Capitalism, resistance, and environment in Tunisia's Gafsa phosphate mining region, 1880s-1960s
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation combines archival and oral historical sources to narrate the social and environmental history of Tunisia's Gafsa phosphate mining basin, from the industry's 1880s beginnings under French colonialism to its 1960s post-independence nationalization. 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 ingredient essential for industrially produced fertilizers. This dissertation argues 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. 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. In short, 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 relative 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, this dissertation traces how modern Tunisia developed out of regional and global connections, shaped by the actions of non-elite Tunisians who are typically marginalized within exceptionalist accounts.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Gruskin, Rebecca LeAnn |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Beinin, Joel, 1948- |
| Degree supervisor | Satia, Priya |
| Thesis advisor | Beinin, Joel, 1948- |
| Thesis advisor | Satia, Priya |
| Thesis advisor | Clancy-Smith, Julia Ann |
| Thesis advisor | Hecht, Gabrielle |
| Thesis advisor | Wigen, Kären, 1958- |
| Degree committee member | Clancy-Smith, Julia Ann |
| Degree committee member | Hecht, Gabrielle |
| Degree committee member | Wigen, Kären, 1958- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Rebecca Gruskin. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/fv569sv1631 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Rebecca LeAnn Gruskin
Also listed in
Loading usage metrics...