The idea of cosmopolitanism as a category of analysis has been employed by diverse parties to construct an urban history of colonial and post-colonial Tunis. On the part of Italian scholars it has often been used implicitly to support a romanticized Italian narrative of its community’s deep roots in Tunis, one that “tragically” ended with Tunisian independence in 1956. Concurrently, Tunisian scholars have used cosmopolitanism to buttress a nationalist narrative of tolerance and cooperation across its populace. While the former tale is replete with Orientalist nostalgia for an imagined, bourgeois cosmopolitanism, the latter took the opposite extreme. There, a nationalist narrative co-opted the discourse of bourgeois cosmopolitanism to remake Tunisia into a land metaphorically between Europe and the Middle East—a model of development. And yet, neither usage of the idea of cosmopolitanism advanced an inclusive model of Tunis under the protectorate. What the metropolitan polyglot meant for the demographically dominant and yet economically impoverished Italian community or for their Tunisian neighbors remains unclear. Moreover, the effect of local interaction between these two economically competitive groups on the development of self—relational identification (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000)—has yet to be uncovered. Using a single instance of socio-economic crisis, the 1911 Jellaz Riot, as a discursive lens, this study will explore local power dynamics between Italian immigrants and their Tunisian neighbors in the capital in order to formulate a working social history of metropolitan space. Moving beyond binary colonial models as well as concentrating on local community interaction and its resulting identification, this article will present a history of place that reintroduces the middling social elements—both Italian and Tunisian—into what has heretofore been an exclusionary tale of European fantasy or Tunisian nationalist triumph respectively. Looking at this turbulent period of 1911-1912 then, this paper will also expose the machinations of identity construction within these two groups as they developed vis-à-vis the other through labor competition in the tramways, docks and local markets of Tunis. In doing so, a new social history of metropolitan Tunis can begin which does not assume static identities nor singular dimensions of communal coexistence, cooperation or competition. But rather, one that is inclusive of all the messy bits of the urban palimpsest, of all the aspects of social indeterminacy that would play a role in developing both communities’ sense of self—in political participation, labor organization and social consciousness—throughout the 1920s and 1930s.