A colossal Anglo-Dutch naval force assembled at Gibraltar under the command of Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, Lord Exmouth, and set sail for the so-called Barbary Coast in the spring of 1816. The expedition first anchored off Algiers, where Exmouth obtained the release of Christian captives; subsequently the fleet moved on to Tunis and Tripoli. By April 1816, agreements were reached with the local rulers of the three Ottoman regencies over the ostensible objective—the abolition of corsairing and the trade in enslaved Europeans. Nevertheless, the armada returned a second time that summer to Algiers, where the commander of the British flotilla, composed of the Queen Charlotte and fifty-four gun, mortar, and rocket boats, sent additional demands to the Turkish dey (regent). His refusal to accede unleashed a devastating bombardment on August 26 and 27. In the dark of night, barges and yawls crept close to the port, setting it afire and destroying the Algerian navy as well as part of the city. More captives, mainly from Mediterranean islands, were released. Christian slaving and corsair raids had come to an end, at least theoretically.1 In many ways, the expeditions to Algiers in 1816 constituted a reprise of Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt as well as a dress rehearsal for France’s occupation of Algeria in 1830.
Tunisia’s encounter with Exmouth differed radically, however, from Algeria’s. After leaving Algiers the first time, the fleet had next put in to La Goulette (Halq al-Wad), the port for Tunis, on April 10, 1816, with eighteen warships whose hoisted flags signaled readiness for hostilities. It stayed in port until April 23, but the cannon remained silent. Tunis was spared. After intense negotiations, Mahmud Bey (r. 1814–1824), ruler of the Husaynid dynasty (1705–1957), freed hundreds of Sardinians, Genoese, and Sicilians from bagnios scattered around the capital city. While many released captives returned to Europe with the fleet, some former slaves elected to stay on.2 As importantly for the peaceful denouement of the affair, Exmouth arrived in Tunis to find to his utter astonishment that Caroline, Princess of Wales (1768–1821), wife of the heir to the British throne, was touring the country’s classical sites. As the bey’s honored guest, the princess and her entourage were lavishly wined and dined. Caroline’s presence rendered bombardment somewhat delicate and may have saved the Tunisians from naval attack. (We will return to the footloose princess a bit later.)3 If the 1816 expedition signaled the royal navy’s supremacy and thus fundamental shifts in power between the northern and southern rims of the Mediterranean, between Ottoman North Africa and European states, its long-term significance emerged a mere two decades later in a curious, contradictory postscript.
FIGURE 1. Tunis and its environs, 1900. (Karl Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers: Third Part; Southern Italy and Sicily, with Excursions to the Lipari Islands, Malta, Sardinia, Tunis, and Corfu, 13th rev. ed. [Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, 1900].)
In 1836 another British fleet, this time dispatched from Malta, appeared in La Goulette. But now, the royal navy sought not to liberate Christian captives but rather to force the Tunisian ruler, Mustafa Bey (r. 1835–1837), to accept British protégés—Maltese laborers—into his realm.4 In twenty years, the politics of population movements in the central Mediterranean had been utterly transformed. British gunboat diplomacy no longer rescued captive Christians but instead dumped impoverished island peoples deemed “surplus” onto a Muslim state. The renegados, ransom captives, slaves, and freewheeling border crossers of earlier centuries were rapidly being transformed into labor and other kinds of migrants. As social actors, they participated, often unwittingly, in complex population displacements and peoplings then taking place on a global scale.5
From the Napoleonic era to the Great War, tens of thousands of people, many of humble social status, crossed the sea from north to south to settle in North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant. Languishing ports were transformed into boom-towns. Alexandria, whose population counted no more than 6,000 in 1798 when Napoleon’s army invaded, had swelled to 231,000 by 1882 when the British army occupied Egypt. While much of the increase resulted from internal population shifts within Egypt or from Syrian Levantine immigration, a significant percentage of Alexandria’s newcomers came from southern Europe and particularly the Mediterranean islands—Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearic Islands, Greece, and Malta.6 These same islanders settled in Beirut, Izmir, Tunis, Algiers, and Tangier, where many resided for generations.
Some realized dreams of fortune in not too distant places, but many failed. Others came and went, moving elsewhere in the Mediterranean or to the Americas and even Australia. To follow the continuous, largely undocumented departures of men and women for North Africa is to track from “below” the grand rhythms of the long nineteenth century: nation-state construction, imperialism, industrialization, boom-and-bust capitalism, world market consolidation, war and violence, Great Power rivalry, and the indefatigable advance of ecological and environmental degradation, particularly on the large islands.7 For the Muslim states and societies on the Mediterranean’s southern shores, these displacements were neither inconsequential nor benign.
