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“With a sharp analytical eye, Mary Lewis takes nothing for granted: she challenges conventional wisdom about the administrative practices, laws, regulations, and legal forms that supposedly underpinned French authority in protectorate Tunisia. Divided Rule is essential, a work of huge significance.” --Martin Thomas, Professor of European Imperial History, University of Exeter
“Based on extensive research in Tunisia, France, Italy, and Great Britain, this study by Mary Lewis provides an insightful and revealing portrait of the complexities of imperial governance. Lewis demonstrates how important Tunisia's status as a protectorate was, not just in international relations but also in its effects on marriage, property, inheritance, and other aspects of the daily life of Tunisians. She makes clear that as French officials tried to exercise closer control, Tunisians pushed back in new ways.” --Frederick Cooper, author of Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History
“The result of prodigious research, Divided Rule explores the multiple and overlapping spheres of authority that structured life in Tunisia during the years in which that country existed as a protectorate of France. Lewis breathes new life into diplomatic history, shattering the false dichotomy that too often divides micro- and macro-studies. This book illuminates as much about the life of individuals in Tunisian society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it does about the nature of the international power politics through which France engaged with the world.” --Sarah Abrevaya Stein, author of Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce
“Divided Rule provides a groundbreaking account of the complex and fragmented legal landscape in Tunisia under French protectorate and explains how French incomplete sovereignty in Tunisia opened the way to a precocious nationalist movement. Mary Lewis brilliantly shows that the formation of the Tunisian nation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries owes to states’ competition in the arena of imperial rivalries in the Mediterranean as much as to nationalism itself. This book is an indispensable reading for any student or scholar interested in the history of imperialism and nationalism.” --Malika Zeghal, author of Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics
List of contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Note on Arabic Spelling
Introduction
Chapter 1. Tunisia in the Imperial Mediterranean
Chapter 2. Ending Extraterritoriality?
Chapter 3. The Politics of Protection
Chapter 4. Contested Terrain: Redefining Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Tunisia
Chapter 5. Over our Dead Bodies: Burial Rites and Sovereignty in 1930s Tunisia
Conclusion and Epilogue: From Co-Sovereignty to Independence
Bibliography
About the author
Mary Dewhurst Lewis is Professor of History at Harvard and author of The Boundaries of the Republic: Migrant Rights and the Limits of Universalism in France, 1918-1940 (Stanford University Press, 2007).
Summary
Based on archival research in four countries, this title uncovers important links between international power politics and everyday matters of rights, identity, and resistance to colonial authority, while re-interpreting the whole arc of French rule in Tunisia from the 1880s to the mid-20th century.
Additional text
"The author’s analysis of the beginnings of Tunisian nationalism in its thoroughly transnational context is even more vital in light of the country’s more recent history."
