Tunisian history, and especially its precolonial history, is often relegated to the margins of prevailing historiographical “centers.” It is the smallest country in the Maghrib, with an arguably less diverse population than its neighbors to the west. In studies of the French Empire, it occupies a decidedly less dramatic place in the history of colonial and settler violence than does Algeria. In scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and its Arab provinces, Tunisia and the Maghrib as a whole are seen as peripheries, rarely if ever fully integrated into the imperial fold. As a result, much Tunisian nationalist scholarship has attempted to trace the roots of its autonomous nature.

Working against the residue of both colonial and nationalist histories of Tunisia, Amy Kallander convincingly plots a trajectory in which the fate of the palace household is bound neither to inevitable colonial rupture nor to a story of exceptional Tunisian autonomy. Rather, Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia builds on the growing and important body of work which sees modern Tunisia as integrally connected to a network of trans-Mediterranean cultural, economic, and political exchange stretching from the Ottoman center and the Near East to Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. In this respect, Kallander's work employs an approach complementary to that of Julia Clancy-Smith's Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010) and Mary Dewhurst Lewis' Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2013).

Kallander argues that to understand Tunisian political and social history in the 18th and 19th centuries one must consider the role of the elite household, and how women were central to its claims to legitimacy. Part I of the book lays out the familial basis—with women at its core—of the bey's hereditary rule in Tunisia. Part II provides a social history of palace life, analyzing the importance of material culture and food to the legitimizing functions of palace ceremonies. Despite their spatial segregation, women were vital to this process, engaging in household politics and rivalries as they worked to strengthen patronage and charity networks across the province. Part III examines how 19th-century transformations impacted the role of women in the Tunisian royal household, from the Tanzimat and nahḍa-era reforms of the bey's budget, to the patriarchal impositions of the French republican family model.

Kallander engages with an impressively diverse array of sources, an approach that is necessary given the uneven and incomplete nature of the relevant bodies of documents. Her analysis of palace budgets and women's waqf records illuminates the most important social and familial aspects of Tunisian governance and patronage. Beyond merely highlighting an example of the “politics of benevolence” well known to scholars of the period, the author demonstrates how certain members often assumed to be marginal to state power—female relatives of the bey, or even domestic slaves—could wield considerable influence in affairs of governance. For example, women such as Mna Ghazalia established awqāf for the improvement of religious and charitable institutions, thereby maintaining control over their inheritance while contributing to dynastic prestige and local patronage networks. By building a garden for Qurʾanic students of the Zaytuna mosques, Mna Ghazalia demonstrated the royal household's magnanimity, employed local workers, engaged in commerce with local suppliers, and provided charity for the poor.

Even when working with sources in which women's active involvement in politics is not clear, the author finds inventive angles from which to analyze their contributions. For example, at first glance, the mid-19th-century reformist texts by Ibn Dhiaf and Khayr al-Din Pasha examined in Chapter 5 deal more with prevailing narratives about elite women than with women's actual role in governance. For Kallander, however, these two components cannot be fully separated. After all, it was women's engagement with state affairs which shaped both the praise and criticism they received from Tunisian statesmen and French commentators, and it was these narratives and representations that, in turn, increasingly circumscribed women's public role in the colonial period.

The final two chapters chart the long 19th century's gradual transformations which caused women to be increasingly relegated to the private and domestic sphere, in keeping with French notions of the republican household (and with the limitations Tunisian reformers placed on the royal family's expenditures). Kallander's approach is thus a delicate one which admirably walks the line between rupture and continuity: she accounts both for the ongoing influence of local and Ottoman household dynamics and for the significant transformations wrought by shifting power relations throughout the Mediterranean. As the argument develops, it becomes clear that the author uses Tunisia, as others such as Julia Clancy-Smith and Mary Lewis have done, to transcend national and colonial boundaries, both geographical and temporal, still prevalent in histories of the Maghrib. In situating Tunisia in the context of global palace household histories from East Asia to Western Europe, her carefully built case is well positioned to demonstrate that these far-flung societies bore remarkable similarities and overlap despite the transformations and inequities usually associated with the long 19th century.

For Kallander, this period reveals increasingly dramatic shifts in paternalistic representations of the roles of Tunisian women. Between French conceptions of the woman's domestic role and related Orientalist tropes about scheming and lecherous harem women, and Tunisian reformers' limitations on the expenditures and powers of the bey's household, Kallander concludes that “while women were able to contribute to the economic and political strength of the ruling family, their actions did not shake its patriarchal foundations” (p. 173).

Kallander's work also raises fruitful directions for further research. For scholars of the 20th century, the author's focus on consumption patterns and elite patronage could open the way for fascinating analyses of Tunisia's tumultuous 1920s and 1930s, which witnessed the transition to mass politics and nationalist movements. How were elite and palace household women involved in these movements? To build on related Egyptian case studies written by Beth Baron (2005), Lisa Pollard (2005), and Nancy Reynolds (2012), among others, how did the shifting public role of women interact with images and representations of women, whether as mothers of the nation, targets for reform, or threats to the paternalistic order?

Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia is a nuanced, well-written, and intriguing analysis of diverse and underutilized documents that will be extremely useful to advanced undergraduates and graduate students studying modern Mediterranean societies. Moreover, scholars with a wide variety of interests, from social, diplomatic, and gender history to material culture and consumption will find in Kallander's work insightful and alternative approaches to the study of North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and French imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries.