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.
Consul Warrington's English Garden
Abstract In 1820, when he had already been six years in Tripoli, the British Consul General, Colonel Hanmer Warrington, acquired a small country estate about a mile beyond the city walls. The move had political implications that he may not have considered or appreciated at the time. But the fact that for a quarter of a century (1820-46) Consul Warrington lived most of the year, and eventually all the year, in this so-called ‘English Garden’ in the oasis-suburb of the menscia brought this influential, larger-than-life figure into much closer, personal contact with local dissident and opposition figures than he would ever have done had he been always shut up in town. In the decade 1832-42 Consul Warrington's official diplomatic position in Tripoli, together with his informal role as doyen of the menscia residents, placed him in a unique position to meddle and mediate in the affairs of the Regency of Tripoli. Such was the case under the semi-independent Karamanli regime and, after 1835, under the Ottoman Turkish administration ruling direcdy from Constantinople. Although the rewards of this risky policy might have been spectacular for Warrington and for Great Britain (and they were nearly achieved in 1842), such success was elusive.
The Compact Minorities and the Syrian State, 1918-45
Historians of the modern Arab world tend to emphasize the elements of novelty and discontinuity that were introduced during the period of the first world war and the ensuing Peace Settlement. This perspective stresses such aspects as the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the formation of the Arab states, the establishment of a direct and indirect European rule and the replacement of traditional loyalties by the supremacy of Arab nationalism. A different perspective underlines the importance of patterns and processes which were transmitted often in a modified form from the late Ottoman period to the Empire's Arab successor states. One such facet of the transition from Ottoman to Arab rule concerns the dominant role played in the government of the new states by members of the notable families, which had played a salient role in Ottoman administration and politics particularly in the nineteenth century.' This element of continuity also had an important impact on the relations between the communities which formed the heterogeneous population of the new states of the Fertile Crescent. Thus, the Arab governments installed in Damascus and Baghdad represented a perpetuation of the Sunni predominance and hegemony of the Ottoman period for the sizeable Shiite communities of Syria and Iraq.2 In this context the relationship which developed between the embryonic Syrian state and the Alawi and Druze communities is of particular interest to the study of both the Ottoman legacy and the issue of inter-communal relations in the Arab successor states of the Ottoman Empire. The two 'compact minorities'3 shared a