Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Although Egypt held the distinction of being the last of the Middle Eastern states to declare bankruptcy, in 1876, the government’s position would have been far stronger had it declared insolvency sooner rather than later. The parallels to the Ottoman case are striking. Between 1862 and 1873, Egypt contracted eight foreign loans, totaling Ј68.5 million ($376.75 million), which, after discounts, left only Ј47 million ($258.5 million), of which some Ј36 million ($198 million) were spent in payments on the principal and interest on the foreign loans. Thus, out of a debt of ?68.5 million ($376.75 million), the government of Egypt gained only about ?11 million ($60.5 million) to invest in its economy. Faced with increased difficulty in raising funds to cover his debts, Khedive Ismail began to sell off the assets of the Egyptian state. He borrowed an estimated Ј28 million ($154 million) domestically. In 1872 the Egyptian government passed a law granting landholders who paid six years of their land tax in advance a future discount of 50 percent on future land taxes in perpetuity. As this desperate measure failed to staunch the hemorrhage, the viceroy sold the government’s shares in the Suez Canal Company to the British government in 1875 for Ј4 million ($22 million)—recouping only one-quarter of the Ј16 million ($88 million) the canal is estimated to have cost the government of Egypt. Stripped of key assets, the treasury tried to postpone payment on the interest of the state’s debt in April 1876. This was tantamount to a declaration of bankruptcy, and the repo men of the international economy descended on Egypt like a plague. Between 1876 and 1880 the finances of Egypt were assumed by European experts from Britain, France, Italy, Austria, and Russia whose primary concern was foreign bondholder interests. As in Istanbul, a formal commission was established. One unrealistic plan followed the next in quick succession, placing terrible burdens on Egyptian taxpayers. With each plan, the foreign economic advisors managed to insinuate themselves deeper into the financial administration of Egypt. European control over Egypt was firmly established in 1878, when two European commissioners were “invited” to join the viceroy’s cabinet. British economist Charles Rivers Wilson was appointed minister of finance, and the Frenchman Ernest-Gabriel de Bligniиres was named minister of public works. Europe got to demonstrate its power over Egypt in 1879, when Khedive Ismail sought to dismiss Wilson and de Bligniиres in a cabinet reshuffle. The governments of Britain and France brought pressure to bear on the Ottoman sultan to dismiss “his” viceroy in Egypt. Overnight, the recalcitrant Ismail was overthrown and replaced by his more compliant son, Tawfiq.³¹

With the bankruptcies in Tunis, Istanbul, and Cairo, the Middle East reform initiatives had gone full circle. What had begun as movements to strengthen the Ottomans and their vassal states from outside interference had instead opened the Middle Eastern states to increasing European domination. Over time, informal imperial control hardened into direct colonial rule, as the whole of North Africa was partitioned and distributed among the growing empires of Europe.

CHAPTER 5

The First Wave of Colonialism: North Africa

Though the colonization of Arab lands was built on foundations laid earlier, European imperialism in the Arab world began in earnest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As was noted in the previous chapter, both the spread of European technology and the financing that allowed cash-strapped Middle Eastern governments to spend beyond their means enabled the European powers to extend their influence across Ottoman domains from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. Bankruptcy in the Ottoman Empire and its autonomous provinces in North Africa lowered the barriers to more direct forms of European control. As Europe’s interests in North Africa intensified, their incentives for outright imperial rule expanded accordingly. By the 1880s the European powers were more concerned about upholding their national interests in the Southern Mediterranean than to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. The “self-denying protocol” of 1840 was a dead letter, and the partition of North Africa followed. France extended its rule over Tunisia in 1881, Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, Italy seized Libya in 1911, and the European powers consented to a Franco-Spanish protectorate over Morocco (the only North African state to have preserved its independence from Ottoman rule) in 1912. Before the outbreak of the First World War, the whole of North Africa had passed under direct European rule. There were a number of reasons why European imperialism in the Arab world began in North Africa. The Arab provinces of North Africa were far from the Ottoman center of gravity and, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had become increasingly autonomous of Istanbul. The Arab provinces of the Middle East—in Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula—were closer to the Ottoman heartland and came to be more closely integrated to Istanbul’s rule in the course of the nineteenth-century reforms (1839–1876). Places like Tunisia and Egypt had become vassal states of the Ottoman Empire, whereas Damascus and Aleppo were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The very developments that enhanced the autonomy of North Africa—the emergence of distinct ruling families heading increasingly independent governments—left those states more vulnerable to European occupation.

