Ottoman Legacies in Colonial North Africa (mid-19th century-1920s): Building on Micro-History and Legal Cases

I want to welcome everybody to the final historic

uh historiography lecture this uh year

uh probably or hopefully the last one we're ever gonna have to give via Zoom.

I'm pleased to introduce M'hamed Oualdi.

He is a historian of early modern

and modern North Africa. Prior to joining the faculty at Sciences Po Paris, he was

assistant and then associate professor

at Princeton University.

His research has centered on two main topics,

slavery and its social impacts on Ottoman Tunisia

and the many effects of transitioning

from Ottoman rule to a French colonial domination in North African societies.

He is currently the principal

investigator of the European Research Council project

SlaveVoices about slave testimonies in 19th century North Africa.

Today he's going to talk to us about Ottoman legacies and colonial North Africa.

Thank you so much James. So yeah, I'll split the screen

and I'll share my powerpoint. So I wanted to thank as well

Christian Rodriguez for putting this event together and

Professor Galvin for this kind invitation.

So I should start by introducing the talk by presenting

the main character of– it's going a bit fast, I mean this

powerpoint is going a bit fast.

So the main character of this book of my second book is

Hsin ibn 'Abdallah and we can say Husayn but the [...]

pronunciation is much more Hsin. And he was as well

on the cover of my first book which is a book of in French about

slaves and masters, about the Mamluks of

the Ottoman Tunisia from the 17th century to the 1880s.

And you can find the open edition

through this link. So if you pay attention to the second, I mean this cover

of the book in French, Husayn

appears already in a detail of this book.

This is the same Husayn that you can see in my second book and one could say that

out of this, out of this detail, I wrote a second book.

So actually Husayn was born in this specific region that you can see

the grey area on this map, Circassia.

And Circassia, as most of you might know, was this region

where until the second half of the 19th century,

local families and local parents would sell their kids.

And the idea is that they would hope for these kids a better life across the

Ottoman empire because the men and women

who were sold from Circassia would become,

would serve the elites of the Ottoman empire and they would become

slaves and concubines for the Ottoman empire households but as well for

so many households across the Ottoman empire.

And in the case of Husayn, he was snatched

and then sold as a child in Anatolia in the center of the Ottoman empire

to slave dealers who were working for the Ottoman governors of Tunisia.

And so Husayn traveled when he was very

young from the center of the Ottoman empire to Tunisia.

And in Tunisia, he was trained to be, to become a Mamluk. He was trained

for more than a decade to become a Mamluk and as most of you

would know, is that a Mamluk in Arabic is a thing or often a person who is

owned by someone else. In the case of the Mamluks in

Tunisia, most of them were slaves but some of them were free people who were enrolled

in the social group of the Mamluks.

But all of them, be them free or slaves, were acting in the name of their

masters within the Tunisian administrations

and the Tunisian armies to the point that some of them could become

generals of their prime minister, prime ministers or adviser of the

Ottoman governors of Tunisia. And now, I, mean the story of this slave

elite, or this elite slave, sorry is quite known

for the case of Egypt with the Mamluk

sultanate.

But you are also aware that the Mamluk phenomenon

was widespread across the Islamic world for more than a thousand years from the

9th century to the 19th century.

And for each case from each manifestation of the Mamluk phenomenon

across the Islamic world, historians have raised again and again

the same kind of question.

Um how can we explain this Mamluk domination?

How is it that you had Mamluks slaves who were ruling governing

Muslim men and women? And some

orientalist scholars such as Patricia Crone have argued that Muslim rulers,

Muslim sovereigns could not govern their

own people, their own free people without the Mamluks.

The idea is that for people like Patricia Crone,

Mamluks were a clear sign or clear signs

of a divide between state and society. They were in fact creating

this split between the state and the society. And

even more so for historians like Patricia Crone and

others, there was this idea that Mamluks were

clear signs, clear evidence of local inabilities to govern according

to the will of the local subjects. And that for them was as well

a clear evidence of a local history of Islamic authoritarianism.

