Julia Clancy-Smith's study of Tunis and its wider Mediterranean context is populated by the migrants who traveled through the port and city during the nineteenth century, some of whom settled permanently as part of Tunis' multi-layered society. They came as court officials and servants of the Husaynid beys, subsistence workers from southern Europe and the Mediterranean islands, technical and scientific experts moving from one modernization project to another, consular officers representing various European powers, bourgeois Jewish families, French missionaries, Muslims fleeing the colonization of Algeria, Italian political exiles, and more. Clancy-Smith shows that each of these groups defies easy categorizations, which fail to capture the multiple identities and dislocations experienced by individuals and families. To take one example, early missionaries in Tunis were Catholic women, some of them European, but others North African; expelled from French Algeria due to Catholic infighting, the order was welcomed and supported by a Muslim ruler, the Husaynid bey of Tunisia. Divisions and segregation between religious, national, ethnic, and professional communities are often overdrawn in the scholarly literature, though as Clancy-Smith shows it was not all harmony either.

The author investigates how Tunisians and in particular the Husaynid dynasty and European consuls viewed, and interacted and coped with immigrants from all social backgrounds. The book is divided into topical chapters that tackle theoretical problems in migration history and the scholarship of empire. The importance of geography and location, of identities of place rather than of religion and nationality, is highlighted throughout, as are the crucial ways in which gender made a difference in the experience of migrants and settlers. The first two chapters introduce the reader to the social geography of the port and city of Tunis and the history of migration in the Mediterranean. The next three focus on work: employment in the Husaynid household, ranging from military leadership to domestic service, as well as in consulates and other elite homes, could bring not only wealth but also social integration through patronage and marriage. It was also possible to make a living through petty commerce, coffeehouses and taverns, and if all else failed, charity, though indigence often led to repatriation or expulsion. Finally, the sea offered plenty of opportunities for contraband and other illicit activities, which were often combined with legal, family-run trades.

A compelling chapter on legal pluralism analyzes how conflicting jurisdictions between the bey, the European consulates, and the Ottoman overlord gave rise to “forum shopping” and “protection switching.” People could, to some extent, and especially when they were displaced, make choices about whose protection and justice to invoke. For some, especially women seeking to escape unhappy marriages, religious conversion became a form of border crossing, a change of jurisdiction. Clancy-Smith also shows how beys and consuls when settling minor squabbles responded to the international climate, as European states struggled for influence in the Husaynid state and the wider Mediterranean. But she is careful not to overstate European control over events, since the imperial centers in London, Paris, and Istanbul were often uninterested in their consuls' tribulations, and even in the era of the Protectorate, French power was hemmed in by pre-existing relationships and agreements between beys, consuls, missionaries, migrants, and locals.

The final three chapters challenge the idea of a sharp break between “precolonial” and “colonial” periods, and show that while European powers already enjoyed much influence in pre-colonial times, even in the colonial era Europeans continued to adapt to local culture. Examples include a Tunisian bathing culture that extended to the elite Euro-Mediterranean expatriate community. Throughout, Clancy-Smith weaves “fleeting facts, ostensibly trivial events, petty detail, the mundane” (p. 9) into a “multisided historical ethnography.” Inevitably, the snippets of life-stories leave many questions open, but the author, acknowledging that this book is an “initial study,” conjectures possible outcomes and offers different interpretations based on her profound knowledge of the nineteenth-century Mediterranean. A weakness of the study is that at times footnotes seem to bear no obvious relationship to the claims in the text. In the epilogue, Clancy-Smith doubts a wider sense of “Mediterranean-ness” existed—one that extended from the agents of Mediterranean connectivity to the many communities that confronted them. She hopes, however, that echoes of past migrations in the present will lessen the plight of North African migrants today.