While long thought dead both as a coherent space and as an interesting topic of study, recent years have witnessed new life injected into the Mediterranean. Scholars in a variety of fields—especially history, literature, anthropology, and classics—have returned to, and been inspired by, Fernand Braudel’s masterful study. Today’s scholars look to the Mediterranean as a model for understanding transnationalism, inter-religious relations, region formation, cosmopolitanism, mobility, and more. But the biases and preferences which shaped Braudel’s Mediterranean in many ways continue to define the (re-)emerging field of Mediterranean Studies, as well as the arguments against such an endeavor. In particular, a geographical preference for southern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, particularly present-day Turkey and the Levant, continue to shape the scholarly Mediterranean—leaving North Africa largely, or even entirely, out of the picture. Looking north and east from the Maghrib, North African historians have similarly tended to shun a Mediterranean perspective, favoring instead national (and nationalist) narratives.
Some recent work (that of Julia Clancy-Smith and Mary Lewis, for example) has sought to bring a transnational, Mediterranean perspective to the history of North Africa. But scholars have yet to make North Africa a full and equal partner in the construction of the Mediterranean. What happens to Mediterranean Studies when the focus shifts away from Europe and the Levant and towards the Maghrib? And what happens to the Maghrib when it is viewed as an integral part of a larger, Mediterranean region characterized by interconnectivity and exchange?
This panel seeks to make North Africa central to Mediterranean studies, and to make the Mediterranean a central part of the study of North Africa. The four papers offer different methodological perspectives on connectivity and trans-regional (or trans-imperial) connections in the Mediterranean. The first paper examines the ways in which North Africans redeemed their loved ones from captivity in the seventeenth century, thereby helping to construct the Mediterranean as a socio-political space. The second paper argues that North Africa became legally integrated into the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century through the spread of extraterritoriality. The third paper explores the ways in which Moroccan nationalist writers in the mid-twentieth century used the history of al-Andalus as a framework for understanding Spanish colonialism in Morocco. The fourth paper looks at regional connectivity between Sicily and Tunisia in the late twentieth-century, arguing that attention to structural similarities between premodern and modern periods may help us see how the Mediterranean can reemerge as a transnational constellation in modern times.
The ransom of captives has recently become a burgeoning theme among scholars of the early modern period. Most studies focus on the ransom of Christians from the Maghrib. The assumption is that since Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco didn’t develop ransom institutions similar to the French and Iberian Orders of Redemption (the Trinitarians and the Mercedarians), North Africans taken captive and enslaved in Christian lands had no hope of returning home.
In contrast, this paper argues that in the seventeenth century, Maghribis employed various ransom procedures in order to liberate their dear ones and return them home. On the one hand, Algerian and Moroccan wives and mothers interacted with Christian women to negotiate the exchange of their own sons and husbands. On the other, Maghribi rulers – Moroccan sultans and Algerian pashas – negotiated with their Christian counterparts the exchange of large numbers of captives. In order to make the ransom procedures that Magribis employed visible, this article takes as its point of departure the moment of the exchange of captives or the negotiations that led up to that moment rather than captives’ religious confession. When examined from the Maghribi perspective, not only does it become clear that Maghribis made huge efforts to liberate their beloveds held captive across the sea but also that the captivity and ransom of Moroccans, Algerians and Tunisians and that of Christians from Iberia, France and Italy were entangled. In that sense, the value of focusing on such exchanges goes beyond the study of captivity and ransom as such, also shedding light on how the sea, a socio-political space linking Iberia and North Africa, emerged out of the flow of such transactions.
Law in the Mediterranean—as in most parts of the pre-modern world—was characterized by a hodgepodge of jurisdictions which coexisted and competed with each other more or less successfully. But by the nineteenth century, the local manifestations of legal pluralism took on an increasingly international dimension throughout the Islamic Mediterranean. The capitulation treaties signed between various European states and their Ottoman and Moroccan counterparts laid the groundwork for a regime of extraterritoriality. By the nineteenth century, this developed into a system by which large numbers of individuals—both “locals” and “foreigners” (categories that are oversimplifications at best)—had some sort of extraterritorial status which afforded access to consular courts that applied the laws of the states they represented. The expanding network of consular courts served as a new and increasingly important connecting force in the Mediterranean, bringing the southern and northern shores of the Middle Sea into a shared legal space. The fact that the rise of extraterritoriality occurred in the nineteenth century—a period during which the Mediterranean is often thought of as already being in decline—suggests that new forms of connectivity continued to arise even long after the region’s supposed golden age.
