africa. “The overplus population which finds an asylum in the Barbary States, in Egypt, Syria, and in Turkey, are chiefly of one class, consisting almost exclusively of labourers who have already more than satisfied the demand for their work, and are, consequently, many of them, even in a worse state than their poor countrymen, at home.”59 By 1847, the vice-consul Ferriere warned London yet again about the fact that “the population of Maltese-British subjects at Tunis has increased in the last twenty years from 500 to 4,000 at least. The greater number of them are of the worst class, disgorged from the gaols of Malta, expelled from the Island, and cast off destitute on the coast of Barbary.” The consulate registered “257 fresh arrivals and only 73 departures” back to Malta, or perhaps some other destination.60 It is, however, probably safe to say that, among the Muslim states ringing the southern Mediterranean’s shores, Tunisia appeared the most familiar, the least foreign, for the Maltese.
Migratory pulses in the central Mediterranean corridor were deeply marked by urban densities on the Italian peninsula, where the largest city, Naples, counted nearly half a million inhabitants by the 1880s; not surprisingly Neapolitans were found in abundance in Tunisia, second only to Sicilians.61 As on other islands, the Sicilian population began to climb rapidly; by 1890 it was estimated at 109 inhabitants per square mile.62 Rural Sicily suffered from the persistence of feudal-like relations, absentee landowners, archaic methods of cultivation, small yields, usury and crippling peasant indebtedness, and declining markets for agricultural surplus. Roads linking one part of the island with another were lacking, ports had fallen into disrepair, if not ruin. One only has to read Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s classic 1958 novel, The Leopard, to appreciate how these circumstances affected daily life. Semi autobiographical and historically accurate, the work opens in 1860 as the prince of Salina and his family laboriously make their way from Palermo to a nearby feudal estate in Santa Margherita; a short distance turned into a three-day trek by primitive transport.63
And Sicily was a place of hunger where the poor subsisted on prickly pear cactus and beans; potato cultivation, which could have provided cheap sustenance, was discouraged due to a popular belief that potatoes encouraged licentious behavior. The clandestine traffic in firewood and timber, often controlled by gangs, contributed to devastating deforestation, whose ravages meant that “by 1840 almost every hill-top was bare and eroded.” In the lowlands, malaria reappeared due to disastrous forestry, agricultural, and river management. While the cost of labor was high relative to international labor markets, the absence of a skilled workforce acted as a brake upon development.64 As was true for Malta, much of the island’s food was imported, particularly wheat, which Tunisia sometimes furnished, in addition to livestock. Finally, a GPS reading reveals that Sicily’s western coast—the ports of Trapani and Marsala—were “closer” to the Cap Bon by small craft than to eastern Sicily via road; in consequence, these ports sent the highest percentage of emigrants to Tunisia.
Seasonal labor movements are critical to intersecting push-pull factors because, after tending vines, picking grapes, or cutting cork, those returning home with money in their pockets may have induced others to try their luck across the sea. From the 1830s until the 1850s, some island workers engaged in temporary or seasonal migration linking Sardinia and Sicily with North Africa.65 Each construction boom in Algeria or Tunisia attracted laborers, but downswings or disasters, such as the 1846 economic crisis, the 1848–1851 cholera epidemics, and the 1864 revolt in Tunisia, reduced numbers, if temporarily. Northern Italian workers were greatly appreciated due to their reputations as hard-working, frugal, and docile. Even the Sicilian cultivator was valued—when not denounced as a bandit or draft dodger—because it was believed that Sicily’s harsh rural economy and rigid class structure predisposed the peasantry to unrelenting manual labor.66 Freelance recruitment agents sprang up across Italy to entice laborers to North Africa, for a fee of course, with spurious promises about golden opportunities—in a manner reminiscent of today’s coyotes operating along the American southwestern borderlands. Indeed a major factor in labor relocation to North Africa was “the deceptions of Italian agents of emigration.” Finally, collective notions about how best to succeed or, in the very least, escape misery played a role, above all, the “widely held belief that one must abandon one’s homeland [i.e., Italy] to make one’s fortune.”67 These elements and others conspired to make leaving home less daunting.
FIGURE 7. Work and gossip in Taormina, Sicily, c. 1906. Peasants from a town in northwestern Sicily engaged in daily tasks that did not differ much from the way of life of Tunisian peasants at the time or that of fellow Sicilian farm laborers who had emigrated to North Africa. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, LC-USZ62–73731.)
