Ottoman North Africa: The Western Center of Empire
Panel 159, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 17 at 3:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel focuses on Ottoman North Africa, redraws the boundaries of the Ottoman imperial map to include the provinces of the Maghreb, and reintegrates the North African provinces into the broader historiographical discussion of the Porte and its domains. Throughout, we examine the various Ottoman administrative approaches that were employed to incorporate and maintain the North African spaces into the Ottoman imperial framework while simultaneously examining how the Maghreb engaged with the Porte that governed over it. Ultimately, this panel looks to reframe the narrative of Ottoman--North African engagement.
The nexus of the papers is that North Africa was key in the Ottoman imperial paradigm, and in many ways served as a geographical ‘center’ of its own. This important corrective addresses the current historiographical framework which has long viewed the Maghreb as the severed limb of empire, left dismembered and disconnected from the political structure that administered it. Throughout these papers, which range in topic from military administration and territorial expansion to the policies surrounding burial practices and the sartorial trends of empire, we will show how that simply was not the case.
Paper 1 examines the Ottoman military system introduced in the sixteenth century North Africa and explores how the Ottomans incorporated local and pre-existing forms of military slavery into its broader administrative scheme. Paper 2 looks at Maghrebi intra-provincial connections and socio-political ties that linked the history of the Maghrebi seas and sands together by examining how North Africans imagined space at the turn of the nineteenth century. Paper 3 examines how cemeteries and burial spaces became a source of political contention in colonial Tunis and how the Ottomans reasserted their authority through their “necro-policies” in a time of European colonial expansion. Paper 4 meanwhile examines the everyday life of the Tunisian fes maker community in fin-de-siècle Istanbul as a case-study illustrating the Ottoman engagements of North African subjects in the imperial capital.
By adopting a regional framework that allows us to look beyond the restricting confines of provincial borders, we examine how Ottoman policies were oftentimes reshaped to fit the sociopolitical contexts of the time across the diverse terrain of the Maghreb itself. Throughout this discussion, we see how the various expressions of imperial rule were formulated to work within the different Maghrebi context, and reciprocally, how North Africans themselves imagined their connections to empire.
This paper examines the interwoven relationship between the coastlines and the provincial inlands of the Ottoman Maghreb at the turn of the nineteenth century. While the Napoleonic Wars and the French Campaign in Egypt and Syria had brought with a surge in maritime activity, the subsequent 1815 Congress of Vienna and the shifting policies of the Ottoman Porte brought with them a sharp decline in Mediterranean corsairing, and a substantial loss in revenues for the North African eyalets. This paper will analyze how the governors of Tunis and Tripoli both turned their attentions inland to recoup lost revenues and to reassert their political agency in a time of transforming imperial landscapes.
The objective of this paper to tease out how Maghrebi officials saw the sea and sand as two sides of the same coin. North African officials would routinely turn their attentions towards one during times of financial, political or even environmental crises in the other, and saw the spaces as working in tandem. This important historiographical corrective does the work of highlighting the ‘interwoven geographies’ North African world and argues against the contemporary paradigm which has long since isolated the Saharan inlands from the maritime connections with which they were so intrinsically connected.
The central case-study for this paper and ‘interwoven geographies’ is an analysis of Tripoli’s empire building efforts in Bornu. It will analyze the proactive attempt on the part of Tripolitan governor—Yusuf Pasha Karamanli— to mimic the empire building strategies and directives of his neighbor-- Egypt’s Mehmed Ali by similarly expanding his reach beyond Fezzan and into Bornu. In doing so, this paper also examines the horizontal ties that bound provinces to one another in a changing imperial landscape as well as the vertical ties that bound the seas and sands of North Africa together.
In November 1887, some men paid by the Ottoman consul in Florence exhumed general Husayn Ibn Abdallah’s remains from the Muslim cemetery of Livorno. General Husayn was a former dignitary and minister in Tunis before France took over this former Ottoman province in 1881. His remains were then transferred to Istanbul and buried in the prestigious mausoleum of Mahmud II, that not only housed the sarcophagus of the reforming sultan, but also those of Sultans Abdülaziz and Abdülhamid.
