#your excellency think about the beautiful metallurgic deposits

[fatehbaz]

There was a line in the sand - a border, or rather the idea of one. This idea described a frontier, delineated a boundary. In 1852 transgression of this idea and the sovereignty it represented angered Bey Ahmad of Tunis. [...] [T]he government of [French] Algeria accelerated plans to undertake a tour of the frontier [...], to define the spatial limits of French power. [...] [T]he bey wrote a letter to the French consul [...]. The two powers had to work together, each having representatives present [...]. The response came from Paris. The prince-president (Napoleon III), the minister of foreign affairs, and the minister of war all agreed with the bey [...]. The barrier was real, the border inviolable, the idea held. So the bey and the president understood each other. [...] [But] [a]n internal letter [among French officials] explained the thinking behind the military's territorial violation: [...] it was necessary to "display clearly [the French military's] position on the frontier and to act to take possession of the country that we have claimed." This was important even if the act itself exposed the border's unreality. [...]

In such a way, belief in the border exposes a kind of irrationality at the heart of modern state power: the very basis of modern sovereign claims - territoriality - was an abstraction that only distance from the influence of local events could make appear real. The idea of the frontier that the French president and the Tunisian bey shared was the modern belief in the reality of borders, of their existence as barriers. That these two shared this idea tells us something about the appearance of modernity in the Maghrib in the late nineteenth century. [...]

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Anxiety about the situation along the frontier was manifested not only in French military sorties and "inspection tours": we can also see it in the positioning in the colonial imaginary of migratory and transhumant populations as anti-modern. Seemingly unconcerned with national boundaries [...], these populations were cast as mere violent holdovers of the "traditional" practices of the Maghrib, soon to disappear before the progress of modern social organization and governmentality. [...] The [French] minister of war held that the government of Algeria should secure the border because unrest was "hampering the industrial development of the La Calle region and slowing the normalization of our authority among the tribes [...]." His reasoning did not necessarily reflect that of the cultivators who were accustomed to moving to lands on either side of the line drawn by Randon or moving their flocks within a generally elastic space. The dictates of imperial economics (i.e., mineral exploitation) were here locked into a territorially-bound sense [...].

The government of Algeria - which was at that point, legally in any case, the French government - [...] based claims to sovereignty on the ability to control violence [...]. This [French military] officer led soldiers across the northern Algerian-Tunisian border, stopping to talk with all the groups [...]. The minister of war wrote that, while this action was indeed problematic on the diplomatic scale, it was necessary and right on the local scale. "Our administrative interests cannot be left outstanding - our dignity itself is at stake in giving to the tribes evidence of our [power] [...]" and "this operation is necessary to tranquilize our tribes and organize the means of repression." [...] In effect, the local scale necessitated a processional display of state power [and literal physical violence] to ensure its claims, while the international scale necessitated the abstraction of fixed and territorialized power. [...]

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[I]n the winter of 1876 [...], [t]he territorialized nation-state was finally achieved. This rosy picture did not last. Even after the French occupation of Tunis [...] in 1881, belief in the border failed to spread to the scale of local life and governance. [...] Certainly the border, even a border that had largely been agreed upon and understood at the level of high politics for nearly three centuries, was a problematic and vexed ides. Only those removed from its immediate reality seemed to believe in it.

Despite the continued efforts of those apostles of modernity on the Algerian side of the border, the border was never as fixed as they thought it should be. Concerned reports about it continued [...] to fill the saddlebags of imperial postmen well after the establishment of the protectorate in Tunisia. The “realness” of the border was a matter of both material reality and socio-juridical imagination. The border between the Regency’s tribes and those of the dey in Constantine, for instance, had existed (more or less) since the 1500s. But these were obviously different conceptions of what made the border. [...] The border would be “real” for these French officials when groups on either side stopped transgressing the imaginary barrier the Regency and France had erected. Vexing to the French imperial imagination was the apparent breakdown of the concept of state power based on maintaining the monopoly of violence in a certain region: “We reserve to ourselves the right to penetrate into the territory of neighboring tribes that breach the interests of our tribes or territory and to punish them emphatically.” [...] Beyond informing people of their legibility to the state vis-à-vis taxes, the point of the multiple tours, meetings, raids, and trades [...] was thus to show off the power of the French war-making apparatus in order to claim for it sole legitimacy. [...] [T]he land claimed by the French becomes practical, modern territory only when the people living there accept the claims to sovereign authority of the French - not before. There is effectively no border until the people believe there is and act on that belief. [...]

That this type of thinking was not the special purview of the “recalcitrant” tribes themselves is reflected in a letter a French advisor to the Tunisian army wrote to the French minister of war in 1862: “Some have wanted to have a frontier delimination between the Regency [of Tunis] and Algeria; it is necessary, as Your Excellency has recognized, that the frontier remain vague. Let us not commit the present, let us reserve for ourselves the future, and let us not raise barriers between the rich valley of the Medjerdah, and the metallurgic deposits and the cork forests of the Tabarka mountains, [and Algeria].” From his vantage point on the ground, this officer saw a different relationship between the border and the territorial position of sovereignty than did the president or bey. The importance of the imperial project was better reflected in not securing a border. But this understanding did not make its way up the chain of command. There a "real" border was necessary.

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All text above by: Brock Cutler. "Believe in the Border, or, How to Make Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century Maghrib". Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60. 2017. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]