What are the local political and economic implications of land expropriation and land reform introduced by colonial regimes? Using archival records from Tunisia and France, this paper evaluates the extent to which access to land and land titling in Tunisia is responsive to French interests. Moreover, this paper presents evidence of a political backlash to French land policy. In regions with increased land expropriation and colonial settlement, we observe increased nationalist mobilization. These regions later become the geographic bases of support for the Neo-Destour party, the dominant political party of independent Tunisia. This research illustrates the extent to which post-independence political cleavages and affiliations are endogenous to the colonial experience.

Robust coercive apparatuses are often blamed for the Middle East’s uniquely persistent authoritarianism (Bellin 2004, 2012). Recent history – both before and after the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings – confirm the importance of these institutions in maintaining the region’s authoritarian governments. However, existing research does not explain how or why these institutions came to be. Political science theories suggest that coercive institutions are established when an authoritarian leader comes to power. He assesses potential domestic threats, which are either mass-based or elite-based (Wintrobe 1998, Brownlee 2007, Svolik 2012, Greitens 2016), and creates a corresponding coercive institution. Leaders face organizational trade-offs, and cannot simultaneously stave off a popular threat and protect themselves against rival elites. Institutional stickiness (Mahoney and Thelen 2010) constrains regimes’ adaptability as new threats arise, resulting in predictable patterns of state coercive organization. While the path dependence of existing arguments holds up to empirical scrutiny, the idea that authoritarian leaders have full autonomy in constructing coercive institutions does not reflect the reality that no leader inherits a state tabula rasa. In contemporary authoritarian regimes, leaders govern states with certain pre-determined resources and capabilities. The starting point for path-dependent coercive institutions must be moved back further in time. In this paper, we argue that authoritarian coercive capabilities are shaped by pre-independence spending and institution-building by colonial powers. The European colonial period coincided with a consequential period of modern state-building in the Middle East. Colonial projects varied across colonial regime type (i.e., British and French and related strategic interests) and time period (i.e., whether the colonial power was spending heavily elsewhere), with implications for state capacity and the functioning of institutions central to governance at independence. We focus our analysis here on understanding the range of repressive tools at the autocrat’s disposal as inherited from the colonial period. Authoritarian regimes use domestic police forces (regular, secret, and plainclothes), national security institutions (namely, the military), and a host of intelligence institutions to repress formally elite and mass opposition during regular periods of governance. We compare the balance of these institutions cross-nationally through a new dataset on colonial budgetary allocations for repressive institution-building. We disaggregate spending on the coercive apparatus by examining investments in police forces, the military, and intelligence agencies, and show that colonial efforts in building and funding such institutions is carried over by post-colonial regimes.

Recent historiographical treatment of European colonial regimes in the Middle East has emphasized the role of security and intelligence services in not only bolstering colonial rule but in defining the nature of the colonial state. This paper shifts focus into two related but understudied aspects of colonial regimes 1) the transnational and transregional scope of colonial surveillance operations and 2) the ways in which surveillance of local institutions like waqf informed broader surveillance work. The case of surveillance related to the official delegation from the French Mandate of Syria and Lebanon to the 1926 inauguration of the Grand Mosque in Paris is instructive regarding the transnational/transregional scope of surveillance under French rule. Analysis of internal records of the French Mandate civil administration read against French and Syrian/Lebanese public press accounts bears out contrasting perspectives regarding the 1926 delegation to Paris. Specifically, the personal surveillance of local members of the waqf administration who comprised the official delegation by French and Syrian employees of the Mandate civil administration was representative of surveillance operations that had participation beyond the formal security services. These efforts have received less attention in the scholarship that is concerned with the form and function of formal colonial intelligence and security services, yet critical surveillance work appears to have been the work of French and Syrian civil administration employees. Moreover, drawing on internal and public sources facilitates a broader definition of colonial surveillance - including the colonial intelligence and security apparatus but without imposing arbitrarily limits on what it can be. This approach recognizes that the violence and poor delivery of services that defined colonial rule was also accompanied by the development of more sophisticated state capacities related to surveillance.