Fish and radical politics sent some Italians to the Maghrib for short-term stays that at times turned into permanent residence. Despite the dangers of captivity, island fishermen had long plied North African coastal waters unusually rich in tuna and coral. Beginning with the seventeenth-century concession granted to a Genoese family, the Lomellini, Sardinians exercised a virtual monopoly over coral fishing off the island of Tabarka; when the concession ended in the late eighteenth century, many Sardinians stayed on. After 1830, the numbers of fishermen shot up dramatically to the dismay of colonial officials in Algeria, Tunisian authorities, and locals for whom they represented fierce competition. Experiencing the annual arrival of foreign men of the sea as an “invasion,” Tunisian villagers submitted a substantial corpus of complaint letters to the government.68 But the important element is that the tradition of emigration from the islands to North Africa was already well entrenched. As population movements in the central Mediterranean corridor increased, another line of work opened up for the owners of small vessels—running ferry services between the islands and Algeria or Tunisia. Depending upon the season and winds, the trip took several days, or even more, but the crossing was less expensive than travel by regular ship and was available to those without papers. Thus fishermen and their small boats played an important transportation role in clandestine immigration to North African coastal towns as well as in smuggling.69
While the Maltese were the most numerous expatriate community in Tunisia until the 1860s, the Italians constituted the first to come as political refugees beginning immediately after the Restoration in 1815. Revolutionary upheavals erupted between 1817 and 1832 in the Italian north and south—Naples in 1820, Sardinia in 1821, and Modena and the Papal States in 1832. Each wave of state repression forced out rebels, Freemasons, and Carbonari; some went to North Africa, others to Egypt or the Americas.70 The English missionary and abolitionist Joseph Greaves, who resided in Tunis, expressed astonishment in 1824 at the number of exiled Carbonari, including several priests politically involved in the movement, who lived there openly as a community.71 After 1829, Tunis represented a political haven for the revolutionary followers of Mazzini and Garibaldi who met and conspired together at the Palazzo Gnecco in the madina.72 Garibaldi, a participant in the 1834 Genoa uprising, was sentenced to death in absentia after escaping to France; he eventually sailed from Marseilles to Tunis in May 1835 on the corvette Hélène, commissioned by Mustafa Bey for the Tunisian navy. Numerous myths sprang up around Garibaldi’s brief sojourn in Tunis in the popular European press, becoming more elaborate and baroque as the years passed. Included in the repertoire of legends and lore were the usual Orientalist fantasies à la Pierre Loti—that Garibaldi had fallen secretly in love with the bey’s favorite wife, Layla, who eloped with him. In July 1835, Garibaldi left Tunis for Marseilles and from there sailed to Rio de Janeiro. He reappeared in North Africa in 1849, seeking asylum in Tangier where he wrote the first edition of his memoirs.73
Others politicos decided to stay on in Tunis, notably the Jewish republican, Gaetano Fedriani (1811–1881), who accompanied Garibaldi to Tunisia from Genoa, where both had been implicated in a Mazzini plot. Thanks to Count Raffo’s patronage, which allowed him to pursue political activities as he cast about for work, Fedriani became the main propagandist for the “Young Italy movement” in Tunisia.74 This same current of political expatriation brought Giulio Finzi to Tunis in 1829, where he established the first Italian printing press and dabbled in revolutionary politics. If figures like Finzi and Fedriani acted as intermediaries between the Italian expatriate community in the capital and the beylical government, creole patronage was absolutely critical to their careers.75 Thus a sort of parallelism emerges between Italians seeking sanctuary in the regency and Tunisians finding haven in Malta or elsewhere in the Mediterranean’s northern rim.
What about the migratory impulses in other islands? Compared with Sicily, life in rural Corsica was scarcely better, as the island had been ravaged by the local class conflict and economic turmoil attendant to the Revolution and Napoleonic years. Harvests were torched, ancient olive trees uprooted, and dwellings and estates perished in the flames.76 Napoleon III’s reign brought more travails, as Corsica’s main agricultural commodities—wine, olive oil, and chestnuts—declined, in part the result of unfair trade practices imposed by the metropole. The eradication of malaria in low-lying areas brought an increase in population, and by the last third of the nineteenth century the older agropastoral system was headed for “ultimate collapse” due in large measure to demographic pressures building since the 1820s. Between 1780 and 1880, the population of the island doubled—from about 140,000 to 280,000. Corsicans emigrated in growing numbers to Marseilles, Algeria, and Tunisia after 1830 as well as Venezuela and the Caribbean. In colonial North Africa, the Corsicans encountered the same negative stereotypes as their Maltese and Sicilian counterparts.77
Other displacements to the east involved subjects of the sultan. The Greeks of Tunisia represented an important population—not due to numbers, which were comparatively insignificant—but rather because their ranks included Ottoman subjects, European protégés, and mamluks or renegades. A small Greek Orthodox community, resident in Tunis since 1645, was made up of mainly middle-class merchants numbering no more than several hundred individuals who enjoyed privileges denied European Christians because of their status as Ottomans. The Greeks mainly came from the Ionian and Aegean islands as well as Crete, Cyprus, Thessalonica, and Macedonia and controlled much of the trade between Tunis and the Greek Mediterranean, notably the lucrative commerce in spirits, silks, and vermillion (used for dying textiles) that had longed existed between Zante and Tunisia. By the nineteenth century, some occupied administrative posts or served in the beylical army.78 (The complicated processes that led some members of this community to abandon their status as ra‘iya and membership in the Millet-i Rum in order to claim European diplomatic protection is discussed in a later chapter.)
FIGURE 8. Disembarking from a ship, Algiers, c. 1899. The social diversity of the crowd on the dock indicates that ports and ships attracted a wide range of people—from native porters, French military, and ordinary folks to bourgeois travelers, whose class is apparent from their apparel. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, LC-DIG-ppmsc-05539.)
However, political and economic circumstances akin to those in other islands may have encouraged Greek settlement in North Africa during the early nineteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century, some of the seven principal Ionian Islands had converted, at least partially, from diversified agriculture to a monoculture in olive oil, used as an industrial lubricant in Europe, with the predictable consequence that the peasantry produced insufficient food for household subsistence. As was true in Malta, the Ionian Islands suffered greatly during the Napoleonic Wars. Invaded by the French army in 1797, they were occupied by Venetian, Russian, and finally British forces. By 1814, they fell into British hands, but nearly two decades of unremitting violence and upheaval made the notion of emigration more palatable. From 1815 until 1864, the Ionian Islands were under the protection of the British Crown; Sir Thomas Maitland, former governor-general of Malta, served as lord high commissioner. The Ottoman-Greek Wars (1821–1829), followed by the establishment of a small independent Greek state, reluctantly recognized in 1832 by Istanbul, may have also encouraged emigration and settlement in Tunisia and Algeria, although most diaspora Greeks preferred Alexandria. The Ionian Greeks established in Tunis were legally British protégés, although some sought protection from France, Italy, or Russia.79
The impact that these “mundane” migratory currents exerted upon collective thinking about the Maghrib as a place of temporary or permanent relocation demands further scrutiny, as does North Africa’s role as a migratory stepping-stone in the trans-Mediterranean, and slightly later global, population movements then taking shape. But the most powerful stimulus for emigration from economically strapped islands or southern Europe came in the summer of 1830.
