Counterfeit Money, Currency Trafficking, and Anxious Rule in the Late Tunisian Protectorate

On July 3rd, 1936, the Director of the Bank of Algeria and Tunisia issued a report to the ministry of Finances in France warning that currency trafficking networks in the Tunisian protectorate were “growing even beyond the borders of the colony”. This paper looks at this document, among other official reports of French authorities in the Tunisian protectorate, to follow issues of counterfeit money and currency trafficking, especially from the 1930s onwards when new sets of coins and banknotes were issued. Counterfeit money has been considered a threat to authority and labeled an offense across regimes and eras. In the context of the Tunisian protectorate, reports on counterfeit money help us decipher the anxieties of colonial power. Instead of viewing criminality and fraud as a given category, this paper considers how crimes are productive historical threads to follow, which can help us analyze the limits of rule and control. To that extent, this paper asks: Why did counterfeit money become a site of anxiety for French authorities? How do reports on currency and counterfeit money enlighten the nature of colonial power as “anxious power”? Indeed, French officials described fake currency as the material symptom of subterranean networks they could not see or tame, but that were threatening the colony. Through these official documents, this paper examines how attempts to materialize money into currency produce the “possibility of the simulacrum” (Derrida 1992, 46) and brings together the material alterations on a currency and the moral claims at stake. Precisely because they are make-believe forms, fake coins threaten official currency and therefore the modes of governance through money. Ultimately, this paper argues that the struggles over the material form of money, unique or reproducible, fake or real, reveals anxieties of power in a colonial setting.