Emboldened by Tunisia’s status as the only ‘Arab spring’ country to implement procedural democracy, much of Tunisian nationalist and Western academic literature posits Tunisia as an exception among other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The comparative framework implicit in these analyses relies on sequestering Tunisia’s history within its national borders. However, modern Tunisia did not develop in a nationally bounded vacuum. It was a product of global connections. In 1885, four years after France established a protectorate in Tunisia, rich phosphate deposits were discovered in Tunisia’s Gafsa region. Because modern agriculture requires phosphate-based chemical fertilizers, Gafsa’s phosphate rock quickly became France’s most important colonial interest in Tunisia. Colonial economic extraversion linked Tunisia’s political economy with global fertilizer markets and the imperatives of heavy-input agriculture. Tunisia was not a self-contained exception; it was a node within global capitalist networks. Overlapping transnational networks of labor, commerce, and capital combined to break apart Gafsa’s mountains, refine the mountain rock into fertilizer, and scatter this chemically processed landscape over Europe’s farmland in ever increasing quantities. In the interwar period, financial crises rendered these networks visible in particular ways. Phosphate mining in the periphery enabled fertile fields in the core, but this did not unfold on an evenly global scale, nor can it be narrated by a linear tracing of one commodity across geographic space. Instead, Tunisian phosphates’ commodification was repeatedly restructured based on flows of other commodities, movement of labor and radical ideas, and global financial exigencies. It produced novel forms of globality and regionality, as government officials and capitalists attempted to divide the market when it suited them and challenged division when it did not. Phosphate circulation in the interwar period linked modern Tunisia’s political economy with the farms of rural Portugal; the coal mines of Britain; the nitrate mines of Chile; the lead, zinc, and silver mines of southern Sardinia; trans-Mediterranean labor migration and circulation of radical ideas; the United States’ economic enmeshment in Europe; and Western currency devaluations amidst interwar financial crises. To illustrate these connections, I draw on archived correspondences among the French government, Tunisia’s colonial government, French phosphate companies in North Africa, the governments of European phosphate importers, and phosphate stakeholders in the United States. Just as recent scholarship challenges historians of U.S. capitalism to engage with colonial capitalism in the global south, Tunisia’s particularities can only be understood in conjunction with global linkages.