On July 20, 1830, the British consul in Tunis informed London of the momentous events then unfolding: “I have the honor to inform you that the intelligence of the capture of Algiers by the French forces arrived here on the 15th instant and although it was expected this circumstance would have created a deep impression in the Population of this Regency. . .. His Highness the Bey and His Government have taken such precautionary measures, as would effectually check any Disposition which might arise amongst the Turkish Population as well as amongst the evil disposed to disturb the tranquility of the Place.”80
The assessment proved overly optimistic; the news of the fall of Algiers in the summer of 1830 provoked elation, terror, and anger in Tunisia.81 Since Algeria had constituted the age-old military enemy, state elites initially celebrated their rival’s defeat, not least because some French military leaders were favorably disposed to a Tunisian “protectorate” over the beyliks of Oran and Constantine, a project that quickly evaporated into thin air. The bey sent one of his closest advisors, Hassuna al-Murali, to Algeria as envoy and eyewitness to the invasion, which he observed from the safety of a French ship anchored off Algiers. During the month of April 1830, weeks prior to the attack, the massive French expeditionary force took on supplies in Tunis, a pattern prevailing for decades. Nevertheless, most received the bitter news of the fall of Algiers with sorrow mixed with trepidation; poets composed verses lamenting the Christian victory. After the long, brutal sieges of Constantine, a city with historically close ties to Tunis, the mood in the streets turned hostile, all the more so because the 1837 fall of Constantine sent waves of refugees into Tunisia.82
The Frenchman marched against [Algiers] and took her
It was not one hundred ships that he had, nor two hundred
He proudly has his flotilla defile before her,
Surging forth from the high seas, with powerful armies83
In the fourteen years separating Admiral Exmouth’s 1816 expedition from France’s invasion, the foreign community of Algiers, historically minuscule compared to Tunis, decreased dramatically. When the mighty French naval force sailed into sight in the summer of 1830, less than a hundred Europeans resided in Algiers, whose indigenous population is estimated at about 40,000. Many had departed after the 1827 altercation between the French consul in Algiers and Husayn Dey, followed by the three-year French naval blockade of Algerian ports. During the summer of 1830, the violence of the conquest and reports of military atrocities committed against Muslims and Jews caused ten thousand city inhabitants to flee to the countryside, to Tunisia, or to Morocco. Some refugees remained in permanent exile; others returned to find their homes, businesses, and streets occupied—another reason for relocation to adjacent Maghribi states or the Ottoman heartlands.84 Made up of tens of thousands of soldiers and personnel, the expeditionary force nearly equaled in numbers the capital’s total population; quartered in and around Algiers, this behemoth required vast quantities of food and supplies. The French fleet made the port of Mahon, on the island of Minorca, into a major supply center in 1830 and communication hub for the western Mediterranean, although it was never able to dislodge Malta from its commanding position.85 The presence of the fleet was directly responsible for waves of emigration from Minorca to Algeria.
Heterogeneous in composition, the expedition’s members, whether military or civilian, arrived with preconceived notions of, and prejudices about, not only Muslims but also other ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. One detects echoes of the earlier Napoleonic occupation of Egypt in evaluations of southern Mediterranean peoples flocking to Algiers. Indeed, some of those involved in the invasion of Algeria had connections with the Egyptian campaign; several descendants of soldiers or savants from Napoleon’s invasion of the Nile Valley took part in the 1830 expedition to Algiers. One of the Arabic interpreters serving the French military in Algiers was a young man, Joanny Pharaon. Born in Cairo in 1803, Joanny was the son of Elias Pharaon, an interpreter of Syrian origins, who had worked for the French army during Bonaparte’s expedition. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1801 by the allied Ottoman-British forces, the Pharaon family settled in Paris, where Joanny later studied at the École des Langues Orientales, mastering Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages. This earned him a position with the 1830 invasion and the critical assignment of preparing a new legal system for Algeria based upon his 1835 study of French, Muslim, and Jewish law. Pharaon ultimately became a professor of Arabic at the Collège d’Alger and founding member of the Société Coloniale d’Alger. One important aspect of the Pharaons’ trajectory is that the family undertook multiple and serial displacements—from Syria to Egypt to France and subsequently to Algeria. As Ahmad Bey and Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha recruited families like the Pharaons, so did the French military eager to engage Mediterranean creoles, capable of acting as translators and cultural brokers.86
One of the first tasks confronting Algeria’s new masters was to repopulate the capital as well as attract immigrants, hopefully from France, to people nearby villages. But herein lay the conundrum. Unlike many European regions at the time, such as the Italian or German states, or the Mediterranean islands, France was not overpopulated. And, aside from specific regions, such as the impoverished Auvergne that had traditionally exported surplus labor to Paris, the French, compared with other nations, were often reluctant to emigrate.87 Many people arriving in Algiers just after 1830 were unsolicited workers from Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, the Balearic Islands, and Greek islands. Unregulated immigration must have dramatically increased soon after the invasion, since in April 1831 a law was passed “establishing penalties for ship captains who disembarked passengers not in possession of passports.”88 Between 1830 and 1831, the Chambre de Commerce in Marseilles alone enjoyed the authority to deliver passports for emigrants to Algeria but, in view of the spontaneity and complexities of immigration, that right was subsequently assumed by the French state.89 But neither Paris nor Marseilles was equipped to handle the influx of people.
