Divided Rule - Mary Dewhurst Lewis

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Conference at the University of California Los Angeles; the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights; the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, where I was kindly invited by Nancy Green to serve as a visiting professor; the Cornell University History Colloquium; the “Colonialisms and Imperialisms” conference at Columbia University; and the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, where I thank all my fellow fellows of 2011–12, the director, Carol Dougherty, and the administrator, Jane Jackson, without whose support I could not have completed this book during my sabbatical.

      My editor at the University of California Press, Niels Hooper, intuitively understood this project from the beginning and supported it through completion, with the help of his very efficient assistant, Kim Hogeland, and the production team both at UC Press and Westchester Publishing Services. This book was conceived of, researched, and written in two distinct phases: before children and after. Accordingly, it went through a first phase of review at the University of California Press while still incomplete and another after the book was finished. This syncopated process allowed me to benefit from the collective insights of five different anonymous reviewers—two of whom have since revealed themselves to me as Julia Clancy-Smith and Martin Thomas. I am grateful to both of them, as well as to the three subsequent reviewers who remain anonymous. Clancy-Smith also provided feedback for the Journal of Modern History (JMH), where an article based on preliminary research for this book was published in 2007. Other still anonymous readers at the JMH and Past & Present also provided helpful suggestions that have improved this work. I thank both the JMH and Past & Present for allowing me to adapt portions of those articles in this work.

      Other scholars and friends have read part or all of the manuscript or have provided a useful sounding board for ideas. They include Nourreddine Amara, Caitlin Anderson, David Armitage, Paul Arpaia, Sugata Bose, Vicki Caron, Herrick Chapman, Frederick Cooper, Tom De Georges, Victoria De Grazia, Nadya Hajj, Will Hanley, Maya Jasanoff, Cemal Kafadar, James Mc Dougall, Charles Maier, Mark Mazower, Susan Gilson Miller, Molly Nolan, Phil Nord, Roger Owen, Katy Park, David Powers, Emma Rothschild, Emmanuelle Saada, Sarah Stein, Moshik Temkin, Peter Wien, Jonathan Wyrtzen, Tara Zahra, and Malika Zeghal. My in-laws, Ann and John Dizikes, have provided intellectual, moral, and other support during the years I have been working on this project. My colleague and friend Alison Frank Johnson read almost every chapter, some more than once, and has provided stalwart friendship and support throughout this project. Only my husband, Peter Dizikes, has read more pages.

      Research in four countries requires financial support, and I am indebted to the following sources for their generous funding: the Harvard University History Department; the Milton Fund of Harvard University; the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies Junior Faculty Research Fund; the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and its C. Douglas Dillon Fellowship and Distinguished Research Faculty Funds; the American Academy in Rome; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Newhouse Center at Wellesley College provided a lovely office in which to complete the manuscript. I also could not have completed this without the support of the staff in the History Department and the Center for European Studies at Harvard. In particular, I would like to thank Paul Dzus, Janet Hatch, Lori Kelley, Mary McConnell, Cory Paulsen, and Anna Popiel; your dedication and support are deeply appreciated.

      This book is dedicated to my husband, Peter, who sacrificed time from his own career to accompany me to Tunisia, London, and Rome to complete the research for this book, and who is also a great line editor as well as an unflagging supporter of this book and my career. I am also grateful to our young children, Sebastian and Simon Dizikes, for brightening our lives and keeping everything in perspective. Sebastian, almost five years old, recently started asking me, “Mommy, did you finish your book today?” Now I can finally answer “Yes.”

      Cambridge, Massachusetts

      March 2013

      NOTE ON ARABIC SPELLING

      This is a book about a place where the majority of people spoke Arabic but at a time when very few of them wrote it. Accordingly, only a few of my sources were in Arabic and the perspectives of local populations were filtered through documents written in French, Italian or British English. These languages follow different traditions of Arabic transliteration, making consistency in spelling difficult. For common Arabic words found in the French, Italian, Tunisian and British archives, I have provided transliterations following the style sheet of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). For instance, instead of the French spelling “caïd,” I have used the transliterated “qā’id”; instead of the French “habus,” I have used “ḥubūs,” and so on. However, I have made an exception to this rule in the notes when they refer to specific letters or documents using the French transliterations. Thus an endnote may refer to a letter written by the “caïd du Cap Bon,” where the text itself would call the same person the Cape Bon qā’id. I also have made an exception in cases where the transliterated word (e.g. shari‘a; fatwā) has become common enough in English (sharia; fatwa) to be considered part of the English lexicon.

      For proper names, I have generally left the spellings as I found them in the archives. If, for instance, an individual’s name was rendered as “Mohamed” (following French transliteration) rather than “Muhammad”, as has become standard in English, I left the name as “Mohamed” to remain true to the archives. However, when persons, places or events are well-known in the English-language world, I have used the common English spelling rather than the correct transliteration. Hence: Habib Bourguiba and not Ḥabīb Būrqībah, Abdelaziz Thaalbi and not ‘Abd al-Azīz al-Tha’libī, Zaitouna Mosque rather than Zaytūna, and Eid al-Kabir rather than al-‘Īd al-Kabīr. I have dropped diacritical marks from all proper nouns. When individuals are well-known by multiple spellings, I have used the most common in the text and mention alternative spellings in the notes. For assistance with translations from Arabic to English, I thank Ali Asgar Alibhai, May Khoury, and Himmet Taskomur.

      Introduction

      ON 24 APRIL 1881, French military forces entered Tunisia, ostensibly to quell the Khmir tribe’s incursions across the Tunisian border into Algeria, France’s most cherished colony.1 This task momentarily achieved, the thirty thousand troops did not withdraw; instead, over the course of the next three weeks, their presence solidified into an occupation.2 From this position of strength, French authorities issued an ultimatum to the bey of Tunis, Muhammad al-Sadiq, and on 12 May, both sides signed the Treaty of Ksar Said (Bardo Treaty), an armistice agreement that abruptly established what amounted to a French protectorate over Tunisia—a country that had been, for roughly three hundred years, a virtually autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire.

      Although French military leaders might have preferred to annex Tunisia, particularly as violent resistance erupted there in the wake of the Bardo Treaty, civilian officials rebuffed them.3 Instead of claiming that Tunisia, like Algeria, was an integral part of France, the foreign affairs ministry contended that it was a distinct state. Muhammad al-Sadiq would remain sovereign, and France would protect the Husaynid dynasty of beys he represented, while at the same time safeguarding its own interests in North Africa by securing a buffer on Algeria’s eastern border. This was hardly the only way France could have tried to control its new imperial acquisition. Given Tunisia’s diverse population—the result of its location at the crossroads of traditional Mediterranean commercial and trans-Saharan trade routes—one might have expected French officials to practice “divide and rule” tactics, manipulating or even fabricating factions among colonial subjects in an effort to achieve a more secure “imperium”—as the Latin phrase divide et impera implies.4 Instead, the French in Tunisia confronted a problem of “divided rule.”

      

      MAP 1. Map of Tunisia showing the region of the Khmir tribe. Map by C. Scott Walker.

      I call French rule over Tunisia divided because the protectorate arrangement institutionalized many sources of authority in the territory, dividing rule not only between France and the Husaynid dynasty of beys, as one might expect, but also between France and other European powers—especially Italy and Great Britain—whose prior

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