The great historian of the Soviet Union (and a fellow Melburnian), Sheila Fitzpatrick once asked me whether I felt

I belonged to an international cosmopolitan community of historians. At the time I was not sure that I did, but reading the responses of the four historians who have invested their time and energy to respond to my book on this H-France forum, I feel very certain that I do belong to such a community. I am very grateful to each of them, and to the editors of H-France, for their generosity in offering me such an opportunity, and I hope that I can respond in kind with what follows. The Chateau de Vincennes, with its moat, drawbridge and looming stone towers, is an odd fragment of a pre-revolutionary world sitting among apartment blocks at the eastern edge of Paris. It certainly seems an unlikely place to go looking for the history of Arabs in France. But there this story really began. Trudging daily, over the course of several months, through leaves, mud and ice to the rather infelicitously named SHAT (Service Historique de lArme de Terre), I saw the first the edges of something greater than the sum of scattered fragments: a phenomenon that had its own historical contours, an emigration, a . Returning to Australia, and combing through the mass of notes, files and documents I had collected, I was confronted with the challenge of trying to talk about something that had not previously been described. I felt a responsibility to these people who had been written out of history, to get it right. As a doctoral student who came to history from cultural studies, I became quite aware of the hollowness of the grand statements I had once been so ready to pronounce. In the most humbling moments - what one may call the loneliness of the long distance historian one invokes ever more urgently that imagined community of historians: those who have come before us and provided the tools, as well as those who will come after and build more securely upon our imperfect beginnings. History does not really exist until it is shared. It must be debated, argued over, rethought, pulled apart and put back together. An original and unexamined subject is an irresistible opportunity, but it is also a danger: the danger that one is arguing furiously only with oneself. In a sense I was fortunate that during my doctoral research, a book called Le Paris Arabe was published, which both scooped my original subject, and set me free to speak about something different: not so much an Arab presence in France, but a history of a key period in French history from another perspective, that of its earliest significant Arab population. I was fortunate to have had a publisher willing to give me the scope and the breathing space to let this new project emerge more fully from the old. It is one of the great and necessary rites of passage, therefore, for this project to forge its own way into the world, and to be subject to the unflinching gaze of sympathetic but incisive readers. The four historians who reviewed the book for this forum have shown great generosity in their judgements, and I thank them sincerely for their kind words, while paying close attention to the important criticisms they have raised. Each reviewer found different elements to praise, which is quite natural given their different fields of interest, but in many ways the areas that they identified as problems had some very significant areas of overlap. The book tries to do a great deal perhaps too much and its argument is in places very dense. It deals with a significant period of French history but also with key aspects of history in

the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the eighteenth century, and it seeks to bring these different histories to speak with and against one another. Fortunately, all four of these historians have worked on transnational history, whether in the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, and they are well placed to appreciate the challenges, for the reader as much for the historian. There are only a few individual points of criticism that I feel need to be corrected, and I therefore choose to focus on the larger questions raised by the reviewers. I propose to respond briefly on the questions of race, gender and religion, each of which is quite correctly identified as an area in which the book might have gone further, and the larger question of identity which is a central problematic to which the book addresses itself. If the question of race is less problematic in the book than it might otherwise have been, this owes a great deal to the observations of colleagues such as Leora Auslander and Carla Hesse, whose observations brought my attention to elements I had neglected in the thesis. In attempting to delineate my subject with reference to Arabs, I had chosen to leave aside those elements which seemed related to another field, whether those of gens de couleur or the Jews with whom the Arab population were closely interconnected, by language or statute. In a provisional sense this decision was necessary. But at a certain point, as my colleagues rightly pointed out, the question of race and racialization emerged from my own argument, and demanded a larger contextualization. Much more than this, however, I discovered that paying closer attention to these questions actually altered the very nature of my argument. I still felt strongly that these people identified themselves as Arabs (as many, including Joseph Agoub, did both explicitly and implicitly), but the conditions under which these choices were made needed a much more careful examination. Crucially, it shed a very different light upon the murderous violence of 1815, always considered (to the extent that it was acknowledged at all) as a political attack upon Bonapartists, and on Egyptians because of their close political connection to the regime. But the story was far murkier, with roots in the racial politics of the ancien regime, the re-establishment of slavery and the corporate status of Jews, and even in the struggles over municipal and prefectoral power in the postrevolutionary state. That story deserves a larger development, it is true, and I hope to be able to contribute to that retelling before the bicentenary of this violence arrives. I was struck by Miranda Spielers excellent observation on the imprudence of studying the history of the French Atlantic in isolation from the broader geopolitics of empire and its representations something that applies equally to Europe and the Mediterranean. Jennifer Heuer, an important contributor to this story through her study of interracial marriage, reminds us how much more there is to say on this rich subject, and a spur to think further, as Heuer suggests, about the indemnity imposed on Haiti and the laws regarding people of colour across the period. But Heuers work, and her comments and those Jennifer Sessions here, point to a more significant gap in the book. There is little doubt that women became central to this episode of racial violence, and I traced that association, or rather intersection between race and gender back to the Napoleonic regimes focus on the so-called negresses of Marseille a decade earlier. That discussion necessarily brief given the span of the book gave me an opportunity to develop the small amount of information I had managed to collect on the women among

