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This special issue originated in a series of conversations two years ago with IJMES editor Beth Baron regarding the Maghrib's positioning in historical scholarship on the Middle East generally and in our field's flagship journal more specifically. While IJMES has published a number of solo articles devoted to North Africa from a range of disciplines, we concluded that the journal's readers would welcome a corpus of recent work in the historical sciences for the modern period from roughly the late 18th century on. Emphasis upon the modern does not imply that other eras in North Africa's long history have languished for lack of renewed scholarly interest—far from it. The Punic and Roman empires are currently subject to vigorous reinterpretation in order to dismantle dominant colonial and Orientalist interpretations. Moreover, the literature on Muslim Spain and on medieval and early modern North Africa and Iberia, particularly the hotly contested idea of convivencia, has gone from artisanal to industrial production in terms of output. The regionalist frame for the special issue admittedly acknowledges a form of geographically informed “otherness,” but it does so in order to question that distinction. And although the call for papers had invited research whose primary (but by no means sole) focus was the peoples, societies, and states in what we now know as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, regrettably no submissions on Tripolitania/Libya were received.
Author's note: I express heartfelt appreciation to Beth Baron and Sara Pursley for their remarkable efficiency in bringing this issue to print in record time as well as for their critical and editorial contributions at each stage of the process. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers for meticulous and constructive readings of each submission, which created a lively multivocal conversation of immense intellectual benefit to all involved.
1 See, for example, Dossey, Leslie, Peasant and Empire in Christian North Africa (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and van Dommelen, Peter, ed., Rural Landscapes of the Punic World (London: Equinox, 2008)Google Scholar.
2 This scholarship now links the histories of Muslim- and Norman-ruled Sicily with that of pre-1500 Iberia principally by viewing the entire western Mediterranean basin as a potential field of social action and interaction, in opposition to frameworks that quarantine the Muslim shores of the sea from larger historical narratives and processes. See, for examples, Catlos, Brian, The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Metcalfe, Alex, The Muslims of Medieval Italy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Trivellato, Francesca, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010)Google Scholar. For an overview of recent scholarship on Muslim Spain, see Anna Akasoy's review article, “Convivencia and Its Discontents: Interfaith Life in al-Andalus,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 489–99.
3 Burke, Edmund III, “Theorizing the Histories of Colonialism and Nationalism in the Arab Maghrib,” in Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghrib: History, Culture, and Politics, ed. Ahmida, Ali (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 17Google Scholar.
4 Clancy-Smith, Julia, “Ruptures? Expatriates, Law, and Institutions in Colonial-Husaynid Tunisia, 1870–1914,” in Changes in Colonial and Post-Colonial Governance of Islam: Continuities and Ruptures, ed. Bader, Veit, Moors, Annelies, and Maussen, Marcel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 65–87Google Scholar; Struck, Bernhard, Ferris, Kate, and Revel, Jacques, “Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History,” International History Review 33 (2011): 573–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Clancy-Smith, Julia, ed., “Introduction,” in North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World from the Almoravids to the Algerian War (London: Frank Cass Publications, 2001), 1–10Google Scholar; and idem, “Mediterranean Historical Migrations: An Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Donna Gabaccia (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2012).
6 For example, fellow scholars from the Society for French Historical Studies and the French Colonial Historical Society, whose interests have extended to the Mediterranean's Muslim shores, are increasingly visible at MESA.
7 Scholarly attention increasingly focuses on violence in general, and colonial violence in particular, as a subject in need of theorizing and definition. See, for example, the special issue on Colonial Violence edited by Samuel Kalman in Reflexions historiques 36 (2010); and Brower, Benjamin C., A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
8 The recent French translation of Matthew Connelly's work, L'Arme secrète du FLN: Comment de Gaulle a perdu la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: Payot, 2011), is emblematic of this interest, as is the work of like-minded scholars in the rapidly changing field of transnational historical scholarship, whether on Algeria, the Maghrib, or other regions. See, for example, Sueur, James Le, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Silverstein, Paul, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; McDougall, James, History and the Culture of Nationalism in Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Christelow, Allan, Algerians without Borders: The Making of a Global Frontier Society (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 After 1956, Bourguiba himself removed documents from the national archives pertaining to his arch rival, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Thaʿalabi, and rendered research into the Husaynid Dynasty all but taboo.
10 It is regrettable the issue does not include articles concentrating on two of the most dynamic subfields in the historical sciences: environmental history and women's/gender history. Readers are directed to Davis, Diana K. and Burke, Edmund III, Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kallander, Amy: Family Fortunes: Women, Gender, and the Palace Households in Ottoman Tunisia (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming).