THE ARAB WORLD IN THE IMPERIAL AGE, 1830-1948

Moreover, the states of North Africa were relatively close to Southern Europe—to Spain, France, and Italy in particular. Proximity had drawn these states closer to Europe’s ambit: for military aid, industrial goods, and finance capital. North Africa was the Ottoman Empire’s distant frontier but Europe’s near abroad. As Europe expanded beyond its own frontiers in a new wave of imperialism at the close of the nineteenth century, it was only natural that it should turn to its near abroad first. There was one other reason why the states of Europe colonized North Africa: precedent. The long-standing French presence in Algeria set an important precedent for French ambitions in Tunisia and Morocco and gave Italy grounds to seek imperial satisfaction in Libya. But for the accidents of history that led to the French invasion of Algiers in 1827, the partition of much of North Africa might never have happened.

Like Tunisia, the Regency of Algiers was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire and governed by a viceroy who enjoyed great autonomy in both domestic and international affairs. The ruling elites were Turkish military men, recruited from Istanbul and organized into an administrative council, electing their leader, or dey, who enjoyed direct relations with the governments of Europe. The sultan in Istanbul formally confirmed the elected dey and claimed a tribute from Algiers. The only Ottoman official posted to Algiers was the Islamic court judge. Otherwise, the sultan’s authority over Algiers was strictly ceremonial. The deys of Algiers exploited their autonomy to pursue their own commercial and political relations with Europe, independent of Istanbul’s control. Yet without the weight of the Ottoman Empire behind them, the deys had little leverage over their European trade partners. Thus, when the deys provided grain to France on credit—to provision French military campaigns in Italy and Egypt between 1793 and 1798—their repeated pleas to the French government to honor their commitments fell on deaf ears. Decades passed without the French repaying their debts, and the deal became a growing source of friction between the two states. By 1827, relations between the Algerian dey, Husayn Pasha (r. 1818–1830), and the French consul, Pierre Deval, reached the breaking point after the French government failed to respond to the dey’s letters demanding repayment of the grain debt. In a private conversation with Deval, Husayn Pasha lost his temper and struck the French consul with his fly whisk. In their reports to their respective superiors, Deval and Husayn Pasha gave very different accounts of their meeting.¹ To the French minister of foreign affairs, Deval claimed he found the dey in an agitated state when he called on Huseyn Pasha in his palace. “Why has your Minister not replied to the letter I wrote him?” Husayn Pasha demanded. Deval claimed he replied in a measured tone: “I had the honour to bring you the reply as soon as I received it.” At this point, Deval reported, the dey erupted: “‘Why did he not reply directly? Am I a clodhopper, a man of mud, a barefoot tramp? You are a wicked man, an infidel, an idolater!’ Then, rising from his seat, with the handle of his fly-whisk, he gave me three violent blows about the body and told me to retire.” The Arab fly whisk is made from a knot of hair from a horse’s tail, attached to a handle. It is not immediately evident how one might deal “violent blows” with such an instrument. However, the French Consul was adamant that French honor was at stake. He concluded his report to the minister: “If Your Excellency does not wish to give this affair the severe and well-publicized attention that it merits, he should at least be willing to grant me permission to retire with leave.” In his own report to the Ottoman grand vezir, the dey acknowledged striking Deval with his whisk, though only after provocation. He explained that he had written three times to the French asking for repayment, without receiving the courtesy of a reply. He raised the matter with the French consul “in courteous terms and with a deliberately friendly attitude.” “Why did no reply come to my letters written and sent to your [i.e., the French] Government?” The Consul, in stubbornness and arrogance, replied in offensive terms that “the King and state of France may not send replies to letters which you have addressed to them.” He dared to blaspheme the Muslim religion and showed contempt for the honour of His Majesty [the sultan], protector of the world. Unable to endure this insult, which exceeded all bearable limits, and having recourse to the courage natural only to Muslims, I hit him two or three times with light blows of the fly-whisk which I held in my humble hand.

