In the nineteenth century, Tunis was an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, placed under the hereditary rule of a local governor known as the Bey. However, in 1881, France established its colonial presence in Tunis. Despite the Bey’s request for assistance, the Ottomans could do little to prevent French occupation on the ground. Legally, however, Istanbul continued to claim Tunis as its province. This paper examines the Sublime Porte’s strategy of legal resistance in its efforts to sustain its sovereignty claims over occupied Tunis. A critical dimension of the French-Ottoman dispute over sovereignty in Tunis was the question of the legal belonging of Tunisians established in Ottoman-ruled territory. Were they Ottoman nationals or French colonial subjects? After 1881, the jurisdictional status of Tunisians became a stake of the larger, more fundamental question of sovereignty. The paper focuses on the legal ways in which the Sublime Porte argued in favour of the Ottoman nationality of Tunisians.

From the 16th century to the two first decades of the 19th century, subjects from the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire (Algiers, Tripoli and Tunis) and from the sultanate of Morocco were enslaved in Spain, Italy and Malta. Like their Christian counterparts in North Africa, in order to be freed from slavery, these Ottoman/North African captives sent various petitions and letters to their respective sovereigns: namely to the sultans of Morocco, the deys of Algiers and the beys of Tunis and Tripoli. The paper will analyze these claims and the institutional processes through which they were conveyed for the second half of the 18th century. It will compare North African petitions to the ones sent by European captives in order to assess how North African slaves defined their legal status and above all their legal belonging in a situation of legal domination in Europe prior to the colonial period.

The history of citizenship in modern North Africa—and the Middle East more broadly—long operated according to a diffusionist model of modernity: modern conceptions of citizenship originated in Western Europe and were then imported by reformist, westernizing officials. This paper seeks to offer an alternative approach: rather than presume that Tunisian citizenship was invented in the nineteenth century, I point to the arguments made by Husayn b. ‘Abdallah, a former mamlūk and a Tunisian government official. Husayn was charged with overseeing the government’s case in a lawsuit that concerned the nationality of Nissim Shamama, a Jew from Tunis who died in Italy in 1873. His approach to belonging suggests that North Africans did not necessarily understand citizenship as a foreign import, but rather as rooted in Islamic tradition. In the standard historiography, proto-citizenship in the Islamic world depended entirely on religious status—principally, whether one was a Muslim or a dhimmī (a protected non-Muslim monotheist). Only Muslims had full rights, as close to full citizenship as the premodern Islamic world got. But these rights did not amount to state-based citizenship; rather, Muslims’ rights derived from their membership in the umma, the community of Muslims worldwide—a group that transcended political boundaries. Jews’ rights similarly depended on their religion and their status as dhimmīs. Because rights were presumably located in religious identity, scholars presume that true, state-based citizenship could only emerge once states stopped defining personal status based on religion—a form of secularization imported from Europe. But this narrative fails us when it comes to grasping how North Africans understood what it meant to belong to Tunisia. In the context of the Shamama lawsuit, Husayn insisted on grounding his vision of Tunisian nationality in Islamic law. He also asserted that the model of belonging in Tunisia allowed Jews more freedom than did emancipation in Europe—a claim echoed by Léon Elmilik, Husayn’s Jewish employee from Algeria. Husayn’s conception of Tunisian nationality suggests that legal belonging—a more abstract category than either citizenship or nationality—existed in Tunisia well before the modernizing reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. Exploring Tunisians’ conceptions of Tunisian nationality frees us from the twinned teleologies of Westernization and secularization; instead, it shines light on the evolution of state membership in modern North Africa as part of an entangled process of legal change across the Mediterranean.

On July 5th, 1830, Dey Husayn surrendered. The French army took over Ottoman Algiers, and, mechanically, Algerians were said to be French. This automatic granting of French nationality emanated from a general principle of the law: the annexing state grants its nationality to the subjects whose state disappears as an object of international law. In the paper, I will discuss this a priori of the law by comparing it with both the legal production and the claims to nationality undertaken by Algerians residing in the Ottoman Empire. How did colonial subjects rebuild their lives in the Ottoman Empire after the colonization of their homeland ? How did theses imperial subjects negotiate their reassignment to the Ottoman Empire by drawing on their multiple affiliations? How did the memory of French colonial violence impact their conception and practices of nationality ? The question of the nationality can be considered as a legal device used to fight the colonial war by other means. Taking advantage of this competition between states, Algerian emigrants invite us to examine the issue of nationality in a way that transcends the nation-state paradigm. They also highlight the nationality law as a narrative of violence. Verbatim records of consular interviews, registration on nefous (i.e. civil status registers), rabbinical proofs of origin and certificates of notoriety issued by qadi, notarial documents, this vast array of sources, including forged documents, underlines the articulation of law, history and daily life in a global microhistory perspective.