Sovereignty Across Empires: France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Imperial Struggle over Tunis (ca. 1830–1920)

Abstract

“Sovereignty Across Empires" examines the inter-imperial dispute which opposed France and the Ottoman Empire over the sovereignty status of Tunis throughout the nineteenth century. After they conquered Algiers in 1830, the French sought to extend their imperial influence eastward, treating Tunis as a sovereign kingdom in order to sever it from the global politics of the so-called “Eastern Question.” From the Ottoman point of view, however, Tunis was an imperial province since the late sixteenth century, albeit one led autonomously by the governors of the Husaynid dynasty, known as the Beys. Was Tunis a sovereign kingdom or an Ottoman province? For nearly a century, Ottoman and French statesmen went to great lengths in order to depict Tunis in a way that was consonant with the imperial policy of their respective governments. That these positions were mutually exclusive gave way to a great deal of legal confusion and frequent diplomatic conflicts between the two governments. The dissertation follows this dispute as it unfolded on several fronts. It argues that the French-Ottoman disagreement regarding the status of the Tunisian state gave rise to more or less implicit theoretical arguments about how to recognize a sovereign state and what the markers of state sovereignty ought to be. Ultimately, it shows that the rivalry between France and the Ottoman Empire became about the nature of sovereignty itself, at a time when legal ideas about state sovereignty and its attributes were still in flux and had yet to acquire the universal quality we recognise in them in international law today.