Arabs (22 page)

 

With the bankruptcies in Tunis, Istanbul, and Cairo, the Middle East reform initiatives had gone full circle. What had begun as movements to strengthen the Ottomans and their vassal states from outside interference had instead opened the Middle Eastern states to increasing European domination. Over time, informal imperial control hardened into direct colonial rule, as the whole of North Africa was partitioned and distributed among the growing empires of Europe.

CHAPTER 5

Though the colonization of Arab lands was built on foundations laid earlier, European imperialism in the Arab world began in earnest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As was noted in the previous chapter, both the spread of European technology and the financing that allowed cash-strapped Middle Eastern governments to spend beyond their means enabled the European powers to extend their influence across Ottoman domains from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. Bankruptcy in the Ottoman Empire and its autonomous provinces in North Africa lowered the barriers to more direct forms of European control.

As Europe’s interests in North Africa intensified, their incentives for outright imperial rule expanded accordingly. By the 1880s the European powers were more concerned about upholding their national interests in the Southern Mediterranean than to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The “self-denying protocol” of 1840 was a dead letter, and the partition of North Africa followed. France extended its rule over Tunisia in 1881, Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, Italy seized Libya in 1911, and the European powers consented to a Franco-Spanish protectorate over Morocco (the only North African state to have preserved its independence from Ottoman rule) in 1912. Before the outbreak of the First World War, the whole of North Africa had passed under direct European rule.

There were a number of reasons why European imperialism in the Arab world began in North Africa. The Arab provinces of North Africa were far from the Ottoman center of gravity and, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had become increasingly autonomous of Istanbul. The Arab provinces of the Middle East—in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula—were closer to the Ottoman heartland and came to be more closely integrated to Istanbul’s rule in the course of the nineteenth-century reforms (1839–1876). Places like Tunisia and Egypt had become vassal states of the Ottoman Empire, whereas Damascus and Aleppo were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The very developments that enhanced the autonomy of North Africa—the emergence of distinct ruling families heading increasingly independent governments—left those states more vulnerable to European occupation.

 

THE ARAB WORLD IN THE IMPERIAL AGE, 1830-1948

Moreover, the states of North Africa were relatively close to Southern Europe—to Spain, France, and Italy in particular. Proximity had drawn these states closer to Europe’s ambit: for military aid, industrial goods, and finance capital. North Africa was the Ottoman Empire’s distant frontier but Europe’s near abroad. As Europe expanded beyond its own frontiers in a new wave of imperialism at the close of the nineteenth century, it was only natural that it should turn to its near abroad first.

There was one other reason why the states of Europe colonized North Africa: precedent. The long-standing French presence in Algeria set an important precedent for French ambitions in Tunisia and Morocco and gave Italy grounds to seek imperial satisfaction in Libya. But for the accidents of history that led to the French invasion of Algiers in 1827, the partition of much of North Africa might never have happened.

L
ike Tunisia, the Regency of Algiers was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire and governed by a viceroy who enjoyed great autonomy in both domestic and international affairs. The ruling elites were Turkish military men, recruited from Istanbul and organized into an administrative council, electing their leader, or
dey
, who enjoyed direct relations with the governments of Europe. The sultan in Istanbul formally confirmed the elected dey and claimed a tribute from Algiers. The only Ottoman official posted to Algiers was the Islamic court judge. Otherwise, the sultan’s authority over Algiers was strictly ceremonial.

The deys of Algiers exploited their autonomy to pursue their own commercial and political relations with Europe, independent of Istanbul’s control. Yet without the weight of the Ottoman Empire behind them, the deys had little leverage over their European trade partners. Thus, when the deys provided grain to France on credit—to provision French military campaigns in Italy and Egypt between 1793 and 1798—their repeated pleas to the French government to honor their commitments fell on deaf ears. Decades passed without the French repaying their debts, and the deal became a growing source of friction between the two states.

By 1827, relations between the Algerian dey, Husayn Pasha (r. 1818–1830), and the French consul, Pierre Deval, reached the breaking point after the French government failed to respond to the dey’s letters demanding repayment of the grain
debt. In a private conversation with Deval, Husayn Pasha lost his temper and struck the French consul with his fly whisk.

In their reports to their respective superiors, Deval and Husayn Pasha gave very different accounts of their meeting.
¹
To the French minister of foreign affairs, Deval claimed he found the dey in an agitated state when he called on Huseyn Pasha in his palace.