Indeed I went against this approach which is basically full of essentialism

and kind of mistaken about the role of

the Mamluks in these societies. So against this

approach and by building on the Tunisian case

in my first book and then in a paper that I published in IJMES,

my point was to show that on the

contrary, Mamluks were connecting some members of the Tunisian provincial elite

with some parts of the Tunisian society.

They were not only disconnecting the state and the

society, they were connecting some parts of the state and some part of the

society. And even more so, by the second half of

the 19th century, the Mamluks played a major role in

transforming the Tunisian state, in reforming the

Tunisian state during the period of Tanzimat in the very period of the

Ottoman reforms.

And to explain how I went from the first book to the second book

after the publication of this book, let's

say a decade ago now, when I started to teach in France

the history of North Africa at the [...] which is like the French

school of Oriental and African studies,

I started to realize the extent to which the Mamluk era, let's say

the extent to which the Ottoman era

sorry, how to the extent to which the Ottoman

era in North Africa was understudied compared to

the history of colonial North Africa.

And indeed it will not come as a surprise

to argue that in France and in other western countries,

the deeply traumatic history of colonization in North Africa

is mostly French-centered or Eurocentred.

It's mainly history of European settlers and European administrations.

And therefore it's rarely a history of

North African societies.

And this French and European version of the history of North Africa

mainly based on primary sources in

Europe and languages.

And accordingly, this kind of history is often ignoring local sources

in Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Ottoman Turkish or Amazirgh languages

as if the sources did not exist at all for these historians of

colonization in North Africa.

And so, and this is like the main argument of the book,

the point of this book was to use the case of Husayn

and all the litigations over his inheritance um during the three

first decades of the French colonization of Tunisia.

And it was. So the idea was to use the litigation over the inheritance of

Husayn in order to assess the importance of provincial

Ottoman political culture in colonial Tunisia.

After that, the French took over Tunis

in 1881. So the main argument of this book

is to look at the Ottoman legacies in a country like Tunisia

during the French colonization in order

to reassess what we know about the colonial

period in Tunisia.

So one might ask to what extent is this book uh very different from other ways

of thinking or writing the history of colonial

of colonial Tunisia or in North Africa.

So as I said, in this book I argue that by focusing on colonial domination

of North Africa, historians

studying this region have clearly overlooked

the extent to which an Ottoman provincial culture

was prevalent among some people in North Africa

until the 1920s, until the end of the Ottoman empire.

And here I'm saying that indeed colonization

was violent and clearly traumatic, but some

some of the North African colonized

subjects were still looking at the center of the Ottoman Empire.

At Instanbul but as well at other parts of the Ottoman empire such as [...]

as places to which they were still belonging. And I should

indeed remind the audience, but that's quite

obvious, that a major part of North Africa

from from the province of Algiers to the province of Tripoli, nowadays Libya,

was under Ottoman tutelage from the 16th century

to the late 19th century in the case of Tunisia

and even to the beginning of the 20th

century in the case of Tripoli.

And um even though the Ottoman control over North Africa was

rather a distant one. And one should remember as well that

the Ottoman control over North Africa did last for three centuries whereas the

colonial period lasted for a shorter time in Tunisia.

It was clearly violent but one should compare,

I mean the two periods and should like wonder why is it that we are

not really studying the Ottoman era in North Africa

and the Ottoman legacies in North Africa. And the point here is to say that

um studying this Ottoman legacies is important at least for

two reasons. It's a way to shy away from Euro-French centric

approaches of North Africa clearly and it's as well a way to write a social

history of North Africa from within.

According to, as I said, the local political culture which was

shaped around the belonging to the Ottoman

empire.

And that was crucial for decades and even

for centuries in this region at least for some parts of the population like

state officials on Ottoman subjects. And here I'm not

saying at all that's recovering the Ottoman

legacies in French imperial North Africa

is the only way to write the social history of North Africa.

There are clearly still other approaches um

clearly and at least someone who is attending this uh

presentation is clearly aware of the different ways of writing this

social history of North Africa. And

I'm only exploring this path because I'm much more familiar

with this kind of social elites in Tunisia and across the Mediterranean.

