Women, gender and migration along a Mediterranean frontier: Pre-colonial Tunisia, c. 1815-1870

Gender and History

Volumn 17, Issue 1, 2005, Pages

  Clancy Smith, Julia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER ROLE; NINETEENTH CENTURY; POPULATION MIGRATION; WOMENS STATUS;

AFRICA; NORTH AFRICA; TUNISIA;

EID: 27844437598     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2005.00372.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (134)

1. Ahmad Ibn Abi al-Diyaf, Ithaf ahl al-zaman bi-akhbar muluk tunis wa 'ahd al-aman, vol. 3 (Tunis: al-dar al-tunisiyya lil-nashr, 1989), p. 267; Sir Thomas Reade, Public Record Office, Foreign Office [hereafter: PRO/FO], Tunisia, 77/30, Tunis, 18 January 1837.
2. Daniel Panzac, Les Corsaires barbaresques: La fin d'une épopée, 1800-1820 (Paris: Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, 1999), pp. 228-44.
3. Other port cities, such as Alexandria and Beirut, experienced substantial in-migration from the Mediterranean islands throughout the nineteenth century. See Leila Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983);
4. and Michael J. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807-1882 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1997).
5. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Gender in the City: The Medina of Tunis', in David Anderson and Richard Rathbone (eds), Africa's Urban Past (London: J. Currey, 2000), pp. 189-204;
6. and Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Marginality and Migration: Europe's Social Oucasts in Pre-Colonial Tunisia, 1830-81', in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-82.
7. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Changing Historical Perspectives on Colonialism and Imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa, c.1900-Present', in Amy Singer and Israel Gershoni (eds), Twentieth-Century Historians and Historiography of the Middle East (Seattle; University of Washington Press, forthcoming).
8. Adam McKeown, 'Global Migration, 1846-1940', Journal of World History 15 (2004), pp. 155-89;
9. Janet J. Ewald, 'Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750-1914', American Historical Review 105 (2000), pp. 69-91.
10. Jacqueline Knorr and Barbara Meier (eds), Women and Migration: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000).
11. Donna R. Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820-2990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);
12. Kathie Friedman-Kasaba, Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870-1924 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996);
13. Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City: Regional Migrations in France (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983);
14. Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).
15. Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870-2001 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001);
16. Sarah Gualtieri, 'Feminizing the Chain Migration Thesis: Women and Syrian Transatlantic Migration, 1878-1924', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2004).
17. Susan Gilson Miller, 'Kippur on the Amazon: Jewish Emigration from Northern Morocco in the Late Nineteenth Century', in Harvey E. Goldberg (ed.), Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 190-209.
18. Deniz Kandiyoti (ed.), Gendering the Middle East (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996);
19. Deniz Kandiyoti, 'Islam and Patriarchy: A Comparative Perspective', in Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (eds), Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 23-42, here p. 40, n. 20.
20. Elizabeth Schmidt, 'Patriarchy, Capitalism, and the Colonial State in Zimbabwe', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (1991), pp. 732-56;
21. Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870-1939 (London: J. Currey, 1992);
22. Hamilton Sipho Simelane, 'The State, Chiefs and the Control of Female Migration in Colonial Swaziland, 1930s-1950s', Journal of African History 45 (2004), pp. 103-124.
23. Floya Anthias and Gabriella Lazaridis (eds), Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: Women on the Move (New York: Berg, 2000), pp. 24-5;
24. Giovanna Campani, 'Present Trends in Women's Migration: The Emergence of Social Actors', in Danièle Joly (ed.), Scapegoats and Social Actors: The Exclusion and Integration of Minorities in Western and Eastern Europe (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998), pp. 192-217;
25. Gregory A. Kelson and Debra L. Delaet (eds), Gender and Immigration (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
26. Russell King (ed.), The Mediterranean Passage: Migration and New Cultural Encounters in Southern Europe (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001);
27. V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993).
28. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Marginality and Migration: Europe's Social Outcasts in Pre-Colonial Tunisia, 1930-81', in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-82.
