Un temps d’ingéniosité. Les missions politiques d’un dignitaire tunisien en Toscane dans les années 1870

Tunis, Paris and Tuscany… Following the journey and the exile of General Husayn, a statesman from the Ottoman province of Tunis in the second half of the 19th century, this essay is inspired by a recent scholarship that aims at writing a history of innovation, which would go beyond a Euro-centric narrative and which would take into account circulations at local and global scales. Husayn’s trajectory shows that new administrative, legal and financial practices were adopted in Tuscany, in a land that was shaped by permanent interactions in the Mediterranean. Moreover, such experimentations were only possible because Husayn and his entourage previously learned in Tunis a new rhetoric and were prepared to new forms of litigations over lands. In such case, mobility and innovation were stimulated in a regional context of continuity between the African and the European shores of the Mediterranean.