The initial, disorderly settlement of Algiers was promoted by the dissemination of largely unfounded rumors around the Mediterranean. Several types of colonization programs were eventually organized principally for French nationals: military land grants to ex-army officers that failed miserably; private utopian experiments inspired by Saint-Simonian principles; and state-sponsored schemes for civilians. Yet in early years, many of the newly arrived enjoyed neither French nationality nor any connection to the military and therefore had little hope of legally acquiring agricultural property, with some exceptions, so they crowded into Algiers or surrounding villages. For these people, hearsay about free land and wages two to four times higher than in Malta or Sicily increased Algeria’s attraction for peasants, unskilled laborers, tavern keepers, and artisans.90 While fewer in numbers, some subjects of the Moroccan sultans and Tunisian beys were lured to Algeria to serve as translators or even fight under the French flag.
Here is one officer’s view of the civilians from 1837: “A mob of social failures from every country, those freed from the bagnios and those who have escaped, grocers, sellers of liquor, café owners . . . involved in all manner of speculations, smugglers exploiting all imaginable branches of commerce.”91 Later on, state and private emigration societies were mobilized in the metropole to recruit “worthy settlers”—skilled, sober, virtuous—from targeted European populations, such as the Swiss and Germans, to offset nationalities regarded as morally objectionable. Gender and national stereotypes played a pivotal role since communities or nations known for their “respectable women” were preferred.92 However, the chaos of the first decade made it easy for social “undesirables,” women and men, to settle. Due to harsh, perilous conditions, middle-class wives of military officers or colonial administrators rarely joined their husbands at first; the majority of European women in Algiers were characterized in military sources as cantinières (camp followers). Population estimates for European civilians in 1839 revealed severe male-female imbalances, true of most immigrant societies in the earlier stages, although eyewitness accounts remarked upon the number of French and European women in the streets while noting the absence of “Moorish” women.93 For women of modest means from islands, the promise of work proved irresistible, and soon an estimated 750 women in Algiers has been assigned to regiments as blanchisseuses (laundry workers) or cuisinières (cooks). Not all incoming females were welcomed with open arms—or rather, the fact that they were too warmly received by male laborers was viewed with trepidation. Soon after the invasion, a ship from Mahon filled with young women seeking farmwork was forbidden to disembark out of fear that they would prove both a financial burden and moral embarrassment. So many poor islanders entered the country that the “ardent colonizer, Maréchal Clauzel, was accused of turning the Algiers region into a dumping ground for Europe’s dispossessed.”94
For the French military command, sexually servicing the soldiers was most urgent to avoid even worse sexual dangers, homosexual relations; arrangements were made for “the importation of a substantial cohort of prostitutes, for whom every facility was taken to aid their arrival.”95 In Tlemcen, General La Moricière ordered the commanding general to “proceed with the recruitment and settlement of a female personnel who can cater to the pleasures, if not the health, of the men.”96 One of the army’s first administrative orders entailed regulating prostitution: “On the 12th of June [1831], the municipality of Algiers was assigned responsibility for overseeing ‘public women’; the measure complemented the decree issued on the 11th of August, 1830, establishing a medical dispensary. This measure so necessary for public health should have been taken earlier since the disorders [i.e., sexual] that this law aimed at ending had already made deplorable inroads.”97
Recent studies have documented the French colonial state’s enormous investment in organizing military prostitution, first in Algeria and subsequently in colonial Tunisia and Morocco.98 Given Tunisia’s location vis-à-vis Malta and Algeria, it is hardly surprising that Husaynid officials and European consuls became increasingly alarmed as women from the “lower orders” began to arrive in Tunis either directly from the islands or the colony. Viewing the simultaneous depopulation, peopling, and devastation of Algiers, Tocqueville, who had earlier toured another nation of immigrants in the New World, recorded this 1841 entry in his diary:
First appearance of the town: I have never seen anything like it. A prodigious mix of races and costumes, Arab, Kabyle, Moor, Negro, Mahonais, French. Each of these races, tossed together in a space much too tight to contain them, speaks its language, wears its attire, displays different mores. This whole world moves about with an activity that seems feverish. The entire lower town seems in a state of destruction and reconstruction. On all sides, one sees nothing but recent ruins, buildings going up; one hears nothing but the noise of the hammer. It is Cincinnati [Ohio] transported onto the soil of Africa.99
As for the upper city, the Qasba, he stated that “Old Algiers seemed an immense fox burrow: narrow, dark, smoky. The population, at this hour, seems idle and dissolute. Indigenous cabarets where Moorish public girls sing and people drink wine. Mix the vices of both civilizations. Such is the external appearance.”100 In his voluminous writings on migration, Tocqueville, who participated in the 1846 official commission of inquiry into conditions in Algeria, observed with bitter irony that France had hunted down the Arab population to people the country with Sicilians, Maltese, and Spaniards.101
In 1847 the army inventoried the capital city’s peoples. Of the slightly more than 100,000 inhabitants of Algiers and its suburbs, nearly one-quarter were consigned to a new administrative and eventually legal category—indigène—then understood to encompass Muslims, Jews, and “Négres.” European nationals from over fourteen countries amounted to 68,734; less than half were French citizens, about 32,000. Finally, 10 percent of the city’s populace was characterized as flottante—sailors who had jumped ship, indigents, those without fixed domicile, refugees, and criminals. In the lower city near the port, the ancient urban core—originally composed of graceful Ottoman structures, including mosques and palaces—was eviscerated to make way for a new sociospatial landscape populated largely by island folk, characterized as “nothing but unwanted Christians that the galleys and the prisons of Europe have vomited up upon this country since its conquest by the French.”102 In less than two decades, Algiers had become a city of minorities from every corner of the Mediterranean.
