Description
Book SynopsisIn June 1887, a man known as General Husayn, a manumitted slave turned dignitary in the Ottoman province of Tunis, passed away in Florence after a life crossing empires. M’hamed Oualdi investigates Husayn’s transimperial life and the posthumous battle over his fortune to recover the transnational dimensions of North African history.
Trade ReviewM'hamed Oualdi’s biography cum social history is dazzling. In life and death, General Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah's story reveals unlikely itineraries, unsuspected traveling companions, and hidden transactions that call into question conventional histories of nineteenth-century North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. The author’s presentation of archives as exiles, émigrés, and migrants is particularly original. -- Julia Clancy-Smith, author of
Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900A Slave Between Empires is a bold reinterpretation of North Africa’s modern history: it revisits time and space by going beyond the narrow lens of colonization and by examining Tunisia as part of a large set of regional (European and Ottoman) networks. A must-read by one of the best historians of the Maghreb. -- Malika Zeghal, Harvard University
This meticulously researched and beautifully written book shows how new insights into Tunisian history can be gained by bracketing the colonial and making a place for “other chronologies.” This historiographical positioning brings a full Mediterranean context back into view, putting the Ottoman empire, law, and Tunisian family history onto center stage. -- Benjamin Claude Brower, author of
A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of French Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902The death documents of this post-colonial Ottoman Tunisian elite settler in Tuscany were a dense knot of financial, intellectual, legal, and kinship ties. Oualdi untangles this net before our eyes, revealing a figure who bridged the Mediterranean in a direction that colonialism tells us was not possible: from south to north. -- Will Hanley, author of
Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in AlexandriaOualdi has much to offer his readers by bringing insights from French and Arabic historiography on Tunisia’s Ottoman and colonial past to an English readership, revealing the entangled nature of Tunisian, North African, French, Italian, and Ottoman histories. Following the life (and afterlife) of a slave turned minister,
A Slave Between Empires is rich with new insights and tantalizing details, and Oualdi has clearly scoured many archives to put this together. -- Amy Kallander, author of
Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman TunisiaOualdi has set out “an entangled history” indeed, one worthy of non-academic treatments, if not novels or a movie or two. * Asian Review of Books *
At a time when Turkey and France are jockeying for influence across the Mediterranean from Cyprus to Libya,
A Slave Between Empires has an odd contemporary relevance. * Current History *
The approach taken to an individual life, traversing imperial borders and religious and social worlds, will also be of great methodological interest to those trying to situate new global histories between empires. * Journal of British Studies *
An impressive study. * Sehepunkte *
A vibrant and thought-provoking examination of the people and events in the region of North Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. * Middle Ground Journal *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: A North African Land and Its Ottoman and Colonial Legacies
1. Husayn: An Ottoman Reformer and a Product of Ottoman Reforms
2. Husayn’s Wealth: How to Build and Protect an Estate Between Empires
3. A World of “Affairs”: Litigation as a Tool for Negotiation
4. The Diplomatic Conflicts Over Husayn’s Estate: Ottoman and Italian Interventions
5. Sovereigns, Mothers, and Creditors: The Agency of Husayn’s Potential Heirs
6. Husayn’s Legacies in Colonial Tunisia: An Epilogue
Conclusion: Local and Imperial Histories of the Maghreb
Select Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
