"An attentive Ear, a watchful Eye, and a Calm judicious Pen": William Samuel Johnson, the Colonial Agents, and the Transformation of the British Atlantic World

By looking at Great Britain and the American colonies in conjunction with the larger British Atlantic Empire, historians can better understand the political, social, and cultural transformations that occurred when transatlantic actors met. William Samuel Johnson is an example of an "ordinary" agent who nonetheless had extensive contacts with numerous British and American thinkers. While acting on Connecticut's behalf in London between 1767 and 1771, he sent reports back to Connecticut governors Jonathan Trumbull and William Pitkin on parliamentary proceedings while corresponding with the people who traveled around the Atlantic world during this critical period-merchants, seafarers, emigrants, soldiers, missionaries, radicals and conservatives, reformers, and politicians. He is also representative of the late eighteenth-century empire writ large. Agents, who had once been a source of stability in the far-flung colonies, became a destabilizing force as confusion and conflict grew over conceptual ideas of what constituted "the empire" and who was included in it. Johnson was a sane observer in the midst of the ideological and administrative upheaval of the 1760's and 1770's. His subsequent loyalism and political obscurity during the war years was in many ways a result of his attempts to reconcile various factional interests during his tenure as an agent. Although he did his best to resolve these divisions and provide an accurate account of the powerful nationalistic forces gathering on both sides of the Atlantic on the eve of the American Revolution, the agents' collective failures as transatlantic mediators helped bring about the collapse of an imperial community. This disintegration had dramatic effects on the whole of the Atlantic world.

Emerging Identities in Colonial Tunisia: "Alliancist" and Zionist Representations in Tunis prior to World War I

By 1900 the Jewish community of Tunisia witnessed the emergence of new competing identities: “assimilationist” of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, termed “Alliancist,” and Zionist. Strikingly, two members of the same family in Tunis, Raymond Valensi, President of the AIU Regional Committee, and Alfred Valensi, President of the Zionist Federation, led the struggle for their separate causes. In his discussion of identity in the modern world, Homi Bhabha asks, "How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities…where, despite shared histories of …discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities…may be profoundly antagonistic…?" It is in this context that the claims of the Alliance and Zionism will be examined prior to World War I, based on the Archives of the AIU and on such secondary sources as the indispensable work of Paul Sebag. The tensions between the Alliancists and Zionists continued until the outbreak of World War II, as the French-speaking Jews of Tunisia sought to define their individual and collective identities.