Population movements constitute the bedrock of world history and assume a wide range of guises: epic wanderings, pilgrimage, pastoral nomadism, transhumance, voluntary relocation, forced expatriation, trade diaspora, travel, tourism, slavery, and labor mobility of many kinds. The critical elements in taxonomies of motion are the relative presence or absence of force, the motivations and objectives of those favoring departure over staying put, the duration and patterns of expatriation, and whether the place of exile became over time a space of belonging. To these considerations must be added variables such as gender, age and generation, social class, family structure, religion, and race, all of which determined how individuals or groups perceived their subjective situation at home and responded to the idea of temporary or permanent expatriation, however alluring or frightening that prospect might have appeared. These diverse manifestations of human mobility were not necessarily distinct; yet no matter how or why they departed, the people in motion brought wide-ranging social changes to their host societies and to those left behind.8
Fundamental to the nature, velocity, and direction of migratory processes in this period was the modern state’s expanding regulatory reach. States and ruling elites around the Mediterranean rim assumed new positions regarding population movements from about 1815 on. Keeping people in, or conversely keeping them out, through compulsion or coaxing (or a range of strategies somewhere in between) turned into major preoccupations enshrined in law, institutions of coercion, methods of identification, and the practices of daily life.9
This work re-creates a borderland society—or societies—forged by migrants and mobilities in the central Mediterranean corridor. Its focus is precolonial Tunisia, especially the capital city, in the period stretching from the eve of France’s conquest of Algeria until 1881 when the French Protectorate was imposed. Population movements of various sorts into nineteenth-century Tunisia triggered profound social permutations that endured into the colonial period, powerfully marking, I argue, the nature of the colonial state. These changes ranged from different uses of urban space, new sounds or noises in the city, novel ways of organizing households and leisure, worker competition, housing crises, and perceived increases in morally reprehensible acts, such as public drunkenness, prostitution, smuggling, and street fights. Many newcomers, but not all, in Tunis were diplomatic protégés of European states, although often they did not fully comprehend—nor even care much about—their legal or political status as they moved about, driven by a wide range of motivations.
Nevertheless, they presented intractable problems of legal jurisdiction and thus of social order for the ruling dynasty, the inhabitants of the capital, and for the coastal towns where many immigrants eventually settled. When Exmouth’s imposing fleet moored in port, perhaps two to three thousand “Europeans,” or “Crypto-Europeans,” resided in Tunisia; most clustered in the Tunis region, whose population can be estimated at 100,000, and many were slaves or ex-slaves. (While estimates of Tunisia’s total population at midcentury range widely, one million inhabitants seems a reasonable figure.) By 1880 the percentage of Europeans and/or those not recognized as subjects of the ruling dynasty, including groups that defy jurisdictional pigeonholing, had climbed to 15 percent or more of the capital city’s total population. This contrasts with Cairo, where the percentage of foreign residents never reached more than 6 percent.10 And it is essential to emphasize that these waves of implantation occurred long before the advent of the French Protectorate.
The selection of this particular port city as a site for studying mobilities and displacements before colonialism requires explanation. French Algeria was transformed into a settler colony soon after 1830. Therefore, Algeria—not Tunisia—would seem to offer a more compelling story. Among nineteenth-century Ottoman port cities, Algiers suffered the most drastic demographic shifts, the result of military occupation, ceaseless warfare, violence, and settler colonialism. With fewer than 100 Europeans, out of a total population of 40,000 before 1830, Algiers counted over 100,000 inhabitants by 1847, of which 69,000 were Europeans of one sort or another. By 1881 French nationals and Europeans far outnumbered native Algerians in a city of nearly 200,000.11 In view of these dramatic transformations, it is hardly surprising that most work on immigration to North Africa has focused on post-1830 Algeria. Yet, neither the impact that population flows into, and out of, colonial Algeria exerted upon neighboring Tunisia, nor the consequences of the ceaseless “comings and goings” between the two countries have been systematically investigated.12
France’s invasion of Algeria eventually reoriented the political economy of immigration in the Maghrib and the Mediterranean generally, but those changes resonated with the greatest initial force in Tunisia. Given the demographic overshoot then taking shape on adjacent Mediterranean islands, Tunisia would have attracted subsistence and other kinds of immigrants—although perhaps not on the same scale—had the French monarch not embarked on a disastrous foreign war in 1830. While many of the migratory streams coalescing in Tunisia were interlaced with those at work in Algeria, critical differences existed. This case is more convoluted because religious refugees—Algerian Jews and Muslims—relocated to Tunisia, one type of forced migration not found in French Algeria. In addition, the state structures into which newcomers were inserted (or rejected like failed organ transplants) displayed features absent from the French colonial state. Before 1881, Tunis and other Mediterranean towns were places where mobile people could reinvent themselves in ways akin to, but also dissimilar from, French Algeria. Finally, the rate, nature, and particularly timing of immigration and settlement made colonial Tunisia a different place from Algeria.
Labor migrants, cunning entrepreneurs, travelers, shipwrecked sailors, missionaries, women in distress, and a whole host of others showed up in precolonial Tunisia largely as “uninvited guests.” They had to learn to navigate, and manipulate, how things were done locally, notably for consular and beylical legal cultures specific in many ways to Tunisia in the period, although parallels with other Ottoman ports existed. In addition, how people came to Tunisia and how long they stayed or intended to are critical to explaining why they fitted into urban society, were relegated to its margins, or, in some cases, were expelled and dumped on a passing ship. The patterns of migratory movements—return, circular, seasonal, or some combination thereof—are significant because they shaped implantation and social insertion. For example, labor transhumance—seasonal work performed by Sardinians in North Africa during specified months of the year—generated exchanges distinctive from those of labor migrants who came and stayed on, although temporary work often created the preconditions for permanent settlement.
