“Capitalism, Resistance, and Environment in Tunisia’s Gafsa Phosphate Mining Region, 1880s-1960s” combines archival and oral historical sources to narrate the social and environmental history of Tunisia’s largest mining zone, from the phosphate industry’s beginnings under French colonialism to its post-independence nationalization.Gafsa is a semi-arid region along Tunisia’s southwestern border with Algeria. In the early twentieth century, Gafsa was the world’s single largest phosphate exporter, one of France’s most important colonial interests in Tunisia, and Europe’s primary supplier of an essential ingredient for industrially produced fertilizers. This dissertation shows that Gafsa’s integration into global capitalist markets cannot be understood from the top down. Mineworkers, their families, local merchants, and small farmers shaped the trajectory of capitalism in Gafsa and the spatial interconnections—local, regional, imperial, and global—that emerged around it. By centering Gafsa’s residents, this dissertation pushes for a capacious understanding of capitalism that encompasses not only the exploitation of wage labor but also the techniques of expropriation—raced, gendered, environmentally grounded, and enforced by state power—that kept production costs low, molded by resistance and contestation.Gafsa, at first glance, appears to be a classic case of European-style capitalism transplanted into North Africa. Phosphate mining was an industrial enterprise, one in which a corporation profited from the labor of wage workers while shareholders accumulated capital. Yet this enterprise could not have existed without economic and coercive forces that reach beyond conventional Euro-American definitions of capitalism. Tunisia’s phosphate industry was built on “pre-capitalist” trans-North African trade networks. To suppress organized labor resistance, French industry leaders relied on imperial state intervention in both marketing and production, culminating in cartelization agreements within France’s North African empire, with US phosphate producers, and with Anglo-imperial mines in the Pacific Islands. Meanwhile, Gafsa’s residents— including women and children who were not salaried mineworkers—faced pollution and disease in ways that forced the French-owned mining company to modify its forms of exploitation, transforming Gafsa into a site through which Western biomedical knowledge was produced and circulated. During the anti-colonial struggle in the 1940s and 1950s, trade unionists wove their resistance into networks that lie outside most histories of capitalism—local kinship groups and armed resistance fighters—building a broad coalition that situated these myriad local actors within the transnational left and Afro-Asian anti-colonial movements more broadly. But the post-independence regime repressed this coalition, nationalizing the industry in a way that built on French-inherited structures. This persistence of colonial dynamics, along with the post-independence regime’s attempts to deny it, structured sporadic strikes in Gafsa throughout the 1960s. It also shaped the 2008 strikes in Gafsa that contributed to Tunisia’s 2010-11 “Arab spring” uprising.Ultimately, this dissertation explores how dynamics that do not fit conventional definitions of capitalism nonetheless structured the commercial networks sustaining modern heavy-input agriculture, drove ongoing processes of environmental degradation, and situated Tunisia within transnational resistance movements across the Global South. Putatively “peripheral” sites have shaped capitalism’s trajectory much more than the term “peripheral” implies. To illuminate the face of capitalism in Gafsa, this dissertation traces how expropriation, exploitation, and resistance developed in ways both locally grounded in Gafsa and interwoven within regional and global circuits of capital, commodities, biomedical knowledge, and people. Not only does this address Tunisia’s absence from global histories, but it also challenges dominant conceptions of the Tunisian nation. The persistent trope of Tunisian exceptionalism, emboldened by Tunisia’s status as the only post-“Arab spring” procedural democracy, sequesters the country within its national frame. In contrast, I argue that modern Tunisia developed out of regional and global connections, shaped by the actions of non-elite Tunisians who are typically marginalized within exceptionalist accounts.