29. Documentation for this article comes from the following sources: Archives Nationales de Tunisie (ANT); Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence: Algérie (CAOM); Maison Méditerranéenne des Sciences de l'Homme, Aix-en-Provence: IREMAM Collection (MMSH); Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie Marseille: série MQ 52: Commerce International, Tunisie (CCM); Archives diplomatiques, Nantes: Tunisie, ler versement (ADN); Public Record Office, Foreign Office: Tunisia (PRO/FO); Oxford University, Bodleian Library; Oxford Library, Rhodes House Library: Scicluna Collection; Oxford University, St Antony's College: Private Papers Collection.
30. The beylical archives in Tunis contain correspondence addressed directly to the rulers written by various Europeans or Mediterranean proté gés under diverse jurisdictions; these are labelled shakwa (literally 'complaint' or 'grievance'), which tells us that categories were roughly the same for Tunisians and Europeans at the time.
31. Jane C. Schneider and Peter T. Schneider, Festival of the Poor: Fertility Decline and the Ideology of Class in Sicily, 1860-1980 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996);
32. John R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
33. Malta, the most densely populated of the Mediterranean islands, boasted the highest demographic densities in Europe with 350 inhabitants per square kilometre; in contrast, Tunisia averaged three inhabitants per square kilometre in this period and, more importantly, was located only 300 miles from the Maltese islands.
34. Yvan Debbasch, La Nation française en Tunisie (1577-1835) (Paris: Éditions Sirrey, 1957);
35. Anne-Marie Planel, 'De la nation à la colonie: La communauté française de Tunisie au XIXe siècle d'après les archives civiles et notariées du consulat générale de France à Tunis', unpublished doctoral thesis, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2000.
36. Prax, 1847, 'Le commerce de Tunis avec l'intérieur de l'Afrique,' CAOM, F80 1697.
37. Vice-consul Ferrier, 'General Survey of Tunisia', PRO/FO 102/32, consular no. 7, 31 March 1848.
38. On the unreliability of estimates for Italians in the same period, see Romain H. Rainier, Les Italiens dans la Tunisie contemporaine (Aix-en-Provence: Publisud, 2002), p. 23. The 1870 estimates come from a contemporary observer, G. B. Machiavella;
39. cited in Dalenda Larguèche, Territoire sans frontières: La contrebande et ses réseaux dans la Régence de Tunis au XIXe siècle (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2001), pp. 134-5.
40. On French nationals, see Anne-Marie Planel, 'De la nation à la colonie: La communauté française de Tunisie au XIXè siècle d'apr̀s les archives civiles et notariées du consulat générale de France à Tunis,' vol. 1, unpublished doctoral thesis, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2000, pp. 92-4.
41. Pierre Soumille, Européens de Tunisie et questions religieuses (1892-1901) (Paris: CNRS, 1975), p. 10, states that even as late as 1892 the French Protectorate was poorly informed about the exact number of Maltese, Sicilians and other non-French nationals residing in Tunisia; the 1906 census did not include the Muslim population.
42. Christian Windler, La Diplomatie comme expérience de l'autre: Consuls français au Maghreb (1700-1840) (Geneva: Droz, 2002).
43. Malta was seized from Napoleon in 1800 and formally made a Crown Colony in 1813; the 1814 Congress of Vienna recognised Britain's claim over the islands. Nationals from Britain, northern Italy or mainland France did not generally regard Mediterranean people as 'Europeans' - and even less so Maltese, Sicilians or Corsicans, who were seen as Africans. In large measure, this stemmed from the fact that they were islanders. Thus Mediterranean islanders were doubly alien. Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1-4. From the Tunisian point of view, that many of the people who settled the capital city - a highly urbanised environment - hailed from rural regions needs to be considered in terms of the ease or difficulty of social insertion and/or exclusion. Offsetting the alien-ness of Corsicans in Tunisian eyes was the fact that they spoke a Tuscan dialect which may have been comprehensible to some Tunisians since various forms of Italian were the diplomatic lingua franca of the Regency.
