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.
French Intelligence-Gathering in the Syrian Mandate, 1920-40
In the inter-war French Levant political stability proved elusive. Relations between the ruling power, reluctant client governments and the civilian population were always fraught. In French Syria that most misleading of imperial terms, 'pacification', was a more or less constant feature of mandatory rule. It signified a dependence on military force to impose a thin veneer of political and social control. Beneath this, disruptive economic pressures, ethnic rivalries and political violence were endemic. The French high commission in Beirut exercised limited imperial power, lacking the popular consent or the economic wherewithal to consolidate its local authority.' In the Syrian mandate, central themes of factionalized urban nationalist politics, Hashemite-Saudi monarchical rivalry, popular protest and communal rebellion confirmed that French control was never secure. These issues have dominated the historiography of the mandate period. For over 25 years, historians of the inter-war Middle East have debated the origins of Arab nationalism in Syria and neighbouring mandated territories. Until recently, this work has tended to focus on urban Arab elites, the emerging groups of effendiyya functionaries in major administrative centres, and the nature of the intra-Arab conflicts between former Ottoman officials, radical nationalists, tribal shaykhs and the wider urban population. Underlying this debate has been the attempt to trace the ideological distinctiveness of pan-Arabism within Fertile Crescent territories arbitrarily divided into national units by the First World War settlement. Understandably, the bulk of this work has drawn on Arab sources and the papers of the mandatory administrations concerned. A 'missing dimension' within this has been intelligence material gathered by the security agencies of the mandatory powers.2 As explained below, recent French archival releases allow us to fill in this gap. This article draws on these sources to reassess the French image of its political opponents within Syria, and the efforts made to contain them. The essential dichotomy of mandate governance lay between a theoretical long-term commitment to cultivate indigenous government and
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.