the Egyptian refugees in Marseille. As both Heuer and Sessions suggest, this material deserves more than an anecdotal development, and should be part of a greater attention to the role of gender, of marriage and the family, and the crucial differences between those symbolical and practical arrangements among the Arab community, the other groups around them, and the official French society in which they functioned. Napoleonic changes in the law of marriage, inheritance and divorce, the return of the church, and questions of licit and illicit sexuality constitute an unsaid of the book, which needs careful historical analysis of the kind Heuer has attempted to undertake, and I look forward to further dialogue on this important subject. Thirdly, but perhaps relatedly, is the question of Islam, which is certainly foregrounded in the title, though I made clear in the introduction that I did not intend to undertake at this point a study of Islam as a religion, but rather as a transnational space like that of Europe against which it is contrasted. These spaces, and the changing relationship between them, are crucial to the developments charted in the book, and if the subtitle presents a rather provocative spur to thinking about such questions, I do not regret this in the least. On the other hand, it is true that the question of Islam as a religion, and its relationship to these developments, took a rather secondary position in the book, in large part because the majority of the Arabs discussed here were Christian (but originating from, and maintaining close links with an Islamicate society) but also because of the near total absence of evidence regarding the religious practice of those Muslims among the emigration. I have already written elsewhere (in French) about this question, and developed at much greater length a discussion of the meaning of this absence. But I agree wholeheartedly that it is a subject deserving a far greater development, and my present projects will do what they can to open up this space, which I find the most exciting and compelling direction to emerge from the book. Lastly, I was particularly engaged by the responses of Julia Landweber and Jennifer Sessions on the question of identity and difference, both in the present and in the past, and their rise to the challenges that the book threw out. I made a deliberate choice to tell what is, for some perhaps unusually, a chronological and narrative history. Many of the most powerful stories we choose to tell in the world today are constructed in this way. I wanted to speak to and within those narratives, to show that they can be told differently. The many theoretical and political questions that arose were dealt with only in passing, although they were the fruit of a great deal of struggle and questioning. As my reviewers rightly observed, this is a book that does intend to speak to the great challenges of multiculturalism facing almost all societies today, to the questions of identity dogging politics and the social sciences, and the warmongering rhetoric of irreducible cultural and religious difference attending the appalling tragedies of the World Trade Centre and the Iraq war. The decision to undertake the thesis was made in the the hills above Dharamsala in the days following September 11 2001, and it is certainly a plea to think differently about our common past, even as it tries to avoid simplistic resorts to the comparison between republican and multicultural systems, the condemnation of Jacobin centralisation or distasteful references to some putative systme anglo-saxon. The book came out just as peoples across the Arab world were defying with the most extraordinary courage the stories they had been told by kleptocratic

dictators and the democratic governments that coddled them. Egypt has emerged once again as a crucial crossroads of the modern world, in ways many of the Egyptians of early nineteenth century France would have understood and celebrated. But these revolutions, sweeping form one Arab state to the next, leaving not a single one untouched, demonstrated the power of an Arab identity that the decades since 1967 had eclipsed, the spread of ideas, of technologies, of revolution through the Arabic language and through the shared forms of a society shaped by Islam, but composed of many religions and confessions. In this sense, I concur wholeheartedly with Jennifer Sessions whose groundbreaking book on the French invasion of Algeria has just appeared that, while paying close attention to the salutary intervention of Frederick Cooper and Rogers Brubaker, identity cannot be so readily eliminated from our analytical vocabulary. The term identification both by the state or other social authorities, and voluntarily as an assertion of belonging by subjects themselves is indispensable, but it does not serve to describe what groups in diaspora or the people on the streets of Cairo and Damascus today are fighting for. I argued in the book that identity must be understood as a project rather than as a fixed or stable category, something more than belonging, more than classification, more even than privileges or rights a place in which people can feel they quite naturally move, in which they can respect others and be respected themselves.