Whatever the truth of these two irreconcilable accounts, it was clear that by 1827 the French had no intention of honoring debts incurred three decades earlier—and the Algerians were unwilling to forgive the debts. After the fly-whisk incident, the French demanded reparations for the damage done to France’s honor while the Algerians continued to insist on repayment of France’s long-overdue debts. The dispute left the two sides on a collision course in which the Algerians refused to back down, and the French could not afford to. The French responded to the dey’s “insults” with ultimatums. They demanded the Algerians make a gun salute to the French flag, which the dey refused. The French then imposed a blockade on the port of Algiers, which did more harm to the merchants of Marseilles than to Algerian corsairs, whose swift ships easily slipped through the over-extended French line of ships enforcing the blockade. After a two-year stalemate, the French sought a face-saving solution and dispatched a diplomat to negotiate with the dey. The Algerians fired a few cannon at his flagship, preventing the negotiator from even disembarking. The Algerian imbroglio was turning into a major embarrassment for the beleaguered government of French king Charles X. Charles X (r. 1824–1830) faced serious opposition at home as well as abroad. His efforts to restore some absolutism to the French monarchy, turning the clock back to pre-Revolutionary times, reached a crisis when he suspended the Constitutional Charter (described at length by Rifa’a al-Tahtawi in his study of France) in 1830. His premiere, Prince Jules de Polignac, suggested that a foreign adventure might rally public opinion behind the throne. Polignac recognized that France had to overcome opposition from the other European powers—Britain in particular—to a measure that inevitably would alter the balance of power in the Mediterranean. He dispatched ambassadors to London and the other courts of Europe to set out the objectives of the impending invasion of Algeria as the complete destruction of piracy, the total abolition of Christian slavery, and the termination of all tribute paid by European states to the Regency to ensure the security of their shipping. Polignac hoped to gain international support for the French invasion of Algiers by claiming to uphold such universal interests. In June 1830 a French expedition of 37,000 troops landed to the west of Algiers. It quickly defeated the dey’s forces and entered the city of Algiers on July 4. This triumph was not enough to save Charles X, who was overthrown later that month in the July Revolution of 1830. The Egyptian scholar Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, who was living in Paris at the time, noted how the French showed far more satisfaction at overthrowing an unpopular king than in the conquest of Algiers, “which,” he argued, “was based on specious motives.”² Nonetheless, the French remained in possession of Algiers well after the fall of the Bourbon monarchy, one of the few enduring legacies of the undistinguished reign of Charles X. Husayn Pasha’s capitulation on July 5, 1830, brought to a close three centuries of Ottoman history and marked the beginning of 132 years of French rule over Algeria.

