Foreign education had been recognized as an imperial power-knowledge network by the Ottoman state preceding the Turkish Republic. Control over education became a new terrain of struggle in the late 19th century, contemporaneous with increasing European intervention in the minority politics of the Ottoman Empire. I argue that with the rising importance of education, ‘ignorance,’ defined as a fount of corruption by the Ottoman state, was also discovered as a social and national problem. The period of educational transition from empire to nation-state in the late 19th and early 20th century proved formative for the post-Ottoman Turkish state’s approach to national education. In 1924, the newly established Turkish state banned religious education and moved to restrict foreign educational institutions. The contrast between the imperial and nation-state approach to education points to a tension that allows for a theorization of the relationship between education and sovereignty, while the fragmented and transnationally contested Ottoman field of education provides a unique vantage point to unpack how national educational fields form through contention. I challenge a linear, teleological, and nationally bound narrative of the formation of national education. Instead, I conceptualize the processes of de-transnationalizing (nationalizing) and de-religionizing (secularization) within the educational field as two separate but related processes, receiving their dynamism from the contention of various educational actors. I analyze the state’s relationship with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. I use American institutions as a proxy for foreign educational institutions for two pragmatic reasons; first, the ABCFM mostly operated in Asia Minor, which provides for territorial overlap with the Turkish Republic. Second, the Ottoman state singled out American institutions as hegemonic amongst others, hence they symbolize the perils of foreign education and contestation in the field of education writ large. I conceive of the Ottoman educational field not as a nationally bounded field, seeking the homogenization of its population, as the mainstream narrative of the construction of educational fields would indicate. Instead, I highlight how this educational field is nested within layered logics of imperial hierarchies, as the Ottoman state is cognizant of its own subordinated position within the global imperial system while at the same time it is exacerbating and constructing imperial hierarchies within its own territory. From this perspective, the ‘homogenization’ of populations become intimately connected to the global metanarrative of racial difference and inter-imperial power relations.

The Moroccan nationalist movement portrayed the Régie Co-Intéressée des Tabacs, a French-controlled tobacco and cannabis monopoly company in protectorate Morocco (1912-1956), as an obstacle to self-government. The Régie, founded in 1911, expanded its production and sales of tobacco and cannabis products at a brisk pace up until the outbreak of World War II. Yet, its stranglehold on two popular commodities, the invasive policing powers granted to its agents, and its connections to protectorate state finances caused many Moroccans to view the company in a negative light. The Moroccan nationalist movement seized on the discontent as a strategy in its larger struggle for independence after the war. This paper asks how Moroccan nationalists harnessed widespread resentment with the Régie in the fight for political and economic autonomy. It uses the records of the Régie, the French administration, and protectorate media to demonstrate that nationalist leaders channeled this anger through rhetorical, commercial, and physical means. One approach involved publishing criticisms through journal, press, and poster campaigns that equated colonial rule and the Régie. At the same time, different nationalist groups called for a boycott to hurt the company’s revenue and worker strikes to halt production. In the most extreme case, a violent strand of the movement encouraged vandalism of Régie facilities and assault against employees and customers. It is important to note that the Moroccan nationalist movement never sought to abolish the Régie, but rather transfer its management to an independent Moroccan state. In emphasizing the contradiction between tactics and goal, this paper considers the role of commodity markets in conceptions of national sovereignty in the Southwest Asia and North Africa region. From the perspective of Moroccan nationalist leaders, liberation involved not a reinvention of the market but instead a replacement of its managers and beneficiaries. Nationalist action against the Régie in the period before 1956 is consequently positioned here as the initiation of a longer and gradual ‘Moroccanisation’ of the company and market.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Cold War and independence from European colonies were eminent, international radio broadcasting became the contested domain of nationalist leaders, advocates of internationalism, colonial authorities, and ordinary listeners over the meaning of self-determination. The paper asks how Moroccan nationalist leaders in the last few years before the independence (1956) faced this new media, utilized it as their weapon against the colonizer, and simultaneously established their claim as the voice of their people. By analyzing primary written and audio materials from the speeches given by the Moroccan nationalist leaders on the radio program Ṣawt al-‘Arab (Voice of the Arabs) of Radio Cairo, a key Pan-Arabism radio broadcasting supported by the revolutionary Egyptian regime, as well as the French intelligence reports, the paper studies what these Moroccan leaders spoke behind the microphone, how ordinary citizens in French colonial North Africa listened to these voices afar, and how the French colonial authorities monitored the emerging novel media of the mid-twentieth century. According to research findings, the paper argues that international radio broadcasts from Cairo provided a platform for Moroccan nationalists to appeal to the broader Arab regional audience, connecting their aspiration for independence and the momentum of Pan-Arabism. Moreover, the utilization of radio allowed ‘Allāl al-Fāsī, an exiled leader of the Istiqlal Party, to reinforce his own position as a popular nationalist leader. Indeed, in comparison with other existing media, radio was able to convey voices directly to the populace by arousing listeners’ emotions more effectively and transcending gender spatial boundaries. The fact that the French colonial authorities were so keen on surveilling and counteracting the anti-colonial propaganda disseminated on air from outside of their proper colonial domain attests to the impact radio broadcasting had on the nationalist struggle. The paper manifests the importance of intimate relations between establishing political authority and mastering the media. In particular, the international radio broadcasting that appeared at the onset of remaking of the international order amidst the Cold War provides significant insights on the interactions of internationalism and postcolonial state-making, through the lived voices from the past.

At the onset of colonial rule in 1881 the working class in Tunisia faced a complete lack of both political and social rights. During this era, workers were faced with several options to organize, the most prominent were cross-national communist movements and cross-class nationalist ones. This choice emerged in part from the fact that Tunisian workers, like other colonized peoples of the French empire, were extensively integrated with a broader imperial labor movement, having originally been organized as members of the metropolitan labor federation, the CGT. This poses the question of under what conditions different kinds of intersectional coalitions are possible? While Tunisia’s first national labor union in the 1920s would try to bring together these two bases of external support, from nationalists and the communist left, future efforts culminating in today’s UGTT would find this impossible. In this paper I explore the concrete factors that shaped this choice at the national and international levels, including realignments within the left, the social base of the nationalist movement, and international labor politics before and during the cold war. I do so using a broad range of labor, colonial, diplomatic archives from Tunisia, France, and the United States. This paper thus offers a case study of how intersectional oppressions can limit the practical choices available to social movements.