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.

While critical scholars, journalists, and the many ordinary Tunisians still living in harsh economic and political circumstances have done much to protest against the reality and implications of the country’s alleged “exceptionalism” in the post-2011 transition period, one of the key pillars of the notion of exceptionalism has received less scrutiny: the idea of “Tunisian Islam.” Drawing on print and archival sources from the interwar period, the following paper shows that debates at Tunisia’s centre of Islamic scholarship—the Zaytuna mosque-university—must be understood as part of a network of exchange with Egypt and in particular with the Azhar, the Zaytuna’s Cairo-based counterpart and perhaps the most important scholarly centre in Sunni Islam. I clarify the point through a case study of how scholars at the Azhar and Zaytuna used the identical 20th-century neologism—al-tashri' al-Islami (Islamic legislation)—to defend the shari'a’s existing provisions on women’s rights. There is another purpose to my argument that the concept of “Islamic legislation” was transnational rather than Tunisia-bound: to raise questions about the progress-oriented narratives implicit in subsequent depictions of reformist Zaytuna thought as leading inexorably to Tunisia’s landmark 1956 Personal Status Code. Diverging from these tendentious portrayals, I suggest that discourses at the Zaytuna had much in common with the Azhari intellectual trends with which they were endlessly entangled. In this sense, “Tunisian Islam” is partly a myth, traceable to the authoritarian age of the post-independence period when politicians and government-backed newspapers reframed Zaytuna history to suit the regime’s own carefully-curated image.

A number of multilateral and bilateral development agencies celebrate Tunisia’s urban upgrading program as a “best practice” that succeeded in universalizing access to services in the country. Deemed exceptional in comparison to its Arab neighbors who enforced slum clearance rather than in-situ upgrading, these programs have been continuously funded by development agencies for the past 50 years. Though in the early 1960’s the post-independent state implemented slum clearance, these policies were later abandoned. This paper traces the global knowledge flows at the origin of Tunisia’s urban upgrading programs. It draws on the policy mobility literature in geography to follow the work of a group of young architects concerned with the slummification of the Medina. In 1967, they established the Association for the Protection of the Medina (Association de Sauvegarde de la Médina de Tunis) to protect its heritage buildings. One of these architects, Wassim Ben Mahmoud received his training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in the United States whose architecture department had a strong interest in questions of international development. Ben Mahmoud finished his master thesis in 1972. In the same year, his thesis advisor John F.C. Turner published the book Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process (1972) reflecting on self-help housing from the slums of Peru. Turner came to be credited for the “aided self-help” housing policies that the World Bank starting implementing all over the world. This paper will trace these global connections in an effort to nuance the claim of Tunisian exceptionalism.