Although the French had defeated the Turkish garrison at Algiers, this victory did not give them control over the country at large. So long as the French confined their ambitions to the main coastal towns, they were unlikely to encounter much organized resistance in Algeria. European powers had long held strategic ports on the North African coast. The French occupation of Algiers in July 1830 and of Oran in January 1831 was not so different from the Spanish position in their presidios in Ceuta and Melilla (which remain Spanish possessions today). But the French were not satisfied with holding the main towns. They hoped to colonize the fertile coastal plain with French settlers in a policy known as “restrained occupation.” It was a policy that inevitably would alienate the indigenous people of Algeria. The Algerian population was made up of fiercely independent Arabs and Berbers, a non-Arab ethnic community that converted to Islam after the seventh-century Islamic conquests. With their own language and customs, the Berber population is spread across North Africa, particularly in Algeria and Morocco. The Arabs and Berbers had preserved their independence from the deys of Algiers and resisted every attempt by the Turkish garrison to tax them or impose Ottoman rule outside the major cities of Algiers, Constantine, and Oran. Thus, they shed no tears over the fall of the Regency. Even so, the Berbers and Arabs in the Algerian countryside were no more amenable to the French than they had been to Turkish rule. As the French began to colonize Algeria’s coastal plains, the local tribes organized a resistance movement, beginning in the west of the country near Oran. The Arabs and Berbers turned to the charismatic leaders of their Sufi orders (mystical Muslim brotherhoods), which often combined religious legitimacy with a noble genealogy linking order members to the family of the Prophet Muhammad. The Sufi orders were organized into networks of lodges that spanned Algeria and commanded the loyalty of the leading men of the community. It was a natural framework within which to mount an opposition movement. Among the most powerful Sufi communities in western Algeria was the Qadiriyya order. The head of the order was a wise old man named Muhi al-Din. Several of the leading tribes of the region petitioned Muhi al-Din to accept the title of sultan and lead the Arabs of western Algeria in a holy war against the French. When he refused, pleading age and infirmity, the tribes nominated his son Abd al-Qadir, who had already demonstrated courage in attacks on the French. Abd al-Qadir (1808–1883) was acclaimed as amir, or leader of the tribes allied against French rule, in November 1832, at the age of twenty-four. It was the beginning of one of the most remarkable careers in the modern history of the Middle East. Over the next fifteen years, Abd al-Qadir united the people of Algeria in a sustained resistance movement against the French occupation of their country. It is no exaggeration to say he was a legend in his own lifetime—in the West and the Arab world alike. To the French, Abd al-Qadir was the ultimate “noble Arab,” a Saladin figure whose religious convictions and personal integrity placed his motives—defending his country against foreign military occupation—beyond reproach. He was bold and audacious in battle, pursuing a guerrilla style of warfare that brought his small forces victories against French armies more advanced than those that had routed Egypt?s Mamluks. His exploits were captured in luscious oils by the Romantic artist Horace Vernet (1789?1863), the official recorder of the French conquest of Algeria. Victor Hugo eulogized Abd al-Qadir in verse as le beau soldat, le beau prкtre—literally, “the handsome soldier, the handsome priest.” To his Arab followers, Abd al-Qadir enjoyed religious legitimacy as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad (a sharif) and as the son of one of the most respected heads of a leading Sufi order. They vowed their loyalty to him and were rewarded with victories against superior forces. Abd al-Qadir’s exploits thrilled contemporaries across the Arab and Islamic world, as a “Commander of the Faithful” defending Muslim lands against foreign invaders. Abd al-Qadir pursued a remarkably intelligent war. At one point, upon capturing some of his papers, the French were astonished to discover that he had obtained very reliable information on debates in the French Chamber of Deputies relating to the war in Algeria. He knew how unpopular the war was in French public opinion and was aware of the pressures on the government to come to terms with the Algerian insurgents.³ Armed with this intelligence, Abd al-Qadir pursued a war designed to drive the French to seek peace. Twice he forced French generals to conclude peace treaties on his terms, granting recognition of his sovereignty and clear limits to the territory that would remain under French control. The first treaty was agreed to in February 1834 with General Louis Desmichels, and the second—the Tafna Treaty of mutual recognition—was concluded in May 1837 with General Robert Bugeaud. The latter treaty granted Abd al-Qadir sovereignty over two-thirds of the land mass of Algeria.