As noted above, potential migrants often made calculated decisions based upon a range of factors when faced with opportunities for “making it” in different parts of the world. Moreover, nineteenth-century migratory streams to North Africa must be situated within a global context, since distant labor markets influenced settlement patterns but so did unforeseen circumstances. The demand for labor in South America, combined with bad luck, brought some Europeans to Algeria. In 1846, hundreds of destitute German families set out for South America via Dunkerque. Unable to pay their passage to Brazil and stuck in port where they proved a financial burden, the Germans were forcibly dispatched to the province of Oran, where most eventually perished of malnutrition and disease.103 The impact of false advertising extolling the glorious prospects awaiting workers in search of a better life, together with the terrible health situation in the Algerian countryside, is seen in this tragic incident reported by the British consul in Algiers in 1858:
This day Thomas Avis a distressed British subject was forwarded to H M consul at Marseille on his way to England accompanied by his wife and five children. This man was engaged as a farm labourer by a Mr. Spreckley, the owner of a farm near Koleah in this province under an engagement to serve as such two years on completion of which term he came to this Office to request assistance and to be sent home as Mr. Spreckley having stopped his wages during frequent fever and sickness, and having made an unfair agreement with the man leading him to believe that this was a very cheap country. He had no opportunity of saving sufficient money to pay his passage home. The undersigned considers this a very hard case and has assisted the man and his family both in an official capacity and from his private charity.104
How many people in Thomas Avis’s unenviable position, bereft of the kindness of strangers to assist with passage back home, ended up in Tunisia—or elsewhere?
Population movements were not only configured by rumors, false advertising, or serendipity. Improvements in maritime transportation—above all, steam navigation—and in interior communications, such as roads, and slightly later, the construction of rail lines, played a critical role in moving people around faster and in disseminating more widely information of varying degrees of accuracy about conditions in North Africa. By 1839, it was noted that “packets go from here [Marseilles] to Algiers on every Sunday and generally perform the voyage in less than three days.” French warships transported passengers to Algeria divided into three classes: “the first class is for persons of worth who only make arrangements with the Captain for their stay on board and dined at his table,” while second-class and third-class travelers paid 105 and 63 francs respectively. Although steamship transportation regularized trans-Mediterranean travel, the delivery of mails, and the movement of goods and peoples, contingencies constantly arose that slowed or changed the course of journeys—and perhaps life trajectories. For example, in 1839 the return from Algiers to Marseilles via Valletta demanded an extra seven days due to the quarantine in effect, while the trip to Malta took longer because a quarrel had erupted between France and Naples over port dues.105 Unanticipated travel snafus such as this surely played a major role in who ended up where at any particular juncture.
European rail building influenced population shifts to North Africa in complex ways, as this case from Spain demonstrates. Although the vast majority of Spanish emigrants set out for South America, comparatively speaking, more Spanish settled Algeria, notably in the province of Oran, than any other national group, while relatively few relocated to Tunisia; nevertheless, emigration from Spain to Algeria indirectly affected migratory currents elsewhere. Consular correspondence from the port of Carthegena, in Murcia province, demonstrates that French consuls around the Mediterranean were tracking local and transnational conditions with an eye eternally attuned to Algerian demographic needs. In 1865 the French representative in Murcia speculated upon the consequences of rail transport from Madrid to Carthagena. In his view, the new line would not only alter how people and products moved between the Spanish coast and Marseilles but also between Algeria and Spain: “There are already nearly 100,000 Spanish in Algeria. . . . The civil war, excessive droughts, and very low wages for unskilled labor are the main reasons that the Spanish leave home for Algeria.” In 1855, the rains completely failed and the French vice-consul in Alicante “delivered in a few months time, 10,000 passports to Spanish nationals going to Oran.”106 Whether they remained permanently in western Algeria or headed instead for the Americas is another matter.
