Empire Unbound: France and the Muslim Mediterranean, 1880-1918

European empires were commonly depicted in bright color-coded maps printed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that conveyed the expanse of European power across the globe. Despite this familiar image of a world divided up into neat imperial enclaves, the reality of empire-building often told a different story. Empire Unbound argues that European empires were never the bounded, stable entities that imperialists imagined. In examining Mediterranean empire-building in a comparative context, Gavin Murray-Miller demonstrates that the era of 'new imperialism' which arose in the late nineteenth century fostered connections and synergies between regional powers that influenced the trajectories of imperial states in fundamental ways. Breaking with conventional national approaches, Murray-Miller traces the development of France's North African empire, noting how empire-building relied upon transnational networks and cooperation with Muslims elites across borders just as much as military conquest. By looking at the inter-connected relationships linking the French, British, Italian, and Ottoman empires from the 1880s through the First World War, Empire Unbound proposes a novel spatial framework for imperial studies, showing how migrations, extraterritorial legal regimes, and cross-border interactions both abetted and frustrated imperial designs at the turn of the century.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: France, Empire, and The Muslim Mediterranean 1: Power Politics and The Imperial Mediterranean 2: Territorialization and Mobility in The Mediterranean 3: Pan-Islamism and Ottoman Imperialism 4: Paris, A Trans-Imperial Metropole 5: Fragile Empires 6: Imagining French North Africa 7: Trans-Imperial Islam in The Crucible of War 8: Imperial Entanglements and The Making of The Post-Ottoman Mediterranean Conclusion: Entangled Histories and Fractured Pasts

About the Author :
Gavin Murray-Miller is a senior lecturer in modern history at Cardiff University. He is the author of two books focused on European revolutions and French colonialism. In the past, he has held fellowships from the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG) in Mainz, Germany, the École normale supérieure in Paris, and the State Academic University for the Humanities (GAUGN) in Moscow. In 2021, he was the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship carried out at the Universität Leipzig.

Review :
In Empire Unbound, Gavin Murray-Miller provides a fresh perspective on France's efforts to solidify and expand their Mediterranean empire from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War.