Sites of Servitude: Comparative Slavery, Difference, and Belonging in Tunis, 1736-1891

Abstract

This dissertation traces a shift in attitudes about enslaveability in Tunis, from one where European Christians could be enslaved, to one in which Blackness became the principal category justifying servitude. To do so, I compare the socioeconomic trajectories of two groups of enslaved people and their descendants in Tunis. The first group, Ṭabarqīn, were individuals presumed to have come to the Tunisian island and trading post, Ṭabarqah, from the northern Mediterranean. The second group, Shuwāshin (sing: Shūshān) were dark-skinned individuals from the southern regions of Ottoman Tunis, with presumed geographic origins in western and central Africa. In 1741, the Ṭabarqīn were enslaved by the Tunisian government and transported to the capital of Tunis. A little over fifty years later, descendants of Ṭabarqīn who had been claimed as subjects of Christian kingdoms were captured, enslaved, and conveyed to Tunis. Yet within a relatively quick period of five years, virtually all captives were freed. Why was the enslavement of the Ṭabarqīn no longer considered tolerable? I contend that this shift occurred because of a convergence of racial ideologies among African and European elites. By the mid-19th century, the Ṭabarqīn had shed the social and material traces of their former servitude through access to European and Tunisian social and legal protection. Meanwhile, the term Shūshān shifted from a family name to a primary marker of Blackness and servitude. This change contributed to rendering such individuals as forever foreigners to the region. Ultimately, I show that ideologies of racialization informed social hierarchies, socioeconomic opportunity, and state formation in the northern regions of the African continent decades prior to formal French colonial occupation in 1881.