“The Mediterranean”, Fernand Braudel famously wrote, “speaks with many voices”. Julia Clancy-Smith has listened closely to the whisperings of nineteenth-century migrants across the “inner sea”, writing an important new history of the Mediterranean and Maghrib. Like Braudel, Clancy-Smith is interested in the movement of peoples and ideas around the region, but instead of stressing the physical characteristics of the Mediterranean over the longue durée, Clancy-Smith focuses first on people, tracking migrants into Tunis during the nineteenth century, investigating their motivations for moving and the responses of Tunisians to these newcomers. This orientation – a regional history “from below” – reveals the complexity of not only migrations around the sea, but also how the intermingling of diverse peoples on the southern shores of the Mediterranean created a unique regional culture.
Mediterraneans continues Clancy-Smith's ongoing project of examining North Africa as a crossroads of exchange for people, goods, ideas and capital; that is, the region as an “economic conduit and cultural mediator” and a “unique place where worlds meet”, as she wrote in the introduction to her edited volume North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World in 2001 (New York: Frank Cass, p. 1). The present work embraces this view, and represents one of the finest attempts to understand who made up that unique land of cultural mediation and economic exchange, and how their multiple histories defined the central Mediterranean corridor.
The focus on migration serves to “track from ‘below’ the grand rhythms” of the period, as Clancy-Smith writes, but also allows her to challenge what she calls the “comfortable binaries or taxonomies” that come with a more traditional narrative of empires and nations (pp. 4, 11). The “impoverished island people” – Sicilians, Maltese, Corsicans – arriving in La Goulette and Tunis, confronted and challenged physical, social, and cultural frontiers; the way Clancy-Smith presents these borders highlights their fluid and constructed nature during this period (p. 3). The rough century that comprises the study overlaps the pre/colonial divide – not only in Tunisia but Algeria as well – and allows us to rethink what those ruptures meant for the people on the ground. Divisions among people were important, but so were the ways in which those divisions disappeared or shifted, and Clancy-Smith's investigation into the way that the multitude of migrants and “cultural creoles” in Tunis made sense of diverse social situations (and in the process created new cultures) is an original and important contribution (p. 7). Formal imperial rule falls away as the most important aspect of the nineteenth century (and the creator of modernity), in favour of more local responses to the challenges brought by a continued influx of diverse people and their varied problems throughout the century.
Mediterraneans consists of nine chapters, each examining a different thematic element in the lives and stories of migrants to and from Tunis and its regions in the nineteenth century. The organization of the book follows the migrants as they arrive at Tunis (1) and we hear about their lives and travels (2). Then we see them search for work (3, 4, 5) and navigate the maze of legal jurisdictions in the city and surrounding areas (6). Clancy-Smith includes the movements of missionaries and medicine and their relationship to nations and empires (7), elite medical tourism and household politics (8), and finally the creation of a Mediterranean-wide cultural system (9). A thematic approach such as this runs the risk of devolving into disparate parts; Clancy-Smith largely succeeds, however, in creating a “latticework of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal linkages that capture the realities and multiple displacements” of migration in the nineteenth century (16).
One of the more impressive parts of the study is the way in which Clancy-Smith takes up the varied decisions that led people to migrate. In particular she suggests that the conquest and colonization of Algeria was the main motor for migrants not only from what would become Algeria, but also from places further afield, such as Lebanon. While acknowledging that quantification is difficult if not impossible for these disparate migrations, Clancy-Smith convincingly argues that the West–East axis of migration that largely defined the period before the nineteenth century gave way to a new, or at least increasingly important, North–South axis after the re-orientation of second-wave French imperialism in the Maghrib. This new axis, while lubricated by the French interests in North Africa, intensified along an older route, the “central-Mediterranean corridor” that had been important for centuries – the Italian peninsula, Sicily, Malta, and Tunis. The focus on migration as a way to investigate changes in the nineteenth century is an innovative way to challenge traditional geographies and chronologies defined by colonialism.
There is little doubt that Mediterraneans will become a standard for historical scholarship about the Maghrib and the Mediterranean. In addition to the broad research that Clancy-Smith has undertaken (Tunisian, French, American and British archives, consular and other official reports, newspapers, journals, published travel accounts, court records and letters), the writing is engaging and clear. Clancy-Smith is master of the telling detail – whether it is the reason Sicilians did not take to the potato (it encouraged licentiousness, p. 81), the way thieves communicated in the Tunis night (a specific whistle for each gang, p. 189), why a shop owner was robbed (he was “having a drink and making love with the Spanish girl Annetta”, p. 137), or the fate of the pages of English-language Bibles distributed in Tunis (they “usually served to wrap up meat or vegetables”, p. 265). Mediterraneans is an important study not only for those interested in Mediterranean and Maghribi history, but for anyone interested in the history of migration around the Mediterranean basin.