My objective is not merely to salvage these life stories but primarily to understand how Tunisians, defined roughly as subjects of the Husaynid dynasty, as well as other city residents viewed, lived in close proximity to, and interacted or coped with the immigrants. Another aim is to trace how a borderland society came into existence and what that meant for Tunisia’s history in the long term. We know precious little about how inhabitants of the capital, which received the lion’s share of immigrants, viewed the Maltese or Sicilians who moved in next door and opened a family-run tavern or shoved their way into trades traditionally reserved for designated social groups.13 Therefore, if one purpose is to piece together the social universe of migrants from “below”—wherever that below may lie—the major emphasis is upon Tunisia, above all, the capital city region. Of necessity, elites, indigenous and otherwise, figure prominently in the story because they compiled most of the documentation on the subsistence migrants, railed against undesirable newcomers, and managed the larger political and economic context framing population movements. As importantly, the immigrants inadvertently, if gradually, undermined much of the political culture of the Husaynid state.
The huge Husaynid family—beys, princes, princesses, retinues of mamluks, courtiers, servants, slaves, and hangers-on—represented a major site of production, consumption, and distribution that spawned various types of networks of which patronage was the most critical. The right entrée into the political class opened up employment opportunities, mainly for Europeans with scientific or military knowledge. At times, ruling elites acted as powerful backers for ordinary people who were fortunate enough to insinuate themselves into princely favor, principally through household service. Nevertheless, the Tunis notables who figure in this story did not constitute a homogeneous class by any means; their origins betray older patterns of trans-Mediterranean emigration, settlement, acculturation, and integration.
FIGURE 2. The Maltese Islands and Valetta, 1900. (Karl Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers: Third Part; Southern Italy and Sicily, with Excursions to the Lipari Islands, Malta, Sardinia, Tunis, and Corfu, 13th rev. ed. [Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, 1900].)
Overlapping to varying degrees with dynastic/state elites was a critical interstitial group, the cultural creoles. These long-term residents, mainly but not exclusively “Europeans,” served as intermediaries between the increasingly numerous, diverse communities established in Tunis from the 1830s on and the society of the capital city. Some creoles—we might call them Euro-Tunisian a‘yan (notables)—enjoyed intimate ties, including kinship, with those at the top of the pecking order, the beylical family. Some creoles filled vice-consular posts in Mediterranean ports for European governments and/or worked for the Tunisian state. Most were involved in “private” commercial interests bleeding into diplomatic duties that were inevitably enmeshed with the political economy of the Husaynid state and its household bureaucracy.
By Husayn Bey’s reign (1824–1835), the country sat at the convergence of three empires: French, British, and Ottoman. Slightly later, a fourth wannabe empire, the Italian, came into play. For half a century, Tunisia shared a fluctuating border with a European colonial state and was perilously close to Great Britain’s Mediterranean outpost, Malta. In response to the unpleasant realities of location where “empires meet,” the political class embarked on modernizing reforms similar to those undertaken in Egypt and Turkey: the organization of a modern army after 1839; the establishment of a municipal council; the creation of a police force patterned on the Paris police; the 1857 declaration of a “fundamental pact”; and promulgation of the constitution in 1861. As elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, the nineteenth century’s version of the IMF and World Bank pashas arrived in Tunisia to exploit its growing financial vulnerability—or to encourage collapse. European creditors ultimately claimed most of the country’s resources through forced “structural readjustments,” culminating in the 1864 revolt and bankruptcy in 1869—a drearily familiar chain of events at work throughout North Africa and the Middle East in precisely the same period whose human cost was high. Nevertheless, we need to slip through the nets thrown by empire and state, if only momentarily, to find out what was going on elsewhere.
The big questions are: How and why did precolonial Tunisian society, particularly the capital-city region, “make room for the newcomers”—if grudgingly—and who exactly was a migrant, stranger, or foreigner? How did the quotidian experience of in-migration shape self-views, religious, cultural, or social practices, and institutions? How did North African migratory frontiers and the societies that coalesced along them transform, divert, or stabilize other migratory currents in the Mediterranean world—and beyond? How did the momentous events of nineteenth-century Tunisian and Maghribi history—the 1864 revolt, for example—shape immigration, and what roles did migratory forces play in these seismic shifts? How does the Tunisian case illuminate the intersections between mobilities and imperialisms? Where did Europe begin and end in the nineteenth century, and who was a European? Finally, what does this borderland society tell us about modernities?
Migration should not be confused with permanent settlement and thus we need to understand how immigration resulted in diverse types of implantation—or conversely in forced or voluntary departures back home, to other ports, or to more distant lands. An underlying problem therefore is the definition of a migrant. Among the peoples who debarked in Tunis, we find the Italian woman Giovanna Tellini, accused in 1868 of concubinage and contraband, as well as the saintly founder of a Catholic female missionary order, Emilie de Vialar, who was thrown out of French Algeria and welcomed in a Muslim state. Subjects or servants of the beys returning after long absences, such as the Tunisian ‘alim Shaykh Qabadu (d. 1871), are considered, as are individuals, such as the Circassian mamluk Khayr al-Din (c. 1822–1890), brought to Tunis around 1839, who was one type of immigrant and, later in life, a seasoned Mediterranean traveler-scholar. Thus the meanings assigned to the notion of “migrant” are generous enough to comfortably accommodate merchants and mamluks, saints and shaykhs, lumpen proletariat and high rollers. Capturing people in motion raises the question of approach and method. Which approaches best lend themselves to the task of recreating a borderland society (or congeries of societies) over time?
