Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic Order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1881–1935

In a letter dated November 1883, Paul Cambon, the resident minister of France's protectorate of Tunisia, confided to his wife that if the Capitulations aren't suppressed, they'll find themselves backed into a corner. These Capitulations--similar to legal arrangements prevailing in the Ottoman Empire, of which Tunisia had been a semiautonomous province until the French conquest in 1881--granted a number of legal immunities to foreign nationals and holders of foreign patents of protection. Lewis explains why French colonial governance in Tunisia shifted in nature, from an insistence that Tunisia was a foreign territory under the sovereignty of the bey to a claim that France shared in the bey's sovereignty and that the territory itself was in some way French. She accounts for this transformation by reconstructing the connection between international relations in the Mediterranean basin and the social uses of the law in Tunisia during the first fifty years of protectorate rule.