Triulzi Alessandro. Italian-speaking communities in early nineteenth century Tunis. Drawing primarily upon the little known American consular records of the Department of State, I shall focus on the composition, character, and life of such communities, both in order to show the part they played in the wider context of Tunisian society at the time, and in order to analyze. Through a reassessment of the consistency and role of these alien groups, I hope to provide a framework of analysis which will eventually deepen our understanding of the complexities of Tunisian society in the first part of the nineteenth century, a period of history which, in the words of the French scholar A.
Martel, "still awaits its historian"1. To reconstruct adequately a demographic picture of the various Italian- speaking communities in Tunis in the first part of the 19th century is no easy task. The first official statistics were made in the late 's and their reliability has been questioned by many authors2.
Consular statistics for the preceding period were no better ; the Italian-speaking "community" in Tunis was a highly unstable one, seasonal in part, its members falling under the jurisdiction before of five Consulates : Sardinia, Tuscany, Naples , France Roman subjects and, theoretically, all Catholics , and Austria Lombard-Venitians : many arrived without passport, lived Incognito with relatives, and only a few registered their presence at the respective Consulates3.
Statistics aside, it seems far more important to consider briefly the composition and origin of these communities9. Until the early 's, when the "Italians" represented "a notable share" of the European colony in Tunis, the Bey's kingdom had witnessed the arrival of different groups of Italian-speaking peoples who, by force or by election , were led to settle in the "Barbary Coast".
Some were brought in as slaves , and were later freed ; some had escaped justice on the nearby Continent and only sought a temporary refuge ; some had come to stay and settled permanently in the country. Their background, interests, and motivations varied greatly , and it is to these different "communities" that I will turn my analysis. In the first place, the slave population. By , when Lord Exmouth forced on the Bey peace treaties with Naples and Sardinia0, the Regency's long-standing practice of slave-raiding along the Mediterranean coasts had brought to Tunis vast numbers of slaves, most of whom came from the Italian islands and mainland.
