Mediterraneans North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 18001900 [Paperback]

Today labor migrants mostly move south to north across the Mediterranean. Yet in the nineteenth century thousands of Europeans and others moved south to North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant. This study of a dynamic borderland, the Tunis region, offers the fullest picture to date of the Mediterranean before, and during, French colonialism. In a vibrant examination of people in motion, Julia A. Clancy-Smith tells the story of countless migrants, travelers, and adventurers who traversed the Mediterranean, changing it forever. Who were they? Why did they leave home? What awaited them in North Africa? And most importantly, how did an Arab-Muslim state and society make room for the newcomers? Combining fleeting facts, tales of success and failure, and vivid cameos, the book gives a groundbreaking view of one of the principal ways that the Mediterranean became modern.

Julia Clancy-Smith is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. She is the author of the award-winningRebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters(UC Press), among other books.

From the anonymous Sicilian fishermen to Maltese coachmen, smugglers and burglars, from Sardinian female servants to French women missionaries and Ottoman future statesmen, Julia Clancy-Smith draws a lively, poetic, portrait of the thousands of migrants who came to Tunisia in the 19th century, changing its space, rhythms and sounds long before the advent of French colonial rule: An ethnographic journey through 19th-century Tunisia that beautifully captures the spirit of the place. Lucette Valensi, author ofThe Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte

In this meticulously researched, beautifully written work, Clancy-Smith has used an extraordinary array of sources from administrative and legal documents to personal letters and testimonies to bring the nineteenth-century Mediterranean world alive. Covering a wide range of situations from domelS(