On Divided Rule

There’s very little written on Tunisian history in English, so this is by definition a welcome addition to the literature. Mary Lewis comes at the subject from the angle of the French colonial empire, and her argument is that the establishment of Tunisia as a “protectorate” was an enormous challenge for the French, as it suggested that other European nations also had a say in Tunisia’s sovereignty due to beylical extraterritoriality laws. In the end, the French tried to overcome this by turning the protectorate into a more traditional colony through laws limiting the status of non-French European subjects (or turning them French), but it was not overwhelmingly successful. At the same time, as the French gained a stronger foothold with regard to sovereignty, they inadvertently galvanized the nationalist movement, who critiqued French claims to “co-sovereignty” (rather than “protection”).

As a result, Lewis’s book fits solidly in the literature that highlights tensions within imperial projects and illuminates a lot of what made French-occupied Tunisia unique while offering new light on both the French colonial empire at large and the imperial Mediterranean.