And I should say as well that I'm clearly not the first one

to advocate for a rediscovery of what remained from

the Ottoman empire and an Ottoman

belonging in North Africa or in the Arab world.

Historians of the Middle East have clearly explored

this question of the Ottoman legacy and

I'm here referring to a special issue

in the Comparative Studies of

South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and a book by Michael Meeker and even

more so, historians of the Middle East have questioned

the colonial dimension of

the late Ottoman empire with the um papers by Makdisi and Deringil.

In the case of North Africa, though fewer

fewer historians have phrased the same line of questioning about the Ottoman legacy.

A historian, a Tunisian historian, Abdeljelil

Temimi was a pioneer since the 1970s to kind of reassess

this Ottoman legacy in North Africa.

And I should quote as well the work

of late um professor Leon Carl Brown and the work of the Tunisian historian

Asma Moalla.

And I should as well mention the work of a historian of architecture,

Zeynep Celik, who explored the connections between the French

empire on the one hand and the Ottoman empire

through the question of architecture

mainly in Algeria but as well in the

parts of North Africa.

And all these contributions are clearly important and they are

enriching because they have clearly

influenced my own analytical framework.

But one should say that most of this approach

are clearly a macro perception of the Ottoman legacies, meaning that

they give an overview of the Ottoman legacies. While in my own approach

and this is related to this discussion about historiography in the

Middle East and in North Africa, in my own approach, it was much more

about micro historyor taking a specific case like the case of Husayn to explore

different dimensions of the Ottoman legacies in North Africa.

Because the point of this kind of approach is to look at as I said the litigations

across the mediterranean of Husayn's inheritance

and what we can find through these litigations.

And the point here was to say that

I'm not only looking at Ottoman legacies in terms of political culture.

I'm as well interested by the material culture

that lasted during the three first decades of the French colonization of Tunisia. So

this kind of litigations, they clearly

show to what extent the Ottoman material culture

and even the land ownership that was shaped during the Ottoman reforms was still

important during the French colonization.

The other main goal of this micro history approach

is that and this is something that we learned from the

Italian school of Microstorya is that this kind of

case study the fact that you're picking a single case is a research strategy. It

helps the historian to be surprised

because if you take a single fragment of border history, then if you follow this

specific case, you get to be surprised and you find

new ways of connecting um some histories and new ways that

and ways to contextualize this history.

It's a way to reassess and to deconstruct our own

assumptions about a specific context.

And I shall explain that in

the third section of of my talk. So basically um this has been

the major arguments of this book saying that in order to have a fresh

and a new understanding of the colonial period of Tunisia,

we should look at what remained from the Ottoman political culture and

material culture in Tunisia by following the case

of Husayn. And I mean, I cannot like summarize the

whole book but I will insist on two aspects of the book

and two interventions of the book in terms of

first the issue of slavery because in fact,

Husayn was a slave, a former slave who was

manipulated at some point and then

I will as well explore the issue of the

history of North African Jews through the case of Husayn.

So let's start with the issue of slavery.

You are aware that these recent years, there has been

an increasing number of books,

studies, papers about slavery in North Africa.

And here we should quote the book of uh Chouki El Hamel "Black Morocco" and the

book of Ismael Montana,

"The Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia."

So on my head, I mean the, um my own perception of slavery was

at the beginning um a history

of elite slavery of the Mamluk slide, I did explain

in the beginning of my talk. And then by focusing

on Husayn's life and on his own writing, I started to be

interested by the issue of the abolition and the demise of slavery in Tunisia and

in North Africa.

And by reading the letters that Husayn did write or that he signed in Arabic,

I started as well to be interested by a broader topic which is the issue of

slave testimonies and ego documents written or produced by

slaves in 19th century North Africa.

And regarding the abolition of slavery, you know that for a long time,

historians have mainly studied the abolition of slavery across the

Mediterranean, as the outcome of British slave

of British diplomacy. The idea is that the abolition

was the result of a British policy across the mediterranean.