A multisided historical ethnography, with its attention to fleeting facts, ostensibly trivial events, petty detail, the mundane, and experienced, offers one such approach. Ethnography makes sense of recondite shards of evidence generated by migratory peoples and processes because one of its methodological principles is that the story, like the devil, is the details. A fact of no great importance—that Greek residents were distinguished in the streets by their clothing’s special hue of red—opens onto much larger social worlds. As a model, Chiara Frugoni’s A Day in a Medieval City comes to mind.14 Directly related, my approach draws on spatial theory because catching people in motion means scrutinizing the diverse places that they passed through briefly, or that they gradually came to regard as home, to understand how locality and situation modulated interactions. The built environment and uses of social spaces at a particular historical juncture governed insertion, marginalization, or rejection and conversely the cityscape was profoundly transformed by the newcomers.15 Taken together these approaches help to vocalize silences in the sources, if only partially.
In addition, I eschew an ethnoscape perspective that tracks a “single” ethnic group, for example, Maltese in Tunisia, which the sources greatly favor, but that fails to translate the social realities of recurring settlement.16 Nor is a stratigraphic optic, stacking up phenomena in a multilayered cake, equal to the task of understanding how things, people, ideas, words, and behaviors circulated or why older circuits petered out or were forced into blind alleys. Port cities, the principal envelope into which trans-Mediterranean migrations are conventionally inserted, should not be treated as isomorphic or self-referential entities—a tendency in the atomized port-city literature where the local becomes too local. The issue of how circuits of movement and varieties of networks converged, thickened with increased exchange densities, or gradually became uncoupled is the heart of the matter.17
One challenge faced was the frame of the Mediterranean itself which, as an imagined, constructed space, tempts the unwary into lyricism, romanticism, or essentialism; indeed “Mediterranean” means something both generic and uniquely specific.18 To contemporaries, the sea was many things—“beautiful wretch” in one traveler’s mind, a sentiment echoed by many people living on, or traveling upon, the Mediterranean at the time.19 Prior to steamship transportation, and for long afterward, the sea was frightening, a place of peril and mortal danger. “Throughout the age of sail . . . geography had absolute power to limit what man could do at sea. By comparison, culture, ideas, individual genius or charisma, economic forces, and all the other motors of history meant little.”20
With the nineteenth century’s partial taming of the sea, perceived by bourgeois Europeans through the lens of a mythologized antiquity, its peoples and cultures, paradoxically, were increasingly vilified. The purportedly defective nature of “Mediterranean” social structures—an ill-fated combination of religion, flawed family relations, and clientalism—rendered them morally inferior and irredeemably backward. By the late nineteenth century, a deeply entrenched racial bias against Arabs and Muslims excluded them from constructions of a Mediterranean identity, indeed from Mediterranean history tout court. Scarcely better are contemporary nostalgic depictions of the “good old days of colonial Tunisia,” allegedly characterized by working-class solidarity between Sicilians, Maltese, and Tunisians, a product of social memory and forgetting that influences some scholarship.21
Another problem is how to write a history of trans-Mediterranean migrations to, and settlement in, North Africa but not churn out yet another account of Europeans in foreign or not-so-foreign lands. Directly related, narrating subjectivities from an ethnographically local perspective holds the danger of obscuring the Mediterranean’s deep history. And the temptation to fall back upon comfortable binaries or taxonomies of religion, civilization, empire, or nation is ever-present. In its time, the scholarly notion of a nineteenth-century Muslim Mediterranean world represented a conceptual advance but carried the potential for resurrecting an older historiography that tended to find only “Muslims” out there.22 True, the successive settlement of Tunisia (and Algeria) by mainly Catholic folk meant that an increasingly visible nonsubject Christian community took root whose presence was signaled by new religious edifices, schools, and public processionals, which were manipulated by various imperial interests. Nevertheless, social interactions, however fraught or friendly, involved people who were also neighbors, workers, competitors, or illicit lovers and not just “Muslims, Jews, and Christians” or “North Africans and Europeans.” Last, but by no means least, women and gender raise problems of methodology.23 An earlier version of this work devoted a separate chapter to women as immigrants and city residents but was ultimately rejected because it confined women to a sort of narrative quarantine rather than integrating them into the fullness of the story.
Conceptually, the notion of a borderland offers an alternative to binaries or monolithic constructs. As layered zones of contact, borderlands are characterized by fluctuating degrees of internal social coherence forged by high exchange densities, while remaining subject to “pushes and pulls” from larger, external forces.24 From my search for fresh ways of thinking about the problems of mobilities emerged the idea of a “central Mediterranean corridor,” which can be imagined as a series of linked, intersecting borderland regions. The corridor’s contours ran roughly from Tunis to the Algiers region, Marseilles, and Leghorn, then to Sicily, Malta, and back along the Tunisian coastline. Like a sentinel, Tunisia commands one of three strategic choke points in the Mediterranean Basin; its positioning in relation to Sicily and Malta makes it the Gibraltar or Dardanelles of the central sea. Between 150 and 300 miles separate the Cap Bon peninsula (or Ra’s al-Dar) from Sicily and Malta; stepping-stone islands like Pantelleria are even closer. Incipient transformations in migratory behaviors from about 1820 represented one vital element in the borderland society that grew up in Mediterranean Tunisia. Other factors played into the mix: older and new commercial patterns; demographic and resource structures; transport technologies; and the ecological baseline of prevailing winds, currents, and other natural phenomena that facilitated or inhibited travel.25
This part of the sea has nurtured intense communications for millennia, but sometime around 1820 things began to change, slowly at first, then with greater velocity as people abandoned the islands and the Mediterranean’s northern edges to settle in majority Muslim lands. In earlier eras, the fluctuating limits between something called Europe and the Ottoman Empire—always moving and permeable—had been located on the big islands of the corridor; after 1830, those limits came to rest along the North African littoral.26 As Italy, Sicily, and Malta moved closer thanks to major advances in the technologies of transport and migratory displacements, the interior—arid steppes, desert societies, and oasis cultivators—became more remote from the political center. Another compass reading reveals that proximity to Sicily and Malta placed Tunisia along a demographic frontier; the islands’ extremely high population densities contrasted starkly with the Maghrib, “a thinly populated land.”27 Finally, the routes that increasingly facilitated population movements along a north–south axis—whether openly or furtively in the dead of night—have remained the same. In the early twenty-first century, tiny Pantelleria just off Tunisia’s Cap Bon is a Mediterranean version of the Rio Grande for undocumented people traveling north by island hopping.28 Nearly two centuries ago, migratory currents began to move in the opposite direction.
