Conceded land in Colonial Tunisia: A study of French settlements policy (1860–1900)

Promotionsvorhaben

This doctoral project is a historical study of Tunisia between 1860 and 1900. It demonstrates that land concessions to corporations by the French state were a central aspect of colonial economic domination. It examines the history of foreign investments, specifically concessions, in the French protectorate of Tunisia. The study examines the archive of property and sovereignty disputes as well as the debates on land reform sparked by the French extraterritorial administrative and jurisdictional control. The project showcases two processes. First, that colonial land reform contributed to expanding the reservoir of grantable land by changing the existing land structure. And second, an extraterritorial governance through public policy favoured foreign corporations as concessionaires. Both French-controlled and public domain land was expanded in Tunisia in order to enable a settlement policy through concession grants. For this purpose, communal land, along with some cases of ‘endowed land’, was categorised as ‘dead’ land and integrated into the public domain. This process resulted in, in all but name, a colonial confiscation of land. The culmination of public domain expansion and land confiscation for the purposes of granting concession was not merely an expansion of territoriality. It strengthened an extraterritorial French presence through the control of the colonial state over land, its resources and the expansion of foreign corporations in the markets of the periphery.