The end of drought in Spain after 1855, together with the construction of a rail line from Madrid to Carthagena, pushed up the price of labor in the next decade; consequently, departures for Algeria fell to about two thousand annually. Boom-and-bust development projects, similar to those in Sicily at the same time, meant that after the line was completed, unemployment soared once again. The rail lines also introduced information from outside into the Spanish interior, which “brought Algeria as a place of settlement to the attention of Spaniards who previously would not have been aware of migration possibilities.”107
Patterns of labor movement in one Mediterranean subregion furnished models for solving shortages elsewhere. Peasants from the Duchy of Lucqnes had traditionally followed the rail lines to Viarreggio and Leghorn from whence they sailed to Corsica, worked the harvest, and returned to their villages with supplemental income—until the annual cycle began all over again. French consular authorities in Spain sought to implement the Tuscan-Corsican model to resolve Algerian labor scarcity, but on a temporary basis, to avoid the problems already caused by the settlement of foreigners: “the people of Murcia could do this in Algeria.” In addition, steamship service and rail lines with fixed schedules reduced the traffic in undocumented Spanish immigrants to Algeria. After 1862 the Messageries Impériales offered maritime transport linked to interior rail lines from Valencia directly to North Africa. “Spanish emigrants prefer the regular service since they are certain to be able to disembark in [their chosen] port in Algeria.” This represented a marked improvement for Spaniards and others who had traditionally been lured to Algeria by unscrupulous captains who “worked for their own account” in the coastal trade, including smuggling, and transported settlers “on the side” for between six to eight francs. Not infrequently, hapless passengers were dumped willy-nilly along the shore against their will.108
Events at the other end of the Mediterranean Basin shaped North African migratory flows. Until late in the century, Maronite peasants were banned from leaving Mount Lebanon without permission from feudal lords. Predictably, the establishment of a French steamship service linking Beirut to Marseilles in 1835 undermined controls over the local movement of labor; the trip, previously as much as three months, now took several weeks. In 1841, the French parliament allocated funding for the construction of six steamboats specifically for the Marseilles-Alexandria line that included Beirut; by 1845, ships on regular schedules were in operation. After bloody confessional strife, aided by Great Power interventions, erupted in Mount Lebanon in 1840–1841, the French consul in Alexandria hatched a scheme to settle Lebanese Christians in Algeria in 1845, which was given serious consideration in Paris and Algiers, although it was not then implemented.109 But the 1860 insurrections in the Lebanon and Syria, followed by the massacre and flight of Christians, made the Maronite peopling of Algeria more urgent and possible. In January 1861, the minister of war in Paris contacted Randon, governor-general of Algeria:
A recent traveler through the Lebanese mountains proposes recruiting the Maronites. Maronite notables believe their people would consider emigration to Algeria and would welcome becoming French subjects since they are very attached to France, if they had the means to do so. Due to recent events in Syria, many Maronites have left their native soil in order to take refuge in Egypt, Greece, and Malta; it would be easy to direct this migratory flux toward Algeria. The Maronite Christians, who speak Arabic, are vigorous, sober, industrious, and already cultivate cotton, wheat, silk, and tobacco and would be eminently suited to cultivate these in Algeria.110
Documents from 1866 reveal that some Maronites did indeed settle in Algeria. In addition, permission to emigrate to Algeria was requested by five hundred families from Crete as well as Chinese, Maldive, South African, Swiss, Polish, and Irish nationals; clearly the famines that beset Ireland from 1845 to 1852 drove some to North Africa.111 Some of these people found their way to Tunisia.
The eagerness of French officials to welcome Germans or Maronites contrasts with prevailing attitudes toward the Maltese. In 1832, several Maltese laborers arrived in Algiers on an English ship from Valletta. Initially the port police refused permission to disembark, ordering the men to return immediately to the islands on the same ship—unless the British consul in Algiers could vouch for their good behavior and adequate financial means. Refusing to provide such guarantees, the consul observed to French authorities that he hoped “the same advantage would be allowed to the Maltese as is granted to the great quantities of Germans and other people who have come here to work and that if they conduct themselves improperly, it will be just as easy to send them away then as now when they have done nothing to deserve it.”112 In this case, they were permitted to remain. However, many more were forcibly transported to Malta or dumped on vessels making the rounds of Mediterranean ports like nineteenth-century ships of fools, laden not with the insane but rather with unfortunate souls deemed undesirable.
After midcentury, British officials on Malta undertook more aggressive policies toward overpopulation, including publicizing colonization schemes in far-flung corners of the empire. A typical instance occurred in 1872 when the official gazette published an announcement from a colonial British entrepreneur in Jamaica recruiting Maltese laborers, both male and female, although naturally women’s wages were greatly inferior. Immigrants were promised a house, garden, and medical services, the catch being that they would perform hard fieldwork and pay part of their passage to Jamaica. The appeal fell on deaf ears, because in Malta “these conditions are not seriously considered as appealing. First of all, it is too far way and the climate is different. In addition, the Maltese earn in Algeria 2 francs 50 per day [2½ times the salary offered in Jamaica] and the climate and the language are more or less the same [in North Africa].”113
In 1871, one observer commented that “Algeria has been looked upon by the Imperial Government, less as a colony than as a place for deportees and political offenders, whose misdeameanours were not sufficiently grave to entitle them to banishment to Cayenne but who still were dangerous to the peace of France.”114 Earlier theoretical literature on global migrations made a distinction between voluntary and involuntary movements, which has recently been questioned, particularly in light of the widespread practice of “shoveling out paupers.”115 In the course of the nineteenth century, North Africa was transformed into a human dump for the politically turbulent or socially unwanted—in addition to representing as a sort of “New World” for people suffering from the dislocations wrought by nation-state or empire building, warfare, and industrial capitalism. Shoveling out to Muslim lands represented a substantial shift in thinking regarding the mobility of subjects on the part of European states. Traditionally, the Chambre de Commerce in Marseilles dissuaded, or even proscribed, individuals from the “lower ranks” of society from seeking a living in Ottoman port cities, known as Echelles. While prohibitions on all French women were imposed from time to time, those from the artisan classes were targeted since they were, in the eyes of the chamber, likely to “foment disorder in the Echelles through their freedom to go about, [and] by the libertinage of their female servants.”116 The reference to women’s “freedom to go about,” presumably in the streets of Istanbul or other Ottoman cities, expresses a deep-seated anxiety about inadequate means for controlling expatriate females in their daily lives, public and private. And the alleged “libertinage” of female servants raises an intriguing question—were these European domestics in service to their countrywomen or to local women from Ottoman society? Entrenched attitudes toward female emigration changed in the course of the nineteenth century but mainly for middle-class Frenchwomen, who were encouraged to go to the colonies accompanied by husbands as part of a familial gendered civilizing mission.
