Events

What Can Tunisian History Teach Us About the Ottoman Empire?

For the better part of the twentieth century, modern historiographies of the Maghrib and the Ottoman Empire have remained impervious to one another. Ottomanists rarely wrote about North Africa beyond Egypt. This lack of interest found its roots in the implicitly notion that the garp ocakları (lit. “Western provinces” – Algiers, Tunis, and Tripolitania) were not ‘real’ provinces of the empire. That they were at the empire's (administrative, geographic) periphery seemed to justify their peripheral place in the historiography. In recent years, historians of the Maghrib have begun to challenge this state of affairs. Bringing the region into the Ottoman fold, they have started to write an Ottoman history of North Africa. Taking the Ottoman autonomous province of Tunis as a case-study, this panel seeks to flip this question around: it asks what can Maghrib history teach us about the history of the Ottoman Empire? 

Panelists: M’hamed Oualdi (Science Po Paris), Youssef Ben Ismail (Columbia University)

With comments and reflections from Julia Clancy-Smith (The University of Arizona).