44. Religion, language and, above all, public dress or clothing constituted important social markers of identity. Male and female Mediterranean immigrants and their Tunisian neighbours of similar class often marked off bourgeois Europeans by describing them as 'wearing European dress'; see ADN, carton 381, 'Correspondance entre le consulat français et les consuls étrangers', 1868, procedura penale contro Giovanna Sellini.
45. Abdelhamid Larguèche, L'Abolition de l'esclavage en Tunisie (Tunis; Alif, 1990).
46. Another set of factors which demands consideration is whether the island emigrants to Tunisia had a tradition of transhumance; for example, Corsicans practised annual internal migration from coastal villages to mountains, which may have predisposed them to engage in trans-Mediterranean transhumance to Algeria and Tunisia, as was the case of the Sardinians after 1830; see Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 3-4;
47. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Marginality and Migration: Europe's Social Outcasts in Pre-Colonial Tunisia, 1830-81', in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-82, here pp. 156-7.
48. Adrianus Koster, Prelates and Politicians in Malta: Changing Power-Balances between Church and State in a Mediterranean Island Fortress, 1800-1976 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984), pp. 35-9.
49. The refusal of royal Governors to sponsor emigration officially also means that accurate records for departures and returns in this period are difficult to obtain; see Charles A. Price, Malta and the Maltese: a Study in Nineteenth Century Migration (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1954).
50. Jean Ganiage, Les Origines du Protectorat français en Tunisie (1861-1881) (Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l'Edition, 1968), p. 41.
51. Sailing times are found in PRO/FO, 77/20-21, 1828-1830. Nora Lafi, 'Les relations de Malte et de Tripoli de Barbarie au XIXe siècle', Revue de l'Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 71(1994), pp. 127-42;
52. Patrick Boulanger, Témoignages sur le transport des immigrants en Méditerranée: les rapports des capitaines des Messageries maritimes (1871-1914)' in Jean-Louis Miège (ed.), Navigations et migrations en Méditerranée (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1990), pp. 351-67.
53. Paul Sebag, Tunis: Histoire d'une ville (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), pp. 261-310; population estimates from pp. 279-80;
54. also Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Gender in the City: The Medina of Tunis', in David Anderson and Richard Rathbone (eds), Africa's Urban Past (London: J. Currey, 2000), pp. 189-204, here p. 189.
55. On the Tunisian Jews, see Abdelhamid Larguèche, Les Ombres de la ville: Pauvres, marginaux et minoritaires à Tunis (XVIIIe et XIXe siècles) (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 1999);
56. Paul Sebag, Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie des origines à nos jours (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1991).
57. On woman see Dalenda and Abdelhamid Larguèche, Marginales en terre d'Islam (Tunis; Cérès Productions, 1992).
58. Nancy E. Gallagher, Medicine and Power, 1780-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 7, 44-6.
59. The issue of how quarantine shaped women's travel and displacements around the Mediterranean demands study. In Tunis port, ships were subject to a twenty-four-day quarantine even if the port of origin had not experienced plague or cholera; ships from suspect ports were not admitted at all. The matter of quarantine regulations relates to a larger question of women at sea, only recently under scholarly investigation; see Jo Stanley, 'Women at Sea: An Other Category' Gender & History 15 (2003), pp. 135-9.
60. CCM, carton 79, c.1843; letter from French traders in Tunis to the CCM regarding regulations for disembarking in port.
61. I have been unable to determine whether women who were subjects of the Tunisian beys or of the Ottoman sultans were subject to these restrictions; clearly Tunisian Muslim women performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, mainly on European ship by this period, but these women normally travelled with male family members. The classic study of Ahmad Bey's programme of reform remains L. Carl Brown, The Tunisia of Ahmad Bey, 1837-1855 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).
62. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Gender in the City: The Medina of Tunis', in David Anderson and Richard Rathbone (eds), Africa's Urban Past (London: J. Currey, 2000), pp. 189-204, here pp. 192-4.
63. PRO/FO, 77/20, 1829-1830; and 77/23, 1831. The beys had long delivered permits or teskere for importing and exporting commodities into and from the country as well.
