A killing in Tripoli (1843): principle and contingency and personal diplomacy
Abstract This article examines the trial in 1843 and 1844 of Giovanni Battista Caruana, a Maltese, for the murder of a Jew in Tripoli. He was found guilty but was not executed because the victim's impoverished wife agreed to accept compensation. The case took place against the background of the British government's increasing impatience with what they saw as uncontrolled Maltese and Ionian communities, leading to the enactment of the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1844. It also demonstrated the importance of the individual authority of the Consul, Hanmer Warrington, and the extent to which consuls' personal objectives and opinions weighed on the development of British policy, and the extent to which Warrington's concern to uphold the law coincided with that of the Pasha of Tripoli, so that the case led to a close identification between the local government and the British consular representative.
The Convict Peace: The Imperial Context of the 1833 Convict Revolt at Castle Forbes
ABSTRACT This paper places a well-known controversy about the jurisdiction of nineteenth-century magistrates in its imperial context. In particular it shows how and why conversations about convict management and the jurisdiction of magistrates in New South Wales were interwoven with contemporary conversations about the law and government of slavery. In 1833 in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt, convicts, administrators and magistrates in New South Wales borrowed the language of disorder and good governance from debates about the amelioration of slavery because those languages made sense of an experience that was both deeply local and shared. Convicts were not slaves; but masters, magistrates, convicts and slaves all experienced substantial shifts in the relations among empire, colonial states and local institutions of governance that redefined their privileges and obligations in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The contest between magistrate-masters and convicts in the aftermath of the Castle Forbes Revolt thus demonstrates the importance of exploring the legal transformation of empire through interconnected histories of everyday order.
Les Troupes Spéciales: Religious and Ethnic Recruitment, 1916–46
In 1918 British and French troops occupied the Arabic-speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire and by 1920 had expelled the Arab nationalist regime in Damascus and divided the area between themselves as they had agreed to do in the Sykes–Picot treaty signed two years earlier. Out of their share, the French created in 1920 the two Mandates of Syria and Lebanon with their own locally recruited military organization, first called the Syrian Legion and later the Troupes Spéciales, which were combined for both countries.