Chair: Akshaj Awasthi

Riwan Bellour, Oxford

Protection without Foreignness: The Algerian Category in Nineteenth-Century Tunis

Consular protection in the Ottoman Mediterranean was ordinarily for foreigners, and ordinarily for non-Muslims. Between December 1845 and November 1858, the French consulate in Tunis entered 1,646 people in a register of Algerians, in two confessional series (1,272 Muslims, 374 Jews). Many were not foreign in any social sense. The register lists men born in Tunis of Algerian parents, others settled in the beylik for two decades, and a working population rather than the merchant elite for whom berats and protection had been designed.

The category this produced, the “Algerian of the consulate”, was not a proto-nationality. It was a working model of non-territorial sovereignty.

Three claims follow. First, the category had several authors: ministerial circulars, consular improvisation, claimants arriving through their guilds and beylical officials. Second, being part of the category was continuously negotiated rather than assigned: the register’s erasures and marginal annotations record men struck off for having placed themselves under the Bey’s jurisdiction. Third, the category was structurally disruptive of the beylical order, extending fiscal and jurisdictional exemption to a Muslim and Jewish population that local authorities regarded as their own subjects, and forcing the question of who counted as its subject.

In Ottoman eyes the Regency of Algiers remained an unrelinquished province. The register is a site where two imperial claims to the same bodies collided on the soil of a third polity, the Ottoman Province of Tunis, whose own standing within the empire was contested. Read thus, the Algerian category was not a way-station on the road to national sovereignty but one of its Mediterranean alternatives: a status that had to be claimed, proved before a chancellery, and could be struck out of the register at any time.

Martin Dixon, Oxford

Iranian migrants in the Bukharan Emirate, 1780s-1850s

Migrants have always been part of the political economy of invading states. Pre-existing migrant communities are co-opted to weaken the dominant order. Or invasion itself generates refugees from the social entropy caused by war. Then there is a stratagem that crops up in global history: the physical transfer of a large population from the conquered territory to the heartland. 

In this paper, I describe the forced transit of much of the Shiʿi population of Merv to Sunni Bukhara by a new and militant state. Then I analyse how far it was really militant, given the extent to which these and other 'Iranian' (i.e. Shiʿi) migrants became integrated not only in society, but in the political order. Even those who were enslaved came to form an élite group of ghulām bureaucrats, who occupied the most powerful offices in Bukhara. This episode in the contraction of historical Iran cannot be explained by a sectarian paradigm; it is a case of statesmen consciously acting to diversify, rather than simplify their populations in order to rule. 

Furthermore, it is an account of how the flow of people across borders informed state formation on the eve of Russian imperialism. The paper concludes by contrasting Bukhara's encounter with Iran and its initial encounter with Russia.