⁴ Both treaties proved short-lived in the face of expansionist ambitions on both sides. Abd al-Qadir and the French each sought to extend their authority over the eastern city of Constantine. The French argued that Constantine fell well outside the territories recognized in the 1837 treaty as part of Abd al-Qadir’s state. The Algerians retorted that the treaty set clear boundaries on French territory, which the French had violated in the conquest of Constantine. Once again, the French and Algerian positions were irreconcilable. Abd al-Qadir accused the French of breaking their word and resumed his war. On November 3, 1839, he wrote to the French governor-general:We were at peace, and the limits between your country and ours were clearly determined. . . . [Now] you have published [the claim] that all of the lands between Algiers and Constantine should no longer receive orders from me. The rupture comes from you. However, so that you do not accuse me of betrayal, I warn you that I will resume the war. Prepare yourselves, warn your travellers, all who live in isolated places, in a word take every precaution as you see fit.⁵

Abd al-Qadir’s forces descended on the vulnerable French agricultural colonies in the Mitija Plain, located east of Algiers. Provoking widespread panic, they killed and wounded hundreds of settlers, putting their homes to the torch. The government in Paris was faced with a clear choice: withdraw, or commit to a complete occupation of Algeria. It opted for the latter and dispatched General Bugeaud at the head of a massive campaign force to achieve the final “submission” of the Algerian resistance to French rule. Bugeaud faced a daunting task in his attempt to achieve total victory in Algeria. The Algerians were well organized and highly motivated. Abd al-Qadir had organized his government in Algeria into eight provinces, each headed by a governor whose administration reached down to the tribal level. These governors were paid regular salaries and were charged with maintaining law and order and collecting taxes for the state. Judges were appointed to enforce Islamic law. Government was unobtrusive, operating within the constraints of Islamic law, which encouraged farmers and tribesmen to pay their taxes. The Algerian government raised enough funds from taxes to support a volunteer army that proved highly effective in the field. By Abd al-Qadir’s own estimate, his forces numbered 8,000 regular infantry, 2,000 cavalry, and 240 artillerymen with 20 cannons, spread equally across the eight governorates. These mobile forces were able to harass the French and withdraw from combat whenever French numbers threatened to overwhelm them in classic guerrilla war tactics. Abd al-Qadir had also created a string of fortress towns along the ridge of the high plateau to provide his armies safe havens to escape French counterattacks. Speaking to his French captors in Toulon in 1848, Abd al-Qadir explained his strategy: “I was convinced, war having resumed, that I would be forced to abandon to you [i.e., the French] all of central inland towns, but that it would be impossible for you to reach the Sahara because the means of transport that encumbered your armies would prevent you from advancing so far.”⁶ The Algerian leader’s strategy was to draw the French into the interior, where the invaders would be overextended, isolated, and easier to defeat. Speaking with a French prisoner at the fortress town of Tagdemt, Abd al-Qadir warned: “You will die with disease in our mountains, and those whom sickness shall not carry off, my horsemen will send death with their bullets.”⁷ With both his government and his defenses better organized than ever, Abd al-Qadir was confident he would prevail once again over the French. Abd al-Qadir did not anticipate, however, the extraordinary violence that the French would unleash on the Algerian people. General Bugeaud pursued a scorched-earth policy in the Algerian interior, designed to undermine popular support for Abd al-Qadir’s resistance—burning villages, driving away cattle, destroying harvests, and uprooting orchards. Men, women, and children were killed, and officers were told to take no prisoners. Any of Abd al-Qadir?s men who tried to surrender were simply cut down. Tribes and villages began to turn against Abd al-Qadir to avoid suffering the fate of his supporters. The measures also devastated the rural economy, cutting Abd al-Qadir?s tax receipts. The Algerians reeled under the French onslaught, and public support for Abd al-Qadir’s resistance movement began to crumble. As the families of his soldiers came to fear attack by fellow Algerians, Abd al-Qadir brought all of their dependents—wives, children, and