Fortuitous location made the Gulf of Tunis and the Sahil (coastal villages) into a giant lint catcher, a finely meshed net snagging a never-ending assortment of down-and-outs, oddballs, and curious types, sometimes by accident, at other times by volition: Italian anarchists and Masons, renegade priests, counterfeiters, scam artists, sailors, and deserters. These people rarely appear in conventional historical treatments, and if they do, play but a minor role. Moreover, historians have turned a blind eye to the social landscape beyond the ports—on the decks of ships and on the high seas—thereby neglecting arenas that shaped the course of events on terra firma; not infrequently, shipboard conflicts spilled over into adjoining ports, engulfing their heterogeneous inhabitants.29 And the stories of people whose living came from the sea—boat captains, crews, fishermen, and smugglers, to name but a few—are still largely absent from the historical narrative, despite the increasing emphasis in today’s Tunisia upon its longue durée Mediterranean identity, a political agenda linked to relations with the European Union.
Over the long nineteenth century, more people left home than ever before in world history but, until very recently, most of the theoretical work on population displacements drew upon documentation from the transatlantic currents or the expanding European empires in Africa and Asia.30 While representing a crucial chapter in global migration history, the countless local exoduses from Europe and the islands to Mediterranean Muslim states did not garner much scholarly attention until now.31 In part, this was because older scholarship on modern Middle Eastern history tended to marginalize demographic shifts when working out master narratives. This is curious, since the region has often been characterized as a cultural mosaic produced by complex population dispersals, layerings, and sedimentations. Early Islamic history opens with a cosmic migratory event—the seventh-century movements of Arab Muslim tribesmen out of northern Arabia and into the Persian and Byzantine empires. The classical age of Islam closes with a more somber migratory episode—the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258—one phase in the enormous outpourings of Turco-Mongolian steppe peoples often led by warrior nomads that eventually led to the creation of the Ottoman Empire.
Paradoxically, the modern era has benefited least from historical analyses of migrations to, or from, the area stretching from Morocco to Turkey, despite the fact that in the course of the nineteenth century an estimated two million Muslim refugees from the Russian Empire and eastern Europe were forced out and relocated in Ottoman lands, mainly Anatolia.32 The relative lack of interest in migration as a central problem in humankind’s history stemmed from an earlier tendency among historians of Islamic societies to prefer the “bona fide” Muslim, while slighting the culturally promiscuous Mediterranean port cities populated by multireligious, polyglot communities marked by indeterminate identities and protean allegiances. Blind spots created by the older area studies approach to the Mediterranean Middle East “constantly sought the regionally authentic and consequently marginalized the hybrid Euro-Oriental cities and their middle-class inhabitants.”33 Today research on port cities has grown into an international academic industry, although one dealing mainly with the eastern Mediterranean.34 Some scholars have placed nineteenth-century Ottoman migrations in a world historical perspective by investigating the local forces that, for example, pushed Lebanese peasants from their villages to the cities of the New World or Africa.35 However, the connections, direct and indirect, between slightly earlier relocations of Mediterranean peoples from southern Europe to the Levant, Egypt, and North Africa and subsequent out-migrations of Ottoman subjects to the New World have yet to be fully explored—even less so integrated into conventional historical narratives.
Why was the story of Mediterranean immigration to Algeria and Tunisia from about 1830 to the Great War excluded from older accounts, for the most part? Earlier scholarly disinterest in the North African migratory frontier can partially be explained by the imperialism of statistics.36 Compared to the earlier migrations to the New World and the vast transatlantic displacements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Maghrib appeared less dynamic in scope because it was not a question of millions but rather of a steady drip of thousands, then tens of thousands of people, relocating over decades. Yet migratory flows from north to south after roughly 1830 represented the largest trans-sea dispersal of peoples since the Iberian expulsions (the so-called Reconquista) of centuries earlier. Moreover, the nature of the archive promotes investigations that take a single national experience as object of inquiry and not multinational or imperial displacements to a single place. And as mentioned earlier, Algeria’s turbulent experiment in settler colonialism overshadowed precolonial Tunisia’s encounter with immigration, while the abundance of colonial documentation after 1881 privileged that period. Then, too, the sheer knottiness of population flows—at a strategic choke point in the central Mediterranean—may have dampened scholarly ardor.