“Why has your Minister not replied to the letter I wrote him?” Husayn Pasha demanded. Deval claimed he replied in a measured tone: “I had the honour to bring you the reply as soon as I received it.” At this point, Deval reported, the dey erupted:

“‘Why did he not reply directly? Am I a clodhopper, a man of mud, a barefoot tramp? You are a wicked man, an infidel, an idolater!’ Then, rising from his seat, with the handle of his fly-whisk, he gave me three violent blows about the body and told me to retire.”

The Arab fly whisk is made from a knot of hair from a horse’s tail, attached to a handle. It is not immediately evident how one might deal “violent blows” with such an instrument. However, the French Consul was adamant that French honor was at stake. He concluded his report to the minister: “If Your Excellency does not wish to give this affair the severe and well-publicized attention that it merits, he should at least be willing to grant me permission to retire with leave.”

In his own report to the Ottoman grand vezir, the dey acknowledged striking Deval with his whisk, though only after provocation. He explained that he had written three times to the French asking for repayment, without receiving the courtesy of a reply. He raised the matter with the French consul “in courteous terms and with a deliberately friendly attitude.”

Whatever the truth of these two irreconcilable accounts, it was clear that by 1827 the French had no intention of honoring debts incurred three decades earlier—and the Algerians were unwilling to forgive the debts. After the fly-whisk incident, the French demanded reparations for the damage done to France’s honor while the Algerians continued to insist on repayment of France’s long-overdue debts. The dispute
left the two sides on a collision course in which the Algerians refused to back down, and the French could not afford to.

The French responded to the dey’s “insults” with ultimatums. They demanded the Algerians make a gun salute to the French flag, which the dey refused. The French then imposed a blockade on the port of Algiers, which did more harm to the merchants of Marseilles than to Algerian corsairs, whose swift ships easily slipped through the over-extended French line of ships enforcing the blockade. After a two-year stalemate, the French sought a face-saving solution and dispatched a diplomat to negotiate with the dey. The Algerians fired a few cannon at his flagship, preventing the negotiator from even disembarking. The Algerian imbroglio was turning into a major embarrassment for the beleaguered government of French king Charles X.

Charles X (r. 1824–1830) faced serious opposition at home as well as abroad. His efforts to restore some absolutism to the French monarchy, turning the clock back to pre-Revolutionary times, reached a crisis when he suspended the Constitutional Charter (described at length by Rifa’a al-Tahtawi in his study of France) in 1830. His premiere, Prince Jules de Polignac, suggested that a foreign adventure might rally public opinion behind the throne. Polignac recognized that France had to overcome opposition from the other European powers—Britain in particular—to a measure that inevitably would alter the balance of power in the Mediterranean. He dispatched ambassadors to London and the other courts of Europe to set out the objectives of the impending invasion of Algeria as the complete destruction of piracy, the total abolition of Christian slavery, and the termination of all tribute paid by European states to the Regency to ensure the security of their shipping. Polignac hoped to gain international support for the French invasion of Algiers by claiming to uphold such universal interests.

In June 1830 a French expedition of 37,000 troops landed to the west of Algiers. It quickly defeated the dey’s forces and entered the city of Algiers on July 4. This triumph was not enough to save Charles X, who was overthrown later that month in the July Revolution of 1830. The Egyptian scholar Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, who was living in Paris at the time, noted how the French showed far more satisfaction at overthrowing an unpopular king than in the conquest of Algiers, “which,” he argued, “was based on specious motives.”
²
Nonetheless, the French remained in possession of Algiers well after the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, one of the few enduring legacies of the undistinguished reign of Charles X. Husayn Pasha’s capitulation on July 5, 1830, brought to a close three centuries of Ottoman history and marked the beginning of 132 years of French rule over Algeria.

 

Although the French had defeated the Turkish garrison at Algiers, this victory did not give them control over the country at large. So long as the French confined their ambitions to the main coastal towns, they were unlikely to encounter much organized
resistance in Algeria. European powers had long held strategic ports on the North African coast. The French occupation of Algiers in July 1830 and of Oran in January 1831 was not so different from the Spanish position in their
presidios
in Ceuta and Melilla (which remain Spanish possessions today). But the French were not satisfied with holding the main towns. They hoped to colonize the fertile coastal plain with French settlers in a policy known as “restrained occupation.” It was a policy that inevitably would alienate the indigenous people of Algeria.