elderly folk—into a massive encampment called a zimala. By his own description, Abd al-Qadir’s zimala was a mobile city of no less than 60,000. To give some sense of the size of the zimala, he claimed that “when an Arab lost track of his family, it sometimes took him two days to find them [within the crowd].” The zimala served as a mobile support unit for Abd al-Qadir’s army, with armorers, saddle-makers, tailors, and all the workers needed for his organization. Not surprisingly, Abd al-Qadir’s zimala became a prime target of the French forces, keen to strike a blow against his soldiers’ morale and the support base of the Algerian army. Through good intelligence on the position of the French army and knowledge of the terrain, Abd al-Qadir was able to keep the zimala safe for the first three years of the conflict. In May 1843, however, the location of the encampment was betrayed and the French army attacked the zimala. Abd al-Qadir and his men learned of the attack too late to intervene. “Had I been there,” he reflected to his French captors, “we would have fought for our wives and our children and would have shown you a great day, no doubt. But God did not want it; I only learned of this misfortune three days later. It was too late!”⁸ The French attack on the zimala had the desired effect. By Abd al-Qadir’s own estimate, the French killed one-tenth of the population of the mobile encampment. The loss of their elders, wives, and children dealt a severe blow to his troops’ morale. The attack also dealt a severe material blow to Abd al-Qadir’s war effort, as he lost most of his property and the wealth of his treasury. It was the beginning of the end of his war against the French. Abd al-Qadir and his forces went on the retreat, and in November 1843, the Algerian commander led his followers into exile in Morocco. Over the next four years, Abd al-Qadir rallied his troops to attack the French in Algeria, falling back to Moroccan territory to elude capture. The sultan of Morocco, Moulay Abd al-Rahman, had no wish to be drawn into the Algerian conflict. However, for harboring their enemy, the French attacked the Moroccan town of Oujda near the Algerian border and sent their navy to shell the ports of Tangiers and Mo-gadir. In September 1844, the French and Moroccan governments signed a treaty to restore friendly relations, which explicitly declared Abd al-Qadir outlawed throughout the empire of Morocco.⁹ Denied a safe haven and cut off from his resource base, Abd al-Qadir found it ever harder to fight the French, and in December 1847, he surrendered his sword to the French. France celebrated the defeat of Abd al-Qadir as a triumph over a major adversary. One of the Algerian leader’s biographers (and admirers) reflected ironically: “The mind boggles when we think that it took seven years of combat and 100,000 men of the greatest army in the world to destroy that which the emir [prince] built in two years and five months.”¹⁰ The impact of the war on the people of Algeria was devastating. Estimates of Algerian civilian casualties number in the hundreds of thousands. The French transported Abd al-Qadir back to France where he was imprisoned with his family. Abd al-Qadir was something of a celebrity, and the government of King Louis Philippe wanted to benefit from its prisoner’s popularity to bestow a high-profile pardon on him. These plans were disrupted by the 1848 Revolution and Louis Philippe’s overthrow. The Algerian leader was forgotten in the political turmoil of regime change in Paris. It was not until 1852 that the new president, Louis Napoleon (later crowned Emperor Napoleon III), restored Abd al-Qadir’s freedom. The Algerian leader was invited as Louis Napoleon’s guest of honor to tour Paris on a white charger and review the French troops with the president. Though he was never allowed to return to Algeria, the French gave him a pension for life and a steamship to take him to the place of exile of his choice. Abd al-Qadir set sail for Ottoman domains and settled in Damascus, where he was given a hero’s welcome. He and his family were accepted into the circle of elite families of Damascus, where he was to play an important role in communal politics. In later life Abd al-Qadir dedicated himself to a life of scholarship and Islamic mysticism. He died in Damascus in 1883. Victory over Abd al-Qadir was only the beginning of the French conquest of Algeria. Over the next decades France continued to extend its colonial sovereignty southward. By 1847, nearly 110,000 Europeans had settled in Algeria. The next year, the settler community won the right to elect deputies to the French parliament. In 1870, with nearly 250,000 French settlers, Algeria was formally annexed to France, its non-European residents made subjects (not citizens) of the French state. Aside from the Zionist colonization of Palestine, there was to be no settler-colonialism in all the Middle East to match what the French achieved in Algeria.