But more recently, for two decades now, historians such as

William Gervase Clarence-Smith have argued that Islamic

societies were involved as well in local debates about slavery

and its abolition. And in that matter the Tunision case is clearly interesting

in the 1840s from 1841 to 1846.

The Ottoman governor of Tunisia, Ahmed Bey,

who ruled Tunisia from 1837 to 1855, um Ahmed Bey gradually put an

end to the enslavement of West Africans in Tunis by first setting free

in August 1841 every black slave who set

foot on Tunisian lands and then by taking down all the

buildings of the main public slave market

in Tunis until um this final decision in January 1846 when

um he decided that every slave in the Province of Tunis has had to be

manipulated.

Um interestingly, at that time,

the governor of Tunis Ahmed Bey was taking in each and every of these steps,

after consulting the British consul in Tunis, Thomas Reed. But it's

interesting as well to remember that Ahmed Bey

was very careful to phrase his own decisions in Islamic terms

according to an Islamic language and an Islamic legal rationale.

And the main character of my second book Hsin ibn 'Abdalla

was as well involved in this abolition and this

debate about the abolition of slavery.

In 1864, he replied to the U.S. consul in Tunis

Amos Perry who was asking about the process of abolition in Tunisia

because in the context of the U.S. civil war he wanted to understand what was the

effect of abolishing slavery in Tunisia.

And Hsin ibn 'Abdalla replied to the U.S. consul by saying that

universal liberty has to be defended because according to Husayn,

the countries where full liberty exists and no enslavement is allowed are more

prosperous than other countries. And this is a reply to the U.S consul which has

been published in the in the newspaper in French,

L'Europe, which was published in July 1865.

And if you're interested by this text that you might know,

if you are teaching this kind of issue, um it has been edited

by uh, Raif Khuri in 1983 in Modern Arab Thought: Channels of the

French Revolution to the Arab East. Interestingly, in the book, I argue

that the debates about slavery and its abolition were not only related

to the imperial British policy across the mediterranean or they

were not only conversations with diplomats from the West.

I showed that this local discussions about slavery

were also triggered by the local and global transformations

of the administration and the army.

So I shall explain three years.

Before this specific reply of Husayn to Amos Perry in 1861, the constitution

was enacted in Tunisia, and you know you might know, that it was the first

constitution in the Muslim world.

And this constitution is quite important

because in fact with this constitution you had the creation of new legal

institutions.

And this constitution and the new institutions

reshaped the legal, political, and social positions of

officials like Husayn.

I mean to be clear, it's quite obvious people like

Hsin ibn 'Abdalla started to think that they were officials and no longer slaves.

That they wanted to be seen as statesmen officials and not Mamluks and you can

read that in the letters that Husayn

was sending in Arabic to his friends and to one of his friends. He was clearly

saying that he no longer wanted to be defined or

seen as a Mamluk, as a slave, but has someone

belonging to the administration. And you can see that as well in the

painting of that moment.

So behind the Bey, Muhammad al-Sadiq Basha Bey, the governor of Tunisia

with his white horse. On the two

paintings that you can see, you have all the Mamluks behind him and

they are represented as officials of this new

Tunisian constitutional state. So meaning that slavery

or the abolition of slavery was clearly the outcome of a conversation

or a new balance of force between the

West and countries like Tunisia, but it was as well

the outcome of local transformation of

the state as well.

And on the other hand by

studying uh the letters written by Hussayn or signed by Husayn, I became interested

by another topic which is

the slave testimonies and more so the ego documents which were written

conceived or signed by slaves in North Africa from the mid 18th century to the 1930s.

And this project that I'm currently

undertaking is funded by the European Research Council

and it brings together different groups of slaves. So

slaves coming from the Caucasus like Husayn,

but as well slaves coming from Southern Europe until the beginning of the 19th century.

Slaves from West Africa who um were still enslaved until

maybe they say the 1930s 1940s and even

the 1950s in the case of Morocco.

And the point of this project is to understand

how all these slaves went through or experienced the abolition era.

It's within this project, by confronting the stories,

the ego-documents of slaves from different backgrounds

that um I will start to think in terms of

race and racial issues which has not been the case for the two first books.

