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This thesis explores the impacts of Egyptian colonialism on the Sudanese agrarian society following the 1821 conquest of the Funj Sultanate until the beginning of the Mahdist Revolution in 1881. This research goes against the Western conventional historiographical consensus affirming that the agricultural sector in Sudan suffered a long and painful decline during the whole Egyptian colonial occupation. In fact, it is the complete opposite: after the 1844 Egyptian failure to impose their plantation system, the local Sudanese elites composed of former Funj aristocrats, traders and nomadic lords, are going to reappropriate this agrarian structure for their own ends. We are, in fact, witnessing the resurgence of Sudanese agriculture under a new hybrid system. This agrarian revival is going to have major consequences on the regions of Gezira and oriental Sudan and also on all the strata of the population. It will lead to an exponential rise in the use of agricultural slavery, the collapse of the free peasant and nomad, the building of a new network of cities and the decline of the environment. During that period, the Egyptian colonial government, confined to its garrison-cities, will limit its interaction with the rural world by inefficiently trying to extract the maximum of riches with the use of violence.
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If Italy officially administrates Libya in 1912, it does not succeed in submitting the whole population. The coming to power of B. Mussolini in 1922 has the country enter in a new colonial era. Firmly decided to dominate the Libyan territory, he wages violent campaigns in the north-west region (Tripolitania) and in the south-west (Fezzan). In 1929, he engages the country in a new campaign to submit the last region in resistance: Cyrenaica. Unable to subdue the resistance despite a brutal policy, the Italians decide in 1930 to create concentration camps to confine tens of thousands of the inhabitants of the region (submitted or in resistance) and to succeed in establishing its power. The thesis falls within the post-colonial history movement and resorts to a transimperial approach in order to analyse the French gaze (by which we understand the state’s institutions and public opinion) on those camps. In those years of high tensions in the North African region, but also of European and Franco-French preoccupations, what was the French discourse on the violent colonial policy of the rival Italian power? The French civilizational ideology of the 1930s, and its own concentrational past, are not the only ways to understand the press and state silences. France’s interest is also in maintaining cordial relations with Italy, and in the weakening, if not, the annihilation of its old Saharan enemy: the Sanusiyya. The mystic brotherhood to which the majority of the interned are affiliated, embodies a common enemy for the two empires. Moreover, the migrations that ensue from the implementation of the concentration camps are profitable, even if concerning, for the French colonial power. The press and state archives therefore allow for very few spaces of denunciation and only in the context of the instrumentalization of the Italian policy to the benefit of France.
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This thesis studies the European travel literature concerning the Ottoman Empire and tries to analyse the role of the informers used by the Europeans in the creation of their representation of the janissaries within their travel accounts. Once the janissaries and the travel literature are presented in the first chapter, the second initiates a reflexion about the form taken by the representation of the janissaries. This representation is twofold : one is « individual », and the other is « collective ». In the first, the focus is put on understanding the representation of the many individuals composing this corps while in the second, the janissaries are seen as a collective entity. Once these parameters are set, the final chapter explore the mechanisms surrounding how travellers assemble their information to understand the janissaries by using three main groups of native informants. Following this analysis, we arrived at the conclusion that the informers either complexify, simplify or alter the perspectives of the travellers. It depends on the linguistic skills of each traveller, because it is the main factor that determines the identity of the people used by them to collect their information, and by extension, the extent to which those travellers exposed themselves to the filters created by linguistic intermediaries and translators. This conclusion enriches our understanding of the process which created the representations transmitted by travel literature, and also offers interesting leads for future analysis on travel accounts. Since considering the influence of the informers used by travellers in the description and explanation of subjects related to a scholar’s interests might be beneficial to his own understanding of his researchs.
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Deprived of his land inheritance like many youngest-born of peasant descent, Martin Bertrand (1915-2008) eventually fled life as a seminarian in the French High-Alps by enlisting in the Mobile Guard and then being stationed in Casablanca, Morocco in 1941. Following the Anglo–American invasion of French North Africa, he was drafted in 1943 to lead a Moroccan colonial recruit unit. With “his” tirailleurs, he took part in the Italian campaign, the Provence landing, the liberation of Alsace, and the occupation of Germany. After the War, he returned to Morocco only to be deployed 3 years later with the same battalion to Tourane, Indochina where the French colonial administration attempted to retake control of the region. During each one of his long absences, Martin Bertrand wrote almost daily to his wife Hélène, descendent of Spanish settlers established in Algeria. By analyzing these letters, this master’s thesis proposes to integrate Martin Bertrand’s experiences, in his functions as a non-commissioned officer in a colonial regiment, into a broader imperial story where France led her armies through her last colonial wars and destabilized the colonial order under which each soldier was governed. Furthermore, this study compares Martin Bertrand’s private letters with more official sources like troop morale reports which allows for an analysis of the complex social and ethnic hierarchies between French non-commissioned officers and “indigenous” troops. At the same time, it explores the deeper questionings of a military intermediary’s self-identity.