With the exception of France’s violent imperial war in Algeria, the European powers abided by their commitment to preserve the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire from the 1840 London Convention for the Pacification of the Levant to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. The formal colonization of North Africa resumed in 1881 with the French occupation of Tunisia. Much had changed between 1840 and 1881—in Europe and the Ottoman Empire alike—as a powerful new idea from Europe took root: nationalism. A product of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, nationalism spread across Europe at a variable rate during the nineteenth century. Greece was an early convert, achieving its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830 after a decade of war. Other European states, such as Germany and Italy, took shape over decades due to nationalist-inspired unification movements, and only emerged into the community of nations in their modern form in the early 1870s. The Austro-Hungarian Empire began to face growing nationalist challenges from within, and it was only a matter of time until the Ottoman Empire?s territories in Eastern Europe followed suit. The Balkan nations—Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Macedonia—began to seek their independence from the Ottomans in the 1830s. The European powers grew increasingly supportive of Ottoman Christians seeking to free themselves from the Turkish “yoke.” Politicians in Britain and France tabled motions in support of Balkan nationalist movements. The Russian government gave full support to Orthodox Christians and fellow Slavs across the Balkans. The Austrians hoped to benefit from secessionist movements in Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro to extend their territory at the Ottomans’ expense (and in the process integrated the very nationalist movements that by 1914 would lead to their downfall and set off a world war). This outside support emboldened Balkan nationalists in their struggle with the Ottoman state. A major revolt broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1875. The following year, Bulgarian nationalists launched an uprising against the Ottomans. The Bulgarian conflict ravaged the countryside, as Christian and Muslim villages were caught up in the violence between nationalist fighters and Ottoman soldiers. The European newspapers, overlooking the higher casualty figures among Bulgarian Muslims, trumpeted the massacre of Christians as the “Bulgarian horrors.” With the Ottomans pinned down by conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria, Prince Milan of Serbia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in July 1876, and Russia followed suit in support of the Slavic peoples of the Balkans. Ordinarily, Britain would have intervened at this point. Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli had long advocated support for the Ottoman Empire as a buffer against Russian ambitions in Continental Europe. However, Disraeli found his hands tied by public opinion. The violence—and the press coverage of the atrocities—discredited his Turcophile policies and left Disraeli vulnerable to the barbs of his Liberal opponent, William Gladstone. In 1876 Gladstone published an influential pamphlet entitled The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. Gladstone’s eloquent tirade condemned the Turks as “the one great anti-human specimen of humanity.” His pamphlet advocated the expulsion of the Ottomans from their European provinces altogether. “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses,” he wrote, “in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves.” Gladstone was more in tune with public opinion that Disraeli, and the British government was forced to abandon its support of Ottoman territorial integrity. Once the principle of Turkish sovereignty over its provinces was breached, the European powers began to consider the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman efforts at reform had not produced a stable or viable state, its European critics argued. They pointed to the Ottoman bankruptcy of 1875 as further evidence that Turkey was the “Sick Man of Europe.” Better to agree a redistribution of Ottoman lands between the European Powers. Germany proposed the partition of the Ottoman Empire, dividing the Balkans between Austria and Russia, giving Syria to France, and awarding Egypt and key Mediterranean islands to Britain. Aghast, the British quickly proposed an international conference in Istanbul in November 1876, to resolve the Balkan crises and the Russo-Turkish conflict. Diplomacy bought time, but the belligerent powers were bent on war and the volatile situation provided ample opportunities. Russia declared war again in April 1877 and proceeded to invade the Ottoman Empire from the east and the west simultaneously. Moving quickly into Eastern Anatolia and through the Balkans, the Russians inflicted heavy casualties on the Ottoman defenders. By early 1878 Ottoman defenses crumbled as Russian forces swept through Bulgaria and Thrace and pressed on to Istanbul itself, forcing an unconditional Ottoman surrender to prevent the occupation of their capital city. Having suffered a total defeat to Russia, the Ottomans had little say over the terms imposed on them by the 1878 Congress of Berlin. The longstanding imperative of preserving the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire was abandoned as the European powers embarked on the first partition of Ottoman territory. In the course of the Berlin peace conference, Bulgaria received autonomy within the Ottoman Empire, whereas Bosnia and Herzegovina, though nominally still Ottoman territory, passed under Austrian occupation. Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro gained outright independence. Russia gained extensive territories in Eastern Anatolia. By these measures the Ottoman Empire was forced to surrender two-fifths of its territory and one-fifth its population (half of them Muslim).¹¹ Unable to prevent the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the British were intent on securing their own strategic interests in Ottoman domains before the Congress of Berlin even began. As a maritime power, Britain had long sought a naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean, from which it could oversee the smooth flow of navigation through the Suez Canal. The island of Cyprus would serve this purpose nicely. The beleaguered Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) needed an ally more than he needed the island, and so he concluded a treaty of defensive alliance with Britain in exchange for Cyprus on the eve of the Congress of Berlin. It was the British claim to Cyprus that extended the partition of Ottoman domains from the Balkans to North Africa. Germany gave its consent to Britain’s acquisition of Cyprus, though both the British and Germans recognized the need to compensate France to restore the balance of power in the Mediterranean. They agreed to ?offer? Tunisia to France to consolidate its empire in North Africa and secure its borders with Algeria. Germany, which had annexed the French province of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870?1871, was only too happy to give its consent to this gift in the hope of fostering a rapprochement with Paris. Only Italy, with its large settler population and significant investments in Tunisia, raised objections?which the other powers were pleased to overlook, suggesting that Italy might instead take satisfaction in Libya (which, in 1911, it did). The French had permission to occupy Tunisia but had no grounds to justify a hostile act against the compliant North African state. Since its bankruptcy in 1869, the Tunisian government had cooperated fully with French financial advisors in honoring its external debts. The French government first proposed the establishment of a protectorate over Tunisia in 1879, but its ruler, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey (r. 1859–1882), politely declined to deliver his country to foreign imperial rule. To make matters more difficult, French public opinion had turned against colonial ventures. A majority believed that Algeria had come at too high a price to France, and there was little support for extending the French presence in North Africa. Without public support at home or a pretext from abroad, the French government was stymied in its efforts to add Tunisia to its North African empire. Meanwhile, Italy took advantage of every French delay to extend its own presence in Tunisia, where the Italian settler community significantly outweighed the French. It was this Franco-Italian rivalry that ultimately drove the French to action. The French had to find grounds to justify invading Tunisia. In 1880 a French adventurer defaulted on a concession and was expelled by the Tunisians for his pains. The French consul protested, presenting the bey with an ultimatum demanding compensation for the Frenchman and the punishment of the Tunisian officials responsible for the insolvent Frenchman’s expulsion. It wasn’t an insult on a par with the 1827 “fly-whisk” incident in Algeria, but it was deemed sufficient mistreatment of a French national to warrant the mobilization of an invasion force to redeem national honor. The unreasonably reasonable ruler of Tunisia deprived the French of a pretext for invasion by conceding to all of their outrageous demands. The troops were sent back to their barracks to await a more propitious opportunity to invade Tunisia. French troops were mustered again in March 1881 when a group of tribesmen were alleged to have crossed into Algeria from Tunisia on a raid. Though the bey offered to pay compensation for damages and to punish the tribesmen, the French insisted on taking action themselves. A French cavalry detachment crossed the Tunisian border and, bypassing the territory of the guilty tribe, made straight for Tunis. It met up with a seaborne invasion force in the Tunisian capital in April 1881. Faced with French invasion forces by land and sea, Muhammad al-Sadiq Bey signed a treaty with the French on May 12, 1881, that effectively severed his ties to the Ottoman Empire and ceded his sovereignty to France. Tunisia?s experience of reform and bankruptcy had led the country from informal European control to outright imperial domination. While the French were occupied with integrating Tunisia into their North African empire, trouble was brewing to the east in Egypt. As was noted in the previous chapter, reform and bankruptcy in Egypt had led to European intervention in its finances and governance. Rather than restore stability, the measures undertaken by the European powers had so destabilized Egypt’s internal politics that a powerful opposition movement had emerged to threaten the khedive’s rule. What began as concerted action between Britain and France to reinforce the khedive’s authority ended in Britain’s accidental occupation of Egypt in 1882.