This paper begins with a discussion of the economic centrality of the family among the ruling elite in Ottoman Tunisia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, arguing that the familial is political. Through a structural and materialist analysis of the family as a social institution and economic unit, I situate Tunisia within a broader Ottoman context and argue for the significance of family history for comparative studies. In contrast to nationalist arguments that Tunisia was already an autonomous or independent state during the Ottoman period, the symbolics of rule illustrate the importance of references to the Sultan, manifestations of the position of the provincial governor within an Ottoman hierarchy, and the resonance of imperial motifs of legitimacy through charities, pious foundations, and the distribution of justice. I argue that the provincial governors – the beys of Tunis - were able to maintain and secure their authority in part through a myriad of charitable contributions which created numerous opportunities for interaction with the subject population. These often presumed hierarchical conceptions of the father’s position within the family, upon whom the population as children was to depend. Relying on these forms of benevolent patriarchy, the governors extended their role as fathers of the ruling families and the palace households, to express paternal concern for their subjects. With the onset of French colonial rule in 1881, the ruling family was stripped of its economic base and prevented from continuing to support welfare projects as the colonial government sought to associate the family with the private sphere. Within the ‘protectorate’ system of colonial rule, the French government began a new and republican approach to occupation as a form of tutelage which inscribed paternal care onto colonial officials and civilizational immaturity onto their colonized subjects. Yet the governor himself was scripted into an intermediary role, the details of which were elaborated in the first decade of colonial rule, where his continued performance of power was necessary to justify of French occupation.