Now regarding another dimension and aspect of the book, the history of

Jews in North Africa and Tunisian Jews.

And this is a way maybe to wrap up and to conclude about

my own presentation of this book.

In this book I showed that Husayn and his opinions

about Tunisian Jews evolved from the beginning of the 1860s

to the 1880s.

In the beginning of the 1860s, um Husayn wrote a letter explaining his

own position about the political role that the

Tunisian Jews should play in the new reform Tunisia. And this

letter has been published by a French Scholar, Léon Bercher. And in this letter,

which is really interesting, is that Husayn argues

that Tunisian Jews did not have to be represented on the new supreme court

that was implemented by the new constitution.

I mean it's quite simple. For Husayn,

In fact, Tunisian Jews had to be loyal to the Tunisian state.

But they should not be represented as Jews per se,

but has people individuals on their own merit,

not as Jews. And it's interesting because 27 years later

in 1887, Husayn sent to a friend in Istanbul

a copy of the French anti-semitic pamphlet, La France Juive,

published the previous year by Edouard Drumont.

And Hussayn wrote in this letter in 1887 to his friend that there are

more copies of La France Juive in Istanbul

and in Italy. And he urged his friend

to read his this book by Drumont saying that this book was important.

So in a short section of the book, in some few pages of this book, I tried

to understand what happened in between. Between 1860

and 1887. Um, broadly as you know um, as historians of

North Africa and the Middle East, our

scholars were working on the Middle East and north Africa,

the legal status of the Jews and

therefore their political and social

positions in North Africa, and especially in Tunisia were completely

changing in 1857 in Tunis and the European diplomatic pressures.

Um, local governors implemented

the Ahd al-aman, which is a major law that proclaimed the civil

and religious equality

of all subjects, meaning that Tunisian Muslims and Tunisian Jews would have the

same rights than as well Christians living in Tunisia.

And facing these broad transformations, common people and members of the local

elite felt that the world was turning

upside down. And there are many evidences of that.

But by the 1880s, Husayn distanced himself from the

Tunisian Jews

even further after the transformation of the 18th of 1857

and 1860 because for years since the mid 1870s, Husayn was representing the Tunisian state

in a specific legal case which is a case about the inheritance

of the leader of the Jews in Tunisia in the 1860s. Caïd Nessim Scemama.

So I will not go into details but

clearly this legal case was created a sense of failure

deception and Husayn started to, clearly he started to felt betrayed by

the North African Jews and by the Tunisian Jews.

But I show in the book that Husayn's interest for

anti-semitic ideas like the ideas developed by Drumont

did not only result from this specific Tunisian context.

Husayn became aware of Drumont's ideas through his own European friends

and entourage precisely because Husayn was living

in Tuscany since the 1870s.

And this is one of the many challenges when trying to write about the history

of anti-Jewish ideas.

It's not only to find sources or local sources including in Arabic dealing with this

kind of ideas but as well to contextualize these

sources, not only according to a North African context

but in interaction with Europe

and European anti-semitic milieu.

So interestingly, as you are aware in the U.S.,

one of the most flourishing

subfield of North African history is the

history of North African Jews because a

great part of this new scholarship

is an attempt at looking at these

Jewish communities beyond national borders.

And I think it's and this is I

this is something that I learned to kind of frame,

this second book, to try to understand Tunisia

and North Africa between empires. I mean, it's not that new

but the point was to show that it's, I

mean, North Africa is not only about

French domination. It's as well about

the Ottoman legacies and I show as well in the book

that it's about the connections and the

enduring connections between

North Africa and Italy. And Italy was

still a major, an important place for

some parts of the Tunisians and Tunisians elite.

So this was the point of my presentation,

to kind of summarize the main argument

of the book and to show

you some aspects of the books. Thank you so much.

So I hope that I will present my new project in some few years and visiting

UCLA at some point or people from UCLA.

But thank you so much for your patience and for

for listening at this talk. Thank you so

much, it was wonderful.

Thank you and um you're more than welcome to join

us again.