M’hamed Oualdi (INALCO)
Corruption or resistance through innovation? Financial knowledge of a Tunisian dignitary at the end of the19th century
dans le cadre du séminaire Cultural Encounters in the Muslim World (14th-19th C.) co-organisé avec l'Orient-Institut
mardi 7 mai 2013 à 19h à l'IFEA
Intervention en anglais
In the 1860s, the governor of the Ottoman province of Tunis started to borrow money from a Parisian Bank (the “maison d’Erlanger”). The idea of a public loan was by then a major financial innovation for this North African part of the Ottoman Empire. And this process has logically huge consequences, forcing the administration and the people of Tunis, to adapt and to cope with new financials tools and concepts. I will analyze those adaptations by focusing on the central issue of credits and loans through the conflicts arising from the inheritance of two major Tunisian dignitaries: the caïd Nessim Scemama on one hand and the general Husayn on the other. The second one, the general Husayn was the main character trying to defend the Tunisian State, which claimed for a part Scemama’s inheritance as the caïd Scemama built his fortune by embezzling a part of the Tunisian Public finances.
For both cases, I will show that the Tunisian people involved did not think or act in terms of financial innovations but rather by conceiving financial knowledge as a cumulative knowledge and by using all the cards they had in their hands. They could subvert the institutions and the formal frameworks shaped in the French and the Italian worlds of finance by hiding behind frontmen and by manipulating formal writings. By showing that, my aim here is, first, to go beyond the cultural interpretation of finance in Islam. The people involved in this story could refer to Islamic ideals but they did not use Islamic tools in their financial strategies. Building on recent research on credits in social history, my second aim is more broadly to question the ways in which the economy and its history has been thought as an historical evolution implying processes of rationalization and institutionalization.