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Economic and Social Development

Traditional patterns of landholding in Tunisia were collective. No individual title existed for arch (tribal land), which was considered the inalienable property of the tribe as a whole. It did not have definite boundaries but might expand in size or shift location as the needs of the tribe, the climate, or the condition of the land changed. Under other kinds of tenure, more common in the north and in the Sahil, land was the collective possession of a family or a village. Extended use was proof of ownership, and continued use was necessary to retain it. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, about one-third of Tunisia's most productive farmland, concentrated in grain-growing areas, was habus-property held in perpetuity by religious institutions as endowments to maintain mosques and shrines and to support public welfare and religious education. The hey derived part of his income from beylical or crown lands, extensive tracts acquired over the years by conquest and confiscation that, according to Muslim law, belonged to the state and passed by right to whomever ruled it. Large estates were also assigned to Turkish families and to members of the government in clientage from the bey. Beylical land was also assigned to landholders on long-term leases.

As the government's financial situation worsened in the 1850s and 1860s, beylical land was sold for ready cash and converted to freehold. The growth of a class of peasant proprietors who could operate above the subsistence level on the land that they purchased was paralleled by the increase of a rural proletariat, which had been disposed of the land confiscated by the bey to be put on sale. In 1859 sale of land to Europeans was made legal. In some cases Tunisian farmers saw their traditional lands sequestered and sold to French-owned companies whose managers in turn hired them as laborers.

The famine and cholera epidemic that struck Tunisia in 1868 hit hardest in the most populous and productive areas. The countryside lay empty where fields had been abandoned and villages deserted. The population in marginal areas reverted to nomadism, while others fled the country. The demographic impact was devastating: Tunisia's population, estimated at 1.6 million in 1867, stood at only 900,000 in 1881 and showed no marked growth as late as 1890.

French buyers took advantage of Tunisia's distress and the beylicate's bankruptcy to acquire land abandoned during the plague years, including them in the growing European-operated modern agricultural sector that specialized in olive and grape production for export. As a result of investment by French-owned companies, France had established its economic domination over Tunisia years before the protectorate imposed political control as well.

French law recognized only individual ownership of a property, a practice that was at variance with Tunisian traditions of collective holdings. Because so much Tunisian land could not be alienated from its collective ownership under Muslim law, a legal framework was constructed through which European landowners could ensure their title to property that they had acquired. In 1885 the beylicate published a decree requiring registration of titles to land. An application for a title was then advertised. If it was not claimed by another party within a given period, the applicant received undisputed title to the property in question. Challenges to an application were considered by a mixed tribunal of Tunisian and French magistrates. The latter formed the majority on the tribunal, which usually decided in favor of European applicants.

Tunisians also took advantage of the new law, however, to lay claim to tribal and other collectively held land. By 1892 more than one-fifth of Tunisia's arable land, concentrated in the north, was French owned, but 90 percent of it was in the hands of only 16 landowners and companies engaged in cap. ital-intensive agriculture. Less than 10 percent of the French residents were engaged in farming. In 1897 a fund was established to pay the cost of settling French colons (colonists), and the next year the beylicate allowed habus land to be put on the market. But, despite inducements offered by the French government and by private colonization societies in France, there was no rush of colons to Tunisia as there had been to Algeria.

More than 10,000 Italians lived in Tunisia in 1881 as compared with fewer than 4,000 French residents, and they remained the largest ethnic group within the European community throughout the period of the protectorate. By 1901 the size of the Europe. an community had increased to approximately 130,000, of which two-thirds was Italian and among which were included a large number of Maltese. The Europeans were occupationally differentiated: the Italians, mostly Sicilians, were blue-collar workers, public utilities workers, or small farmers. The Maltese, who were British subjects, were the proverbial shopkeepers. Tunisians rubbed shoulders constantly with these Europeans, confronted them in the marketplace, and competed with them for jobs. Shut out from the social and economic advantages that were reserved for French citizens, the Italians were held in contempt by both the Tunisians and the French. Except for members of the elite, Tunisians seldom had contact with the French-the administrators, supervisors, managers, and owners-and even the elite did not meet them on a social level.

Traditional education in Tunisia was highly developed before 1881, and the school of the Zituna Mosque in Tunis was recognized as one of the leading centers of classical Islamic studies. Under the protectorate the French residency continued to empha size education, patronizing the Zituna Mosque school and the Muslim schools as well as Kherredin's Sadiki College. The latter was accredited as a lycée and set the standard for a bilingual, bi-cultural school system, offering instruction to a mixed student body, that was extended throughout the country. Many Tunisian graduates of these schools went on to complete their education in France. Within a generation a class of well-educated, gallicized Tunisians-the évolués (literally, the evolved ones)-had been created that formed a new social elite among their countrymen. Strongly influenced by French culture and political attitudes-and particularly attracted by a Cartesian, or rationalistic, inquiry, which was alien to the Islamic tradition-they nonetheless became the core of a highly motivated nationalist movement.