The SilverBack The Mejba Revolt: How a Tax Destroyed a Nation and Opened the Door to Empire

In the spring of 1864, the pastoral confederations of Tunisia's western highlands refused to pay their taxes. What began as a fiscal protest became the largest armed uprising in North African history before the twentieth century - a coalition of tribal fighters, city merchants, and Islamic scholars who briefly proclaimed a People's Bey, stormed the walls of coastal cities, and forced a reigning sovereign to sign a ten-point reform program he had no intention of honouring.The Mejba Revolt reconstructs this forgotten revolution in full: the catastrophic debt deals that created the crisis, the coalition leader Ali Ben Ghedhahem who gave it political form, the epidemic years that followed the suppression and killed tens of thousands, and the diplomatic horse-trading at the Congress of Berlin that quietly authorised France to end Tunisian independence seventeen years later. Drawing on Arabic chronicles, European consular archives, and Ottoman diplomatic correspondence, Tormund Kelly restores the revolt's full human scale - the pastoral families whose herds were confiscated, the city guilds whose trades were destroyed, the reformers who saw what was coming and were ignored.This is the story of a state that borrowed itself into catastrophe, a people who resisted with remarkable sophistication, and a colonial conquest decided not on the battlefield but in the ledgers of a Paris banking house.