The displacement of Husayn’s remains is not anecdotal at all. At that time, by the 1880s, cemeteries and funerals started to be a source of contention in colonial Tunis. Moreover, the Muslim cemetery of Livorno where Husayn was firstly buried became under Ottoman administration a political resource for acting amongst Muslims living in this part of Europe.
Studying closely the displacement of Husayn’s remains from Italy to Istanbul in such a context reveals a new and crucial dimension of the Ottoman policy towards its North African subjects. The Ottomans reasserted their authority over subjects through their “necro-policies”, their administration of their former subjects’ deaths and funerals across the Mediterranean, even though these North Africans subjects and their bodies were now colonized. In such a light, it appears then restrictive or even mistaken to view the Ottoman Empire as powerless in this region after the French colonial conquest of the former province of Tunis. North Africans including within Husayn Ibn Abdallah’s entourage supported explicitly such Ottoman “necro-policies”.
Under the ‘Tunis’ entry of ?emseddin Sami’s authoritative Ottoman dictionary, Kamus-i Turki (1898), the Ottoman-Albanian intellectual provides the following phrase to illustrate the use of the word in common parlance: “The Tunis Fez - the large and thick type of fez.” In the late Ottoman Empire, the Eyalet of Tunis came to be associated with the red woollen headdress so closely identified with Ottoman sartorial modernity. From the eighteenth century onwards, first summoned by Sultanic decrees and later leaving spontaneously in search for more lucrative markets, Tunisian fez makers emigrated from their North African province to Istanbul. They settled in Tahtakale and in the Grand Bazaar, forming an entire community in the heart of the imperial capital. At the turn of the twentieth century, there were approximately three hundred active Tunisian fez makers in Istanbul.
This paper examines the everyday life of the Tunisian fez maker community of Istanbul in the late nineteenth century. Using Ottoman encyclopaedias, newspapers, visual sources, court records, and government reports, it demonstrates that this community was an integral part of the social fabric of fin-de-siècle Istanbul. In doing so, it aims to challenge the long-standing notion that, by the nineteenth century, the province of Tunis and its subjects had become completely severed from the rest of the Ottoman world. For Tunisian fez makers, Tunis was inextricably tied to the rest of the empire. Through their continuous back-and-forth between Tunis and Istanbul, they fashioned an Ottoman-Tunisian space where cultural connections, economic opportunities, and political capital were constantly being produced. For the Sublime Porte, treating Tunisian fez makers as Ottoman subjects came at a political cost: in virtue of its protectorate over Tunis, the French government considered Tunisians living in Istanbul as its protégés, enjoying French consular protection and thus ineligible to be treated as local subjects. Studying the community of Tunisian fez makers in the Ottoman capital reveals a rich cultural and political landscape, one that is otherwise invisible from the premise that Tunis was independent from Istanbul.
The sixteenth century, particularly the period following the Ottoman conquest of North Africa, was a watershed moment for the growth and expansion of military slavery in the Maghrib. Between 1512 and 1574, after they halted Spain’s imperial and colonial ambitions, with the exception of Morocco, the Ottomans, in turn, occupied the region. To administer these new eyalets (provinces), which were now incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans introduced a military system based exclusively on mamluk infantry, the vast majority of whom were of slave castes. By comparison to the mamluks, employment of military slaves and militia derived from the regions of sub-Saharan Africa that had occurred both before and after the Ottoman period has been overlooked in the historiography of the Ottoman domains in general. In Ottoman Tunis, for instance, while the existence of a lesser-known Sudanic military corps has been documented by contemporaneous sources, to date very little is known about their presence, roles, or functions. Using contemporary accounts, chronicles, Husaynid beylical administrative records, travelers’ accounts, and oral interviews, this article explores the political climate that accounted for the presence of this Sudanic military corps and how it shaped the corporate identity of enslaved sub-Saharan Africans of Sudanic descent in Ottoman Tunis.
By placing the paper within the literature on military slavery, I argue that while the Sudanic military corps does not fit into the dominant category of mamluks or kul (elites) slavery in the wake of the Ottoman period, not only do they reflect continuity of a much older tradition of employing slaves or militia for political ends in the wider Islamic context, but they also tell a story of slavery and a continuity of historical relations between Ifriqiyya and the Bilad al-Sudan.