This paper focuses on consular courts in Morocco during the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that these institutions acted as a force integrating Morocco into the broader Mediterranean. This observation is particularly important given the paucity of scholarship focused on the legal consequences of extraterritoriality—as opposed to the relatively well-known political effects of protection, which did much to chip away at the sovereignty of North African states. Paying attention to consular courts as legal institutions points to cross-Mediterranean connectivity in two ways. On the one hand, the availability of consular courts afforded those Moroccans with either protection or foreign nationality an entirely new set of legal institutions to which they could appeal. From the point of view of the legal consumer, then, the expansion of consular protection brought a little of Europe into North Africa. On the other hand, consular courts shifted the legal landscape from an institutional point of view. Consul-judges had to adapt their practices to those which prevailed in local courts (both Islamic and Jewish). In other words, a little bit of North Africa seeped into European law as it was applied in Moroccan consulates.
This paper will explore the ways in which Moroccan nationalist writers used the history of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia) as a framework for understanding Spanish colonialism in Morocco. During the colonial period, Spanish writers and intellectuals revived the historical memory of al-Andalus in order to legitimize Spain’s historical connection to North Africa and to justify Spain’s colonial projects in Morocco. Toward the end of the Protectorate period, Moroccan nationalists, such as Muhammad Dawud and al-Tuhami al-Wazzani, appropriated the Spanish celebration of al-Andalus and re-purposed it as a tool for anti-colonial resistance. Thus, I will be arguing that, during the colonial period, recourse to the historical memory of al-Andalus served simultaneously as a tool for Spanish colonial self-justification and as the banner cry for Moroccan nationalism and anti-colonial resistance.
My paper will explore the origins of Moroccan nationalist discourse through two related Mediterranean lenses. It will address the complex interplay between Spanish colonial discourse and Moroccan nationalist discourse, but it will also show how modern Moroccan representations of al-Andalus were in implicit dialogue with modern Mashriqi representations of al-Andalus – and, in particular, with Shakib Arslan’s writings about al-Andalus.
Most historians and anthropologists of North Africa, Southern Europe, and the Levant agree that the Mediterranean has lost its conceptual coherence with the advent of modernity, even if they disagree both on the definition and on the timing of that historical change. As a result, anthropologists have completely abandoned the Mediterraneanist perspective on processes in the region, whereas historians, even when they do directly define a modern Mediterranean, make it almost a residual spatiotemporal category, formed around a similar marginality that places around the sea share, rather than any connecting dynamics of mobility and circulation.
This paper opens with an examination of the ways in which the Mediterranean and modernity have been defined in contradistinction to each other. The paper then discusses the similarities and differences among the three main strands of modern Mediterraneanist studies: anthropologists’ interest in honor and shame as well as in patron-client relations, and the interest they share with historians in cosmopolitanism. I argue that by revisiting these three focuses of Mediterraneanist interest we would be able to go beyond the academic separation between nostalgic images of past Mediterraneans and lamenting accounts of the current, seemingly disintegrated region.
I then address two recent moments of Mediterranean connections: Italian-North African tensions and relations at the height of the Cold War and the stabilization of clandestine migration routes in the central Mediterranean during the last decade. In both cases, Tunisian, Italian, and Libyan political projects and commitments along the shores of their respective continents and across the sea shaped the circulation of people and goods across the sea. In both cases, circulation then affected these political projects and initiated spatio-political processes of region-forming potential. I use these two examples to argue that by searching for structural similarities across periods more than for continuities through them, and by liberating our concept of processes of regional formation from any time-bound or essence-based definition, we may discover that the Mediterranean may, that it has reemerge as a transnational constellation in modern times.
