About

Ian Coller is a Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, affiliated with the School of Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Melbourne in 2006. His research interests focus on Modern France, the French Revolution and Empire, Modern Europe from circa 1700 to 1900, and the Muslim Mediterranean. Coller has contributed extensively to the understanding of the intersections between Islam, race, and political culture within the context of French history, particularly during revolutionary and imperial periods. His scholarly work includes publications on topics such as Muslim communities in France, the impact of the French Revolution on the Islamic world, and the broader implications of empire and globalization. Coller has edited volumes and authored articles that explore the cultural and political histories of Western empires, emphasizing the role of Islam and Muslim identities in shaping modern European history. His research provides a nuanced perspective on the entanglements of race, religion, and politics in revolutionary and imperial contexts, making significant contributions to the fields of French history, Islamic studies, and imperial history.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Religious studies
• Theology
• Law
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Arab France from Revolution to Empire

  Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht eBooks · 2024-12-09

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• Policing Muslims under the Directory

  French Historical Studies · 2024-11-01

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  Abstract In early 1799 French authorities issued orders to identify and register Ottoman Muslims within the territory of the Republic, followed by orders to arrest Algerian subjects and sequester their property. The immediate context of the policing operation was France's unprovoked July 1798 invasion of Egypt, leading to the Ottoman declaration of war in September. But the aims of this botched and almost entirely fruitless operation are harder to discern. Presented as a way of ensuring the safety of French subjects who had been detained in Istanbul and Algiers, it only exacerbated tensions. It was less a proportionate diplomatic action than a Machiavellian tactic by the foreign minister, Talleyrand. In the interests of ending the Revolution in France, Talleyrand sought to aggravate the war and drive the Ottoman Empire into the arms of the anti-French coalition. The new anti-Muslim rhetoric that emerged in this process outlasted Talleyrand's ministry and contributed to the fragmentation of republican universalism in the lead-up to Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d’état at the end of 1799.

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• :<i>The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment</i>

  The Journal of Modern History · 2023-03-01

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• 7. The French Revolution Comes to the Indian Ocean: Deportation, Slavery, and Empire in Anjouan

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2023-11-09

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• The Jacobin and the Mameluke: Islam, Race and Political Culture at the End of Empire

  War, culture and society, 1750-1850 · 2023-01-01

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• Laurie M. Wood. <i>Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2023-06-01

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  Journal Article Laurie M. Wood. Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire. Get access Laurie M. Wood. Archipelago of Justice: Law in France’s Early Modern Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii, 264. Cloth $72.00 Ian Coller Ian Coller University of California, Irvine, US Email: icoller@uci.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 1048–1049, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad212 Published: 22 June 2023

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• Possibles Citoyens : Étrangers originaires du monde musulman et hospitalité révolutionnaire sous la « Terreur »

  La Révolution française · 2022-01-01

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  Les mythes fondateurs de la « Terreur » ont été en grande partie démantelés par des historiens récents, mais la thèse d’un dérapage nationaliste vers la xénophobie en l’an II est restée assez courante. Certes, dans le contexte de la guerre et la peur du complot, certaines révolutionnaires ont dénoncé « l’étranger » comme un danger existentiel pour la République, or, en pratique, les autorités ne visaient que les sujets des pouvoirs ennemis, surtout les Britanniques, et ces mesures n’ont pas été implémentées de manière suivie. Les étrangers sujets de pouvoirs non-ennemis peuvent servir de test pour cette xénophobie supposée. Trois cas d’étrangers originaires (ou prétendant l’être) des pouvoirs musulmans, qui sont restés neutres ou amis de la France malgré les efforts des alliés de les tourner contre la République, ne montrent aucune évidence de xénophobie généralisée aux moments les plus forts de la « Terreur ». Au contraire, les gestes d’hospitalité étaient très ouverts. Ces cas suggèrent que les attitudes envers les étrangers devraient être comprises dans le contexte politique plus large des alignements et oppositions, et non comme un discours univoque d’exclusion.

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• A Slave Between Empires: A transimperial history of North Africa by M'hamed Oualdi

  Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History · 2021-01-01

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  Reviewed by: A Slave Between Empires: A transimperial history of North Africa by M'hamed Oualdi Ian Coller A Slave Between Empires: A transimperial history of North Africa By M'hamed Oualdi. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. How do we write the biography of a death? It is fascinating enough to follow the life of a Tunisian Mamluk who travelled from the slave markets of Circassia through the most powerful circles of Ottoman politics to exile and death in Florence. But in A Slave Between Empires, M'hamed Oualdi's interest is less in General Husayn ibn 'Abdallah himself than in the posthumous struggles over his estate. The book opens with a powerful description of the physical trauma of colonization, as Husayn's body sank into incapacity and illness after the French invasion of Tunisia in 1882. Yet, in Oualdi's reading, this frailty did not prevent Husayn from moving to resist the incorporation of his estate by the new imperial rulers. Nimbly wielding instruments of Islamic law that the French protectorate left in place, he sequestered the bulk of his wealth from the governing bey, who asserted the right to inherit as Husayn's master in the system of Mamluk slavery. The key word in Oualdi's title is neither "slave" nor "empire" but "between." Husayn's itinerary helps provincialize French imperialism, challenging its dominance in the North African narrative. This is not a plea for Ottomanism or incipient nationalism, but for the complexity of interlocking spaces—an "entangled history of the Maghreb" (3). In Chapter One, we see Husayn straddling Tunisian, Ottoman and Muslim networks from Istanbul to New York, an unusual combination of politician and scribe, appointed to high office in the municipality of Tunis, the criminal court and foreign affairs, while publishing children's books and arguments against slavery. Pushed out of Tunis in the 1870s by an increasingly reactionary administration, his exile was made permanent by the French invasion. His rented apartments in a Tuscan villa became a hub for visitors debating the future of the Muslim world and European anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Husayn's intermediarity becomes even clearer when Oualdi flips the script in his second chapter to look at Husayn from the perspective of "things"—from his clothes and the Etruscan vases he collected to the diverse nature of his properties—inzal tenancies of his waterfront developments and hubus and waqf structures that transferred ultimate ownership of properties to charitable foundations while retaining inheritance for the existing lineage. The various images of Husayn in his red shashiyya hat and European-tailored uniform, or turban and baggy sirwal trousers, suggest neither a Westernizer nor a nationalist but a man who lived a life of service, self-enrichment and personal contradiction, marrying and later repudiating the daughter of his mentor, the great Tunisian notable Khayr al-Din, while raising the daughters of his domestic servants in Italy—at least one of whom seems to have been his own child. Oualdi concludes that despite these entanglements at the level of material culture, Husayn "started to develop a moralistic discourse of land ownership based on national origin, and he began to hide his assets from the Tunisian state and the French colonial administration." (65) Chapter three confronts a key intellectual challenge: the book's focus on a single case. Oualdi invokes the historical context that made such "affairs", as they were known in the late nineteenth century, so much the focus of contemporary interest. Husayn himself had played a role in earlier legal struggles over huge sums embezzled from the Tunisian government by officials who had fled to Europe. Oualdi explores these "affairs," not as revealing the fragmentation of Ottoman power, but as tools used by a variety of actors for different purposes. Where European observers moralized these affairs as confirming Orientalist claims about Ottoman corruption, Husayn used them to defend Tunisian interests in an asymmetrical political world. In the wake of French colonization he changed course and deliberately complicated the legal tangle, frustrating French attempts to lay their hands on the money. These previous cases offer clues to the ways Husayn himself created the "affair" that followed his own death. Chapter Four explores the...

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• The Rights of Muslims

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-03-20

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  This chapter follows the revolutionary attempt to stabilize growing anxieties through a Declaration of Rights that would frame a new conception of the citizen. This category, however, was still riven by contradictions over religion, race, and gender. In a France where only a handful of Muslims could be identified as conceivably fulfilling any of the conditions to become citizens, the chapter considers why they were so prominent in the framing of the decree, and what significance, if any, it held for the future conception of the Muslim citizen. Here, the rights offered to Muslims through the Edict of Tolerance of 1787 became an integral piece of the new society revolutionaries were seeking to build. The debate over how Muslims, Jews, and other non-Christians could participate in the French state would become, as this chapter shows, a furious battleground in defining the break with the ancien régime, and the complexion of a new France.

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• The Muslim Republic

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-03-20

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  This chapter traces the growing interconnection with the Ottoman Empire, and in particular the North African powers, who rejected pressures to join the coalition against France and became increasingly critical partners in economic, military, and diplomatic terms. Algiers at the time was in rapid transformation, a kind of “republic” analogous to France, adapting to the new geopolitical context. North Africans were crossing to France with greater frequency, so much so that the Algerians hoped to establish a passenger ferry between the two countries. As republican France articulated a new openness to Islam, Algeria began to view the republic as a friend and partner rather than a religious enemy. In France, older fears of the barbarian pirates were giving way to the new conceptions of Muslims, but could still exert considerable force. The <italic>dey</italic> of Algiers demonstrated particular support for the new French Republic, offering financial support that would never be repaid, and which would ultimately serve as a catalyst for the French invasion of Algeria four decades later.

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Frequent coauthors

• Alice Garner

  University of Melbourne

  1 shared

• Richard Flamein

  1 shared

• Natacha Coquery

  Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1

  1 shared

• Bill Murray

  1 shared

• Adrian Jones

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of Melbourne

  2006