The French occupation of the western Jafara and the village of Dahibat, 1890-1891

Contenu

Titre

The French occupation of the western Jafara and the village of Dahibat, 1890-1891

Créateur

Joffé, E. George H. Voir tous les contenus avec cette valeur

Date

1984

Dans

Libyan Studies Voir tous les contenus avec cette valeur

Résumé

The creation of the Libyan-Tunisian border through the Jafara plain, in the wake of the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881, was to be codified in a formal treaty in 1910, just before the Italian occupation of Libya and the outbreak of the Italo-Libyan wars. However, the border, as then defined, had little to do with any prior social, political or economic reality – Muslim political theory is more concerned with communal sovereignty than with territorial control, while the Jafara plain had always been a region of local political autonomy. In reality, it represented the complex attempts by local military commanders, with the full support of the French administration in Tunis, to maximise French territorial control at the expense of the Turkish administration in Tripoli. The abandoned village of Dahibat, at the foot of the Jabal Nafusa, provided an ideal means of applying such control, particularly as the original population was anxious to return and the French were able to use their anxiety as a means of applying concepts of territorial sovereignty to the Jafara. However, in creating a rigid territorial division, the French authorities also created the grounds for resistance at a local level that eventually expressed itself first through the First World War jihad movement in the Jafara and later formed part of the Tunisian independence movement.

Langue

eng

volume

15

pages

113-128

doi

10.1017/S0263718900007585

issn

0263-7189, 2052-6148

Joffé, E. George H., “The French occupation of the western Jafara and the village of Dahibat, 1890-1891”, 1984, bibliographie, consulté le 18 septembre 2024, https://ibadica.org/s/bibliographie/item/1328