64. ADN, carton 407, Gaspary to Guys, 17 March 1824.
65. ADN, carton 406b, 20 February 1822.
66. There is little work on European women residing in North African Ottoman trading cities aside from Jacques Reynaud's 'La résidence des femmes françaises en Levant au XVIIIe siècle', Revue de la Chambre de Commerce de Marseille (November 1948), pp. 21-4;
67. Yvan Debbasch, La Nation française en Tunisie (1577-1835) (Paris: Éditions Sirrey, 1957), published a half century ago.
68. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Marginality and Migration: Europe's Social Outcasts in Pre-Colonial Tunisia, 1830-81', in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-82.
69. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Marginality and Migration: Europe's Social Outcasts in Pre-Colonial Tunisia, 1830-81', in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-82;
70. Jean Ganiage, La Population européenne de Tunis au milieu du XIXe siècle: Étude démographique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960).
71. Marc Donato, L'Émigration des Maltais en Algérie au XIXème siècle (Montpellier: Éditions Africa Nostra, 1985), p. 108.
72. Habib Kazdaghli, 'Communautés méditerranéennes de Tunisie. Les Grecs de Tunisie: du Millet-i-rum à l'assimilation française (XVIIe-XXe siècles)', Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 95-98 (2002), pp. 449-76.
73. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Algerian "Expatriates" in Pre-Colonial Tunisia', in Patricia Lorcin (ed.), Identity, Memory and Nostalgia: France and Algeria, 1800-2000 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, forthcoming);
74. Émile Temime, Migrance: Histoire des migrations à Marseille (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1990);
75. Émile Temime, 'La Migration européenne en Algérie au XIXe siècle: Migration organisée ou migration tolérée?', Revue de l'Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 43 (1987), pp. 31-45;
76. David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bône, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
77. Gérard Noiriel, The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, tr. Geoffroy de Laforcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
78. A fuller treatment of work and migration in nineteenth-century Tunisia is found in Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Marginality and Migration: Europe's Social Outcasts in Pre-Colonial Tunisia, 1830-81', in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-82.
79. Dalenda Larguèche, Territoire sans frontières: La contrebande et ses réseaux dans la Régence de Tunis au XIXe siècle (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2001);
80. Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994);
81. and Julia Clancy-Smith, 'The Maghrib and the Mediterranean World in the Nineteenth Century: Illicit Exchanges, Migrants, and Social Marginals' in Michel Le Gall and Kenneth Perkins (eds), The Maghrib in Question: Essays in History and Historiography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), pp. 222-49.
82. Godfrey Feise, 'Observations on the Regency of Tunis, 1812, 1813', mss. No. 15.417, British Library, London.
83. Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 217-18, among numerous sources.
84. PRO/FO, 77/20, 3 April 1829.
85. The most work on wet-nursing in Muslim societies has been done for the medieval periods by Avner Giladi, Breast-Feeding in Medieval Islamic Thought: A Preliminary Study of Legal and Medical Writings (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), but we cannot assume that this applies to nineteenth-century Tunisia.
86. Dino Cinel, 'The Seasonal Emigrations of Italians in the Nineteenth Century: From Internal to International Destinations', Journal of Ethnic Studies 10 (Spring 1982), pp. 43-68, reports that Italian women from Lucca engaged in seasonal migrations to Marseilles to work as wet-nurses in the 1850s;
87. this is discussed by Kathie Friedman-Kasaba, Memories of Migration: Gender, Ethnicity, and Work in the Lives of Jewish and Italian Women in New York, 1870-1924 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 70-71.
88. See also Dalenda Larguèche, 'Les femmes, le savoir-faire médical et la maîtrise du corps dans la Tunisie traditionnelle', in Dalenda Larguèche (ed.), Histoire des femmes au Maghreb: Culture matérielle et vie quotidienne (Tunis; Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2000), pp. 209-35.
