Slave to Modernity? General Ḥusayn’s Journey from Tunis to Tuscany (1830s-1880s)
In: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientSearch for other papers by M’hamed Oualdi in
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Following the career of General Ḥusayn b. ʿAbdallāh, a prominent Circassian slave who served the Ottoman governors of Tunis from his childhood in the 1830s until his death in Tuscany in 1887, this paper attempts to grasp more than the colonial dimension of the North African past and to assess other global and transnational dynamics that molded the histories of modernity in the Maghrib. His exile in Florence redirects our attention to Mediterranean spaces, such as Tuscany, which were neither imperial nor colonial and which have been erased from the main narrative of colonized North Africa.
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Bayram Muḥammad b. Muṣṭafā Tarjama Muḥammad Bayram al-Khāmis fī Ṣafwat al-iʿtibār bi-mustawdaʿ al-amṣār wa-l-aqṭār 1989 Carthage Bayt al-Ḥikma (d. 1889)
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1
M.C. Sahli, Décoloniser l’histoire (Paris: François Maspero, 1965).
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2
A. Laroui, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretative Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); E. Burke iii, “Towards a History of the Maghrib.” Middle Eastern Studies 11/3 (1975): 309-10, 312.
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4
I. Grangaud, “Prouver par l’écriture: Propriétaires algérois, conquérants français et historiens ottomanistes.” Genèses 74 (March 2009): 25-45. In the Tunisian case, the primary sources and the archives as an institution are the product of provincial Ottoman and French colonial reforms.
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6
J. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011): xii, 340, 344, 345.
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7
M.D. Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881-1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014): ix, 4, 5.
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8
I. Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860-1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010): 2, 168.
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9
Ḥusayn, Rasāʾil Ḥusayn ilā Khayr al-Dīn (Carthage: Bayt al-Ḥikma, 1991): 1:20. J. Ganiage, Les origines du Protectorat français en Tunisie (1861-1881) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959): 83.
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12
D. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 7, 115; Scott, Conscripts: 115; T. Asad, “Conscripts of Western Civilization.” In Dialectical Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Stanley Diamond, ed. Christine Ward Gailey (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1992): 337.
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13
D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001): 5, 180; the author quotes Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988): 5.
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19
I.M. Montana, Abolition of Slavery in Ottoman Tunisia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013): 84, 97.
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20
Y.H. Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800-1909 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); E. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998); Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, s.v. “Slavery.”
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27
A. Chenoufi, “Un rapport inédit en langue arabe sur l’école de guerre du Bardo.” Cahiers de Tunisie, 95-6 (1976): 45-118.
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28
A. Daux, “Achmed-Pacha, Bey du Tunis et des réformes qu’il a faites dans l’administration de ses états.” Revue de l’Orient et de l’Algérie et des Colonies 4 (1848): 356.
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32
L. Bercher, “En marge du Pacte ‘fondamental.’ Un document inédit.” Revue Tunisienne (1939): 67-86.
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36
M.F. Bin ʿAshūr, Arkān al-nahḍa al-adabiyya bi-Tūnis (Tunis: Markaz al-Najāḥ, 1961): 16, 18; A. Vaḥḥah, al-Ḥaraka al-iṣlāḥiyya al-zaytūniyya wa al-madrasiyya al-Tūnisiyya khilāla qarn. Al-Shaykh Sālim Bū Ḥājib wa-manhajihi al-iṣlāḥī anmūdhaj (Tunis: ʿAbd al-Qādir Fiḥḥa, 2007); A.H. Green, The Tunisian Ulama, 1873-1915: Social Structure and Response to Ideological Currents (Leiden: Brill, 1978): 87, 246.
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39
C. Windler, “Diplomatic History as a Field for Cultural Analysis: Muslim-Christian Relations in Tunis, 1700-1840.” The Historical Journal 44/1 (March 2001): 79-106.
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46
L.C. Brown, The Tunisia of Ahmad Bey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974): 336-49; K.J. Perkins, A History of Modern Tunisia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 16.