With the abolition of African slavery and the trade in enslaved persons in Tunisia after 1840 and in Algeria in 1848, the involuntary movement of labor was principally through compulsory transportation for felonies or political crimes. (Clandestine slavery persisted of course.) Forced population transfers and the use of colonies as dumping grounds had been practiced for centuries and was part of France’s (and other nations’) ancien régime policies. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish government routinely banished convicts to presidios on the North African coast, particularly Oran, although the practice ceased in 1792 when the Algerians recaptured the city. This older use of colonies influenced nineteenth-century attitudes toward settlers universally regarded as misfits at best. As European governments increasingly viewed North Africa as a social landfill; criminals were discarded in Algeria or Tunisia upon release from incarceration in Europe. In June 1837, the French minister of the navy complained that the Tuscan state had previously delivered passports for Bastia or Marseilles to subjects or residents whom Italian authorities found “disorderly or given to vagabondage.” However, measures were in place to assure that Corsica and Marseilles no longer served that purpose, and “currently the Tuscans are using Algeria and North Africa as a poubelle for casting away their social undesirables.”117 The difference between the nineteenth century and earlier centuries was the sheer quantity of people subjected to forced relocation, the fact that these were not enslaved persons, and the political backgrounds of the castaways.
After violent suppression of the popular uprisings in Europe between 1848 and 1851, a number of insurgents were exiled to Algeria. The rebels of June 1848 were considered dangerous enough to be “placed in a special disciplinary institution” near Batna, where they served long sentences at hard labor. Sent to Bône by ship, another 450 expulsés arrived in 1850, with many more to come after Napoleon III’s coup d’état of December 1851, which sent 15,000 Parisians to Algeria to rid the capital of disruptive elements.118 In June 1852, twelve women arrested for political activities were released from Saint-Lazare Prison in Paris for involuntary transportation, followed by hundreds more. Pauline Roland, an educated feminist, socialist, radical republican, and mother of three, was one of the women sent across the sea. Pardoned in 1859, most women elected to return to France, although two hundred remained.119 The fate of some transportés reveals the challenge posed by the peopling of Algeria. One-third of the 1851 exiles promptly died of cholera; another third returned to France in a year’s time, and others straggled off to the New World. The remainder stayed on, but most abandoned farming for casual or unskilled work in coastal cities. Nevertheless, many officials in Algeria and France opposed using the colony as a scrap heap for political rebels or as a huge incarceration facility for common criminals. As Louis Veuillot sarcastically remarked at the time, “our colony of Algeria is nothing but a hospital contained within a prison.”120 Not a few of the deported escaped to other parts of North Africa.
Ship desertions brought uncounted numbers of people to Maghribi ports; some lingered, others attempted to reach home—wherever that was. The poor devils condemned to the galleys frequently jumped ship in Tunisian ports: “the generality of the Maltese now here are persons of the most desperate character, many having been convicted of the worst crimes and sentenced at Malta to the Galleys.”121 In 1858, a novice seaman, Barthelemy Bergel, onboard the French ship La Nanette, deserted in Munastir, a smart move because the port’s small size and location impeded policing. For two weeks, Bergel wandered about and eventually made his way north to Bizerte, where small boats constantly ferried people between Tunisia, Bône, and Collo. From his trajectory, it seems that the hapless Bergel was trying to reach Algeria. Unfortunately, he was discovered in Bizerte, arrested, and taken to Tunis, where the French consul general contacted officials in Marseilles about forcibly repatriating the sailor.122 Soldiers in the French Algerian army routinely deserted or “got lost” or both. A Tunisian vessel from Tabarka reached La Goulette in 1839 with a soldier, Pierre Vaillé, claiming that he had been separated from his Foreign Legion unit by accident. Captured by Algerians in Bône’s still unconquered hinterland, Vaillé was forced to work harvesting wheat, or so the story went. After his escape, Vaillé arrived in Tabarka where a Tunisian ra’is (ship captain) agreed to deliver him to the French vice-consul. Predictably, Mediterranean warfare brought increased military ship desertions; during the Crimean War, both British and French seamen jumped ship in North African ports.123
Soon after 1830, a maritime police force was created that, together with customs officials, closely surveyed each passenger debarking in the Algiers port, “carrying out inquisitorial searches throughout one’s luggage” to prevent fraud and contraband.124 This only encouraged those without papers, deserters, and others to head for Algerian and Tunisia ports under less vigilant control. Until 1881, military authorities in Algeria continually complained to the beys and European consuls in Tunis about lapses in regulating coastal ship traffic between the countries. Bône was a favored place for channeling people with or without papers into Tunisia. In Malta, the French consul delivered 383 passports for Algeria for the entire calendar year 1871; however, for the first six months of 1872 alone, 223 passports had already been furnished to people traveling to “all ports of Algeria but especially for Bône . . . in addition to those [Maltese or others] who go to Algeria via Tunis.”125
Tunisian captains piloted small vessels linking Collo, Bône, Tabarka, and Porto Farina virtually free from surveillance. French consuls repeatedly protested that these ships failed to keep manifests of goods and people. By the 1870s, the governors-general regarded this maritime Greyhound service as hazardous to Algeria’s security. A typical letter from 1876 stated that “Tunisian ships which frequent Collo are never in possession of their crew rolls or passenger lists indicating the number and names of passengers whom they transport. In addition, their patents of health are often incomplete and limited to stating the condition of the health of the ship when it left Tunisian ports.”126 In short, La Goulette or smaller port towns operated as gateways—or getaways—for deserters, escapees, and criminals headed to—or out of—Algeria. And if officials in both countries scrambled to stem the free flow of people, the constant va et vient between islands and the African littoral, combined with inadequate resources, made it an aleatory enterprise.127
France’s determination to make Algeria a settler colony, and after 1848 an administrative part of France, transformed the central Mediterranean into an expressway scattering peoples across the Maghrib: the rural dispossessed and sans travail, adventurers and carpetbaggers, speculators and investors, missionaries and bourgeois travelers. And in a cruelly ironic way, the brutalities of military pacification sparked middle-class travel and tourism to Algeria as well as Tunisia. Bitter disillusion with Algérie Française intensified population exchanges and movements in the central Mediterranean corridor. Thousands of émigrés who had set out for Algeria only to see their dreams collapse continually petitioned Paris for repatriation permits with the result that even more people came and went.128
Given these circumstances, attempts at quantifying human mobility are doomed to failure, in large measure because of the fluidity of categories used by those responsible for counting. On December 4, 1842, a French ship from Bône deposited in La Goulette a Monsieur Greff, three French nuns from a Catholic missionary order, the Sisters of Saint-Joseph, and “ten diverse Muslims” (“dix Musulmans divers”).129 The French vice-consul inventoried another ship in 1847 from Algiers that had onboard one French subject, one Tuscan national, and fourteen “Arab and Jewish passengers.” Another ship arriving at the same time from Bône had twenty-two passengers, seventeen designated as indigènes.130 The category indigène is of critical importance since it glossed not only “natives” but also acquired legal armature in Algeria. In this period, it could mean Muslim and Jewish North Africans, or only Muslims, or only Algerians, and so forth, and encapsulates the dilemma inherent in establishing the identities of people arriving in, or departing from, Tunisia. Even in colonial Algeria, subject to much more rigorous record keeping, “the statistics [for 1856] are not precise; they reflect arrivals in large ports by ships and steamships; but there is not a single inlet [along the coast] where Spanish boats have not discharged their load of [undocumented] immigrants.”131 Seasonal, circular, return, and/or clandestine population displacements, combined with floating taxonomies of race, religion, and nationality, rendered tracking and quantifying many groups virtually impossible.