89. PRO/FO 77/20,1829-1830.
90. PRO/FO 77/20,1829-1830.
91. PRO/FO 77/20,1829-1830.
92. PRO/FO 77/20,1828-1829.
93. Despite these efforts, an incident in 1857 involving an inebriated Tunisian Jew, Batou Sfez, who was charged with blaspheming Islam, turned into an international cause célèbre and sparked inter-confessional unrest in the capital; on this see, Paul Sebag, Histoire des Juifs de Tunisie des origines à nos jours (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1991), pp. 116-18.
94. These incidents were reported in the consular logbook, PRO/FO 77/20-21, 1828-1830.
95. PRO/FO 77/20, 1828-1829.
96. Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Marginality and Migration: Europe's Social Outcasts in Pre-Colonial Tunisia, 1830-81', in Eugene Rogan (ed.), Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), pp. 149-82, here pp. 170-73.
97. PRO/FO 77/22: 25 October 1830.
98. Jeremy Boissevain, A Village in Malta (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980);
99. also Adrianus Koster, Prelates and Politicians in Malta: Changing Power-Balances between Church and State in a Mediterranean Island Fortress, 1800-1976 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1984).
100. On poverty in indigenous Tunisian society, see Abdelhamid Larguèche, Les Ombres de la ville: Pauvres, marginaux et minoritaires à Tunis (XVIIIe et Xixe siècles) (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 1999);
101. also Fanny Colonna (ed.), Etre marginal au Maghreb (Tunis: Alif, 1993).
102. Ahmad Ibn Abi al-Diyaf, Ithaf ahl al-zaman bi-akhbar muluk tunis wa 'ahd al-aman, vol. 3 (Tunis: al-dar al-tunisiyya lil-nashr, 1989), p. 267.
103. ADN, carton 406b; and CCM, carton 77.
104. CCM, vol. 78; letter of 20 May 1825.
105. Quote from ANT, carton 64, dossier 755, letter from French consul, Béclard, to the Ahmad Bey, 19 October 1854, referring to the Sisters of St Joseph, a French Catholic missionary Order. Sarah A. Curtis is working on a study of the Sisters of St Joseph. On the Order in Tunisia, see Julia Clancy-Smith, 'Algerian "Expatriates" in Pre-Colonial Tunisia', in Patricia Lorcin (ed.), Identity, Memory and Nostalgia: France and Algeria, 1800-2000 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, forthcoming);
106. Pierre Soumille, 'Les Activités et les oeuvres des congrégations religieuses catholiques en Tunisie à l'époque du protectorat français,' in Jacques Alexandropoulos and Patrick Cabanel (eds), La Tunisie mosaïque (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2000), pp. 319-24.
107. PRO/FO, 77/21, 1830. The issue of widowhood among the expatriate community in North Africa deserves further study; Muslim and Jewish societies tended to view widows some-what differently in that they strongly encouraged re-marriage as soon as possible. Important theoretical work on widows and widowhood has been done by Kenda Mutongi, '"Worries of the Heart"; Widowed Mothers, Daughters and Masculinities in Maragoli, Western Kenya, 1940-60', Journal of African History 40 (1999), pp. 67-86.
108. ANT, série H, carton 56, dossier 620, 2 December 1837, French consul Schwebel to Murali.
109. ADN, carton 409b, 16 November 1839.
110. The Capitulations or imtiyazat ('concessions') were diplomatic agreements in force since the sixteenth century between European nations trading in Ottoman lands and the Porte to foster commercial exchanges; they included the important right of residence for Christian traders. By the nineteenth century, these treaties had been expanded in meaning to extend considerable privileges to Europeans residing in Ottoman lands far beyond the text of the agreements; The Encyclopedia of Islam 2nd edition, vol. 3 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971), pp. 1178-95.
111. For example, F. Robert Hunter, Egypt under the Khedives, 1805-1879: From Household Government to Modern Bureaucracy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).
112. C. R. Pennell, 'The British Consular Courts and Moroccan Muslim Identity: "Christian" Justice as a Tool', The Journal of North African Studies 1 (1996), pp. 172-91, here p. 173;
113. see also C. R. Pennell, 'Law on a Wild Frontier: Moroccans in the Spanish Courts in Melilla in the Nineteenth Century', The Journal of North African Studies 1 (2002), pp. 67-78.
114. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 7-12.
115. PRO/FO 77/21, 1829-1830.
116. PRO/FO 77/22, 17 September 1831.
117. Likewise in 1845, the British consul-general in Alexandria noted that Greeks of whatever background, even subjects of the Sultan, sought 'every opportunity of putting themselves under a foreign flag'; Michael J. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 2807-1882 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1997), p. 85.
118. PRO/FO 77/21, 1829-1830.
119. Abdelhamid Larguèche (ed.), Histoire communautaire, histoire plurielle: La communauté juive de Tunisie (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 1999).
120. Mercedes Garcia-Arenal (ed.), Conversions islamiques: Identités religieuses en Islam méditerranéen (Paris; Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001);
121. Abdelhamid Larguèche, Les Ombres de la ville: Pauvres, marginaux et minoritaires à Tunis (XVIIIe et XIXe siècles) (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 1999), p. 178, on conversion to Islam among Tunisian female Jews.
122. PRO/FO 77/22, July 1830.
123. The British in Malta strove to maintain the status quo; thus colonial authorities avoided conflict with the Catholic Church, which was one of the most important sources of Maltese identity under colonial rule as well as in diaspora. As Koster states: 'Canon law was indiscriminately applied to all Maltese with respect to marriage. Consequently, civil marriage and legal divorce did not exist'; Adrianus Koster, 'The Kappillani: The Changing Position of the Parish Priest in Malta' in Eric R. Wolf (ed.), Religion, Power and Protest in Local Communities (Paris: Mouton, 1984), pp. 185-211; here, p. 187.
124. Oxford University, Bodleian Library, Confidential Print, No. 978: Printed for the use of the FO on 22 July 1861: Confidential. 'Nationality': 'A Married Woman, being a British Subject, cannot by embracing Mahometanism in a Foreign Country, throw off her Allegiance, so long as her Husband adheres to his Allegiance to the British Crown and continues to be a Christian'. On conversion and mixed marriages between European women and Tunisian men in a later period - a rare event - see Leila Blili Temime, Histoire de familles: Manages, répudiations et vie quotidienne à Tunis, 1875-1930 (Tunis: Éditions Script, 1999), pp. 63-5.
125. Ridha ben Rajab, Al-Shurta wa 'aman al-Hadhira, unpublished doctoral thesis (Tunis: Université de Tunis I, 1992).
126. Paul Sebag, Tunis: Histoire d'une ville (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), pp. 274-9.
127. ADN, carton 382, British consul, Richard Wood, to French consul, Duchene de Belle-court, 23 August 1866. One major difference between French Algeria and beylical Tunisia was the fact that the term 'European' was admitted into French jurisprudence as a legal category in legislation passed in Algeria in 1831, an important part of the process constructing 'altérité juridique'; on this, see Jean-Robert Henry, 'Introduction' in Alec G. Hargreaves and Michael J. Heffernan (eds), French and Algerian Identities from Colonial Times to the Present: A Century of Interaction (Lewiston, NY; Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), pp. 1-18.
128. Marc Donato, L'Émigration des Maltais en Algérie au XIXème siècle (Montpellier: Editions Africa Nostra, 1985).
129. Hamilton Sipho Simelane, 'The State, Chiefs and the Control of Female Migration in Colonial Swaziland, 1930s-1950s', Journal of African History 45 (2004), pp. 103-124, reports attitudes identical to the North African case for a century later, to name only one example.
130. ANT, série H, carton 228, dossier 413, Richard Wood to Conti, 12 October 1876 [letter marked 'private'].
131. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2000).
132. Among works too numerous to cite here, Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
133. The differences are most striking in girls' education; see Julia Clancy-Smith, 'L'École Rue du Pacha à Tunis: l'éducation de la femme arabe et "la plus grande France" (1900-1914)', Clio: Histoire, Femmes, et Société, 12 (2000), pp. 33-55.
134. Mounira Charrad, Women's Rights: The Making of Post-Colonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).