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47
M.S. Hanioǧlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008): 75-6.
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49
M. Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review.” The American Historical Review 111/3 (June 2006): 692, 698-9, 714.
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51
J. Dakhlia and B. Vincent ed., Les musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe. I. Une intégration invisible (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011).
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53
Jacques Devoize, Paris, 8 June 1779, AE B i 1149, vol. 26, Tunis 1778-9, French National Archives, Paris. Ibn Abī al-Ḍiyāf, Itḥāf ahl al-zamān bi-akhbār mulūk Tūnis wa ʿahd al-amān (Tunis: Dār al-Tūnisiyya lil-Nashr, 1989): 3:20.
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63
David Santillana, Florence, 1 July 1887, doc. 8762, d. 113, c. 11, hs, tna.
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71
In front of the French empress, in 1860, Ḥusayn was unable to speak French. In London, in 1868, Ḥusayn aimed to learn English and Persian (Rasāʾil: 1:76, letter 24, August 1868/Jumādā i 1285). But he did use European words, both French and Italian, in letters he sent to Khayr al-Dīn, such as kārṭa al-fīzīta (business card), būmāda (ointment, from French pommade and Italian pomata), “Kūnsīl dī Ātā” (State Council, from the French), camera, and aviso, (Rasāʾil: vol. 1, letters 1, 17, 21, 34, 79).
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72
F. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009): 93. “By the time of the Napoleonic census of 1808, North African Jews made up 13 percent of the nation and controlled 42.64 percent of the Jewish commercial houses in Livorno.”
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73
Visiting Livorno in July 1882, Muḥammad al-Sanūsī assumes a population of more than 100,000. According to him, 10% were Jews. Those originating in Tunis used to meet in a café (qahwa) close to Telegraph Square (Markaz al-Talaghrāf). M. Ibn ʿUthmān al-Sanūsī, al-Riḥla al-Ḥijāziya (Tunis: al-Sharika al-Tūnisiya lil-Tawzīʿ, 1976): 226-7.
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83
M. Gilsenan, “Translating Colonial Fortunes: Dilemmas of Inheritance in Muslim and English Laws across a Nineteenth-Century Diaspora.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32/2 (2011): 355-71.
-
89
A. Tunger-Zanetti, La communication entre Tunis et Istanbul, 1860-1913: Province et métropole (Paris: Harmattan, 1996): 142-4.
-
94
A. Dirlik, “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalization and the Question of Modernity.” Social History 27/1 (2002): 25.
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97
M.P. Guterl, “The Futures of Transnational History.” American Historical Review 118/1 (2013): 309-10, 312.
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99
K.J. Perkins, Historical Dictionary of Tunisia (London: Scarecrow Press, 1997): 30-1. ʿAlī Bāsh Ḥānba graduated from Ṣādiqī College and was trained as a lawyer in France. He advocated Islamic solidarity. Suspected of “having a part instigating the Jallaz Cemetery incident” and active in organizing “a boycott of the Tunis tram system that aimed at securing equal treatments for its Tunisian and European employees,” he was exiled in 1912. In Istanbul, he was involved in “Ottoman efforts to promote pan-Islamic ideas during World War I.”
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Slave to Modernity? General Ḥusayn’s Journey from Tunis to Tuscany (1830s-1880s)
In: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientSearch for other papers by M’hamed Oualdi in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Following the career of General Ḥusayn b. ʿAbdallāh, a prominent Circassian slave who served the Ottoman governors of Tunis from his childhood in the 1830s until his death in Tuscany in 1887, this paper attempts to grasp more than the colonial dimension of the North African past and to assess other global and transnational dynamics that molded the histories of modernity in the Maghrib. His exile in Florence redirects our attention to Mediterranean spaces, such as Tuscany, which were neither imperial nor colonial and which have been erased from the main narrative of colonized North Africa.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 597 | 86 | 12 |
| Full Text Views | 179 | 1 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 103 | 3 | 0 |