What other elements—political, intellectual, and otherwise—conspired to make this migratory subsystem less visible than others until about a decade ago? The ideology of colonial North Africa overwhelmed the facts “on the ground” because the official transcript held that North Africa became French at some point in time. However, popular local literature, films, and the lives as well as testimonies of the Maghrib’s inhabitants (of whatever social, religious, cultural, or ethnic status) unmasked French North Africa, revealing it for what it was—a collection of borderland societies, some of whose populations bore very lightly the mantle of civilization as imagined in Paris.37 And as Gerard Noiriel argued in 1988, the French had long suffered a “denial of memory” regarding immigration in the making of the nation, although this denial has been shattered in spectacular fashion over the past twenty years. Since the Maghrib was a special preserve of French scholarship, it is hardly surprising that migration as a historical problem was marginalized. Because of the Algerian trauma, present even today, the denial of memory extended to the study of French colonialism in North Africa, ignored during the decades following decolonization and the end of empire, which created a double erasure.38
To the extent that colonial North African history was studied in France after 1962, it was the preserve of scholars on the left. Charles-André Julien and Charles-Robert Ageron viewed the Europeans as illegitimate occupiers and tended to footnote non-French colons in historical narratives, even if colonial officials and the metropole received their due. In their massive two-volume Histoire de l’Algérie, less than 10 percent was devoted to the settlers. After forced “repatriation” to France, many ex-colonials supported Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme right-wing Front National, which rendered them unappealing as historical actors, even less so as objects of scientific inquiry for older generations of historians on the left. The terrible dislocations of decolonization and subsequent south-north worker migrations to France conspired to make the nineteenth-century migratory streams semi-invisible. During the nationalist upheavals from 1954 to 1962, culminating in Algerian independence, nearly 1.75 million people abandoned the Maghrib, one of the largest population movements in postwar European history.39
But there were other reasons for previous scholarly indifference to large-scale immigration and immigrants. Nationalist historians writing after independence ignored the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who called North Africa home—they had all left (or most had)—so why study them? The closely wedded tales of imperialism and nationalism conceptualized around mutually exclusive binaries—“the colonizer, the colonized”—offered little space to talk about these people. “Not-quite-Europeans,” who became “not-quite-French” by about 1900, represented the history that nobody wanted—like the story of Algerian harkis who served France during the war for independence or North African soldiers fighting under the French flag in two world wars. Some writers eventually reclaimed some of this history, but at first it tended to be in the genre of heritage accounts by writers from communities or families exiled from North Africa to a France they knew little or not at all.40
The past decade has seen a hefty spike in scholarly investment in migrations and mobilities, with North Africa as its primary focus; needless to say, the current hysteria in Europe and North America about “foreigners in our midst” partially nurtures this reawakened interest. Noteworthy in this new research is Italian work on the highly diverse Italian communities in colonial Algeria, precolonial and colonial Tunisia, and Tripolitania/Libya.41 On a larger scale of analysis, Edmund Burke’s arguments that the Mediterranean islands and Muslim states ringing the sea constituted the first recipients “of the liberal reform project in its political and economic forms,” which assumed fullest expression under the French Third Republic, suggest where scholarship is heading.42
The nature of the documentation and questions raised demand the combined skills of the muralist and the miniaturist, which greatly shaped this book’s structure. My methodology is to follow people around on their daily rounds—to shadow them, tail them, imagine where they might be, what they might be doing and why—in other words, train the ethnographer’s beady, if sympathetic, eye on the archival table scraps and shreds of life stories. Given the unusually recondite primary sources, most migrants’ trajectories can only be reconstructed once they landed in Tunis or more frequently when they faced some difficulty—lack of housing, unpaid debts, violent conflict with neighbors—that brought into play local authorities, either Tunisian, or consular, or both. Regrettably the kinds of records that might enlighten us about initial decisions to strike out, to leave home, wherever that may have been—in Malta, Sardinia, Tuscany, or Gibraltar—for North Africa generally are wanting for earlier decades of the nineteenth century.43
Conceptually, the chapters follow a problem-centered exposition rather than linear progression, since the fragmented sources do not allow for a systematic or sustained chronology, even less so for credible quantification. Each grapples with theoretical problems in migration history but fans out to intersect with issues addressed in other chapters. As such, the book forms a latticework of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal linkages that capture the realities of multiple displacements occasioned by the persistence of older patterns, dramatic ruptures, or slow-moving changes. We start somewhere around the 1820s, which furnishes a baseline for appreciating the transformations of later decades. The story’s end is a sort of moving benchmark because one argument weaving throughout is that 1881, when France invaded Tunisia from Algeria, did not necessarily introduce the abrupt disjuncture that informed previous scholarship and its dominant periodizations, which distinguished sharply between the precolonial and early colonial eras. In plotting out the chapters’ sequences, the frame of an ethnographic voyage, or ethnography of movement, seemed best suited to capture migratory processes and their social consequences for the peoples involved.
Migration is, simply stated, about everything, and the range of potential topics is limitless; thus different chapter arrangements could be imagined, many more questions could be posed. Nevertheless, the available primary sources and secondary literature dictated the selection of problems. While the record is not generous for reconstructing labor markets, for example, some ways of making a living are better documented than others. The inner, intimate workings of urban households, whether elite or humble, Tunisian or not, represent a door only slightly ajar for historians. And the precise networks undergirding the recruitment of laborers either locally or transnationally can only be partially reconstructed. However, since smuggling violated treaties and commercial regulations, more data exist—ironically—for the contraband trade than, let us say, for the mundane realities of domestic service or petty trade. As always, limited time and resources also dictated the topics addressed; in consequence, I was only able to consult some collections—and then not to the degree that one would desire—while potentially important archival and other sources had to be left for future researchers to mine. Therefore, rather than a full or final statement about nineteenth-century North African or trans-Mediterranean mobilities, my study represents an initial journey, a beginning not an end, intended to suggest avenues for research in the years to come.44
In sum, this is a tale about how people became migrants, protégés, and then Tunis city residents, how proletarians turned into property holders or remained paupers, how some newcomers in Tunisia climbed to the top of the heap or failed to realize dreams of social betterment after leaving home. Intertwined with these tales are the multiple stories of how subjects of the Husaynid dynasty consorted, conspired, or fought with successive waves of newcomers only to have their world fall apart after 1881, a direct consequence of the people on the move. As a history of trans-Mediterranean displacements in a small place, Tunisia before colonialism stands in for many parts of the globe experiencing similar and in some cases interlinked processes during the long nineteenth century. Because of the problems posed by the sources, the first six chapters tend to fall into the genre of prosopography, while the last three chapters trace individual life stories more fully.