A historical geography of displacements demonstrates how older circuits of travel and trade, new migratory pressures, processes, and politics as well as pure chance—some would call it rotten luck—brought Maronite peasants, Sicilian masons, Maltese carpenters, metropole insurgents, and transnational mountebanks of various stripes to North Africa. To these trans-Mediterranean axes of mobility was added a horizontal axis of movement, mainly Algerian refugees fleeing devastation by relocating to the Regency of Tunis. The land borders were porous, and individuals or families moved to and fro in response to conditions that promised opportunity or heralded imminent disaster. Some Mediterranean island clans, such as the Maltese Borgs, counted family in both countries, a form of insurance against an uncertain future. And uncertainties abounded, since Algeria suffered droughts, epidemics, and major revolts unleashed by the institutionalized violence inherent in settler colonialism. In Tunisia, the great revolt of 1864 discouraged fresh immigration for a while and even sent some émigrés back to island villages for a time. While the migratory torque of France’s invasion of Algeria is indisputable, exoduses from the northern Mediterranean rim or the islands would have occurred anyway—as Alexandria’s expansion and Maltese immigration to Tunisia during the late 1820s demonstrate.
We began the chapter by evoking Khayr al-Din’s odyssey, on the one hand, and the diverse trajectories of entrepreneurs, middling folk, political militants, or subsistence immigrants, on the other, which represented two somewhat historically distinct, although overlapping, patterns of trans-Mediterranean movement. Khayr al-Din embodied the older Ottoman system of military slavery and palace service, by then in its twilight years, that had furnished capable—and sometimes rebellious—administrators and soldiers to North African provinces for centuries. The east–west axis of exchange, traditionally the most significant, ceded to—while never being eclipsed by—the imperialism of the vertical north-south axis. Migratory pulses along the latter transformed Tunisia and Algeria (and a bit later, Morocco and Tripolitania) into places of socioeconomic advancement for peoples who had previously not viewed Barbary in this way, in part because popular conceptions shifted relatively rapidly. Gradual as well as dramatic shifts in the relative importance of these axes of displacements reflected profound transformations in Mediterranean politics, economies, and social structures and the world beyond.
When Ahmad Bey took the throne, about eight thousand nonsubject “others” resided in Tunisia; by the eve of the Protectorate, the percentage of “strangers” had doubled from 7 or 8 percent to 15 percent or more of the capital city’s population. These figures, however, furnish an incomplete picture of collective perceptions regarding the presence of newcomers. Actual numbers—which city inhabitants did not know—were less significant than visibility; foreignness was often calculated according to a sociomoral sliding scale. Where the immigrants lived, worked, and socialized in the capital, the foods they consumed, the sounds they made, clothing, and languages—all were components of visibility. By far the most significant element was the public behavior of each community’s womenfolk, which was frequently translated into neighborhood whispers about private comportment. How did their diverse Tunisian hosts—state officials, religious leaders, fellow laborers, neighbors, creditors, or landlords—accommodate, ignore, or reject the newcomers?
In keeping with the frame of an ethnographic voyage, the next three chapters follow people around as they sought work of various kinds. As the crux of the migratory experience, making a living constituted a major incentive for leaving as well as deciding where to go. Most immigrants clustered in the Tunis region because it afforded more advantages. Individuals claiming military or technical skills peddled their knowledge to Husaynid officials and thus forged a range of relationships—patron-client, business partnerships, and so on—not only with the beys’ courts but also with consuls, creoles, and regular folks. To flourish modestly or merely survive, people of ordinary means relied on their own labor, wits, kin, if a kinship network existed, the benevolence of neighbors or strangers, and, from the 1840s on, missionaries. Employment inserted newcomers, if only partially, into social networks and exchange circuits that eased integration, however imperfect. If fortune smiled, the immigrant may have urged family “back home” to contemplate a short journey across the Sicilian Channel or a longer one from more distant parts. Yet raw chance often disrupted the best-laid plans; a golden prospect on the other side of the water proved a siren’s song. The webs of opportunities and choices that labor migration seemed to offer ran head on into the unexpected, contingent, and unforeseen.