Chapter 1 takes the reader by ship to the Tunis region in circa 1830. We start with the port, Halq al-Wad, or La Goulette, and then proceed to the capital city, where diverse city folk and the spaces they inhabited are introduced. One issue is that of the cultural creoles, longtime residents of diverse origins who had lived and worked in Tunisia prior to the migratory surge partially unleashed by France’s invasion of Algeria. But most important is the social geography of Tunis, whose neighborhoods, markets, and places of work and worship correlated to a degree with religious affiliation. In a city on the cusp of large-scale immigration, how did individuals and communities discriminate between “us” and “them,” and what roles did religion, language, dress, occupation, and place of residence (to name but a few elements) play in calibrating or affirming identity or conversely calibrating difference?
How and why did North Africa turn into a place of permanent or temporary evasion for so many people from across the Mediterranean? Chapter 2 unravels the multiple forces that induced subsistence and other kinds of migrants to abandon the sea’s northern rim or the islands to settle in Algeria and Tunisia. It first considers long-standing traditions of travel and movement in the central Mediterranean corridor, including the social forces and cultural norms that governed women’s displacements. Theoretically, it revisits some of the scholarship on migrations and migrants to determine how this case study contributes to, or challenges, that literature. It offers a truffle hunter’s view and a hang glider’s perspective of the processes—large, small, and in-between—at work in North Africa, Europe, and the eastern Ottoman Empire.
Work lies at the heart of the migratory experience. Chapters 3, 4, and 5, form an ensemble as all are devoted to making a living in one way or anther. But what kinds of employment did a preindustrial, precolonial state and society offer? How did “strangers in the city” nudge their way into the existing system of production, distribution, and resource allocation in Tunis and how did abolition and the end of slavery influence labor markets and the search for a livelihood? Domestic work in elite households and employment by local consulates are emphasized because they offered possibilities for men and women of modest means, generated patronage and, if fortune smiled, some capital to start small businesses; these sectors are also the best documented. The theoretical issues addressed revolve around the different kinds of networks, shaped by such elements as social class, gender, ethnicity or national origins, which created work for newcomers or local city denizens.
Newly arrived immigrants with few resources and without patronage most commonly filled unskilled or semiskilled jobs in carpentry, carting, or masonry, engaged in street commerce, or ran small family business, such as inns or bakeries. Women participated in the local economy as tavern or hotel maids, or in petty trade and commerce. When tourism took off after the middle of the nineteenth century, it offered expanded employment as well. Chapter 4 concludes with a consideration of those who did not make it and why they failed to secure stable work. Illness, trouble with the law, or bad luck plunged families into extreme want, particularly after social networks unraveled, frequently leading to forced expatriation or departures for other lands that seemed to hold more promise. At the same time, it is argued that the social universe of the immigrant “down-and-out” in Tunis should not be seen as distinct from the world of the indigenous poor.
The growing contraband economy that operated in the central Mediterranean corridor during the long nineteenth century invites us to consider population displacements in tandem with extralegal commodity flows and various kinds of work. Chapter 5 engages the scholarship on global labor movements that correlates the development of “underground economic sectors” with mobile populations but takes issue with some dimensions of that literature. It argues that contraband depended upon certain kinds of migrations, upon occupations tied to the sea, such as fishing, and the persistence of older forms of sea transport as well as dramatic advances in maritime transportation. In addition, smuggling was often integrated into the legitimate household economy of tavern keeping, transport, fishing, or farming, which blurred distinctions between legal and illegal. And while the archival record is surprisingly scarce, the sex industry constituted smuggling in another register, since “contraband desire” represented one way of making a living in the underground moral economy. The implications of prostitution—or merely love with the wrong person—and its significance to the construction of religiosexual borders meant that when the Husaynid state could no longer effectively police those borders it lost considerable moral capital. Activities or exchanges branded as extralegal, illegal, or illicit drew individuals of different religious or ethnic backgrounds residing in precolonial Tunisia either into a complicit “republic of thieves” or into communal strife that brought disorder to streets and neighborhoods. Thus the social universe of contraband networks and bargains constitutes a perfect vantage point for probing intercommunal relations in a precolonial Muslim state.
This chapter, the last of the work trilogy, forms a bridge between the issues posed by making a living and the next chapter on regimes of legal pluralism. As a way of earning one’s bread, smuggling and other proscribed trades led to conflict with neighbors, state authorities, or consular officials, triggering long drawn-out quarrels over legal jurisdiction that became increasingly embroiled in international quarrels.
Within the crucible of Great Power struggles over North Africa, trans-Mediterranean immigration to Tunisia posed intractable problems of law, justice, and social order; legal pluralism raises an inexhaustible range of questions, only some of which are addressed in chapter 6. What unwritten norms or rules structured the older culture of beylical and consular justice at their points of intersection? In what ways did Tunisia’s positioning in the central Mediterranean corridor, together with migration, transform that culture? What kinds of punishments and sanctions were available to those in power? How did the people who petitioned the beys or consuls, submitted depositions, stormed the consulates, and leveled or denied charges involving family, friends, and foes live the daily reality of a multicentric legal order and contribute to its ever more baroque configurations? Who were the losers and who were the winners in long drawn-out battles over jurisdiction?
Theoretically, the chapter addresses recent thinking on legal pluralism. It analyzes the disputes that pulled city residents, beylical subjects, expatriate Europeans, and other foreigners into an increasingly tangled legal culture through an ethnography of physical spaces where city inhabitants sought justice as well as the beliefs, rituals, and practices associated with those spaces, notably the right of sanctuary. Algerian subjects claiming French protection in Tunisia constituted an especially knotty jurisdictional case as did another type of border crossing—switching religious affiliation, which was deeply gendered in motivations and consequences. Conversion from Christianity to Islam confronted European consuls and their governments with thorny issues of law, national identity, and religious affiliation. The final section forces us to cross beyond the temporal boundaries of conventional periodizations to ask: Did 1881 or 1883 provoke a rupture in the culture of legal pluralism or did rupture come later? Due to the undeniable weight of past practices as well as the presence of thousands of non-French nationals with a personal stake in the old legal order, to what extent was the colonial state successful in establishing a unified legal system?
Among the myriad groups relocating from Algeria to Tunisia during the 1840s were Catholic female missionaries. Chapter 7 delves into missions in relationship to migration but pays close attention to one French congregation, the Sisters of Saint-Joseph de l’Apparition, as they sought patronage from the Husaynid state and assimilated into local society. It argues that the welcome afforded the Sisters of Saint-Joseph in Tunis by Ahmad Bey (r. 1837–1855) was tied to social order during expanded Catholic settlement as well as the outbreak of cholera on a massive scale. On a theoretical level, the chapter reexamines the literature on global missionary societies with specific attention to gender and empire. Since one of the volume’s underlying arguments revolves around questions of temporalities, the chapter extends into the early colonial period (post-1881) to explore continuities and their consequences for the colonial state.
How did immigration affect local and creole or expatriate elites? Examining sociabilities from the perspective of households, women, and gender, chapter 8 argues that princely harims, enclosing numerous, highly diverse individuals, were fundamental to a state organized as a “household bureaucracy” for much of the century. Palace visits, sea bathing, and leisure, in which European and Tunisian notables participated, were managed by women and generated transversal relationships that were often political in nature. One critical site for international diplomacy was the summer palace or villa by the sea; the kinds of sociabilities generated by sea bathing are examined for elites and nonelites. At the same time, tourism brought Europeans in steadily climbing numbers to North Africa for water cures in hydrotherapy sites long used by Tunisians and resident creoles. Not far behind were scheming promoters, the vanguard of the modern tourist industry, seeking to transform thermal stations into spas segregated by religion, social class, and “race.” Nevertheless, earlier collective manifestations of leisure, taking the waters, and sea bathing exerted a powerful influence on the colonial state, limiting what it could and could not do.
The final chapter recreates the life story of Khayr al-Din Pasha, a migrant of sorts. Born in the Caucasus during the 1820s, Khayr al-Din was sold into slavery, educated in Istanbul, sent to Tunis around 1839 as a young mamluk, returned to the Ottoman capital in 1877 to serve a prime minister, and ended his days in a palace on the Bosporus in 1890. He is best known as the author of a political treatise advocating the reform of Muslim states that appeared in Tunis in 1867. But he also established one of the earliest institutions for modern education in the Maghrib, Sadiqi College founded in 1875, as well as drafting the Arab world’s first constitution proclaimed in 1861. Seen from this perspective, Khayr al-Din, the statesman-intellectual and immigrant of a special kind, becomes a metaphor for the age of migrations. His journey from slavery, to state service in Tunisia, to recognition as one of the most original Muslim thinkers of his generation encapsulates the transformations at work in a borderland society of the central Mediterranean corridor. Revisited and reinterpreted, Khayr al-Din’s life reads as a parable for how the Muslim Mediterranean became modern.
We start the ethnographic journey in chapter 1, tracking travelers, city residents, or immigrants as they first arrive in port and then make their way to Tunis “the well-protected.” After rounding the verdant Cap Bon pierced by jagged mountains, Jabal Zaghawan and Bu Qarnayn, ships made their way into the Gulf of Tunis guarded by twin islets, Zembra and Zembretta. There an enchanting sight awaited passengers, which the well-traveled compared favorably with the Gulf of Naples in splendor and physical beauty. The cubical village of Sidi Bou Sa‘id was the first thing espied from onboard before approaching the port, Halq al-Wad, some ten miles distant from the capital city. Communications between the city and its port were assured by small skiffs that laboriously crossed the shallow lake sheltering Tunis from the open sea. Situated on a slight incline, Tunis, a white city, climbed up to the highest point where the Qasba, a sixteenth-century Ottoman fort, stood watch. With the buhaira (lake) in front, abundant gardens and orchards, and the surrounding hills planted in dark green olive groves, the panorama impressed first-time visitors, particularly during the calm summer sailing season when tempests were less likely.
