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Review, James McDougall, A History of Algeria

Article  in  The American Historical Review · October 2018

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1434 Reviews of Books
that acted in unison. Likewise, Marglin illustrates the
ways in which Muslim Moroccans also held divergent
conceptions about legal dealings with their Jewish compa-
triots.
More broadly, Marglin’s work illuminates the historical
processes by which modern conceptions of “Jew” and
“Muslim” became reified and hardened against the back-
drop of nineteenth-century globalization, French colonial-
ism, and emergent nationalist discourses. Yet this work is
no apologetic for discrimination against Jews within Mo-
roccan society; nor is it a romanticization of the precolo-
nial period. Indeed, the author emphasizes that Moroccan
Jews—like Jews and Christians in other parts of the Mus-
lim Mediterranean world—held a special legal status as
dhimmīs (protected religious minorities), who ultimately
occupied a second-tier legal position vis-à-vis their Mus-
lim counterparts. Although “significant social and legal
boundaries separated Jews from Muslims . . . these bound-
aries were porous” (76).
Across Legal Lines is accessible to the nonspecialist, is
clearly written, and is thoroughly researched. It offers a
welcome and extremely significant intervention in the his-
tories of Muslim majority societies, of Jewish and legal
histories, and of the Moroccan experience of moderniza-
tion and French colonization. Through a nuanced reading
of a diverse array of legal and administrative archival
sources, Marglin not only brings to life the legal maneu-
vers of the Assarraf family, but also cogently demonstrates
that in Morocco “it is no longer possible to imagine Jews
as isolated, within either their own communities or their
own legal systems” (76).
SAHAR BAZZAZ
College of the Holy Cross
JAMES MCDOUGALL. A History of Algeria. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 432. $29.99.
To write a modern history of Algeria, James McDougall
chooses as his starting point the Ottoman phase of Algeria,
when it was a beylek of that empire, and provides a de-
tailed account of the land and people, cities, religious prac-
tices, and, of course, the many political events of that era.
He thus prepares his readers to enter the modern period of
Algeria’s colonization. A History of Algeria details the se-
quential events that led to colonization, including con-
quests of both land and population, and local resistance to
these, from the resistance of Abd al-Qadir in the 1830s
and 1840s to that of Shaykh al-Muqrani in 1871. It is as if
McDougall wants these events to speak for themselves,
and until chapter 6, he does not provide explanations, only
narrations. For instance, in the events that led up to the
creation of the régime de l’indigénat (“‘native status’ reg-
ulations,” 125), the rule of the army, and the naturalization
of the Jews by the Crémieux decree (1870), an important
explanation is missing. The reader may not know why the
French implemented the code de l’indigénat, what this
code entailed, or why the Jews but not the Muslims be-
came French—that is, why the French state was both un-
able and unwilling to make the entire population French.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Racial explanations of colonial policies are required to
make sense of these events. One of the particularities of
colonialism, and not only in Algeria, is that it reconfigured
local populations via racial categories and divisions. This
instituted race into the very fabric of society. This legacy
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can still be seen in Algeria today (for instance, in the op-
position of Arab versus Kabyle, which is profoundly ra-
cialized).
The chapter about the Algerian war for independence is
remarkable, and it is undoubtedly the highlight of the
book. McDougall gives a detailed, extremely useful, and
readable account of the dynamics of the war, the history of
the resistance, and the composition of the factions and
individuals that constituted the National Liberation Front
(FLN) that led the war against French occupation from
1954 to 1962. However, at the end of the war, in this nar-
rative, we see the European population leaving Algeria,
but we do not see how France left. The author does not
mention the important manifesto in which the FLN offered
negotiations for independence in exchange for preserving
French interests in the region. The Évian Accords are
mentioned, but their contents are not specified or dis-
cussed. France mysteriously disappears from the narrative
after 1962, as if it had not left any legacy, or was totally
disinterested in the former colony in its own backyard
(France continued to own Algerian oil, for example). In
this narrative, the United States is continuously present af-
ter independence, including, importantly, during the Alge-
rian civil war. But not France. Yet France, and its alleged
involvement in internal affairs, is a significant presence in
the narratives of the Algerian masses, and among Islamists
in particular. In many declarations, the Islamic Salvation
Front (FIS), for example, pointed to France as a major pro-
tagonist in the civil war. McDougall instead privileges
interviews with politicians and academics whose views in-
form a narrative that tends to ignore the legacy of France
in post-independence Algeria.
The book is particularly engaging where it focuses on
economic concerns. In one important section, McDougall
analyzes the economic conditions that led to the opening
up of the political system and eventually to civil war. The
author then makes the argument that the state stands
against society and that “Algeria’s rulers had chosen to
perpetuate the system, and to do so through ‘the manage-
ment of society by violence’” (289). However, it is not
clear what “the state” means in his narrative. Sometimes
McDougall equates the state with the FLN (239); other
times the FLN is “a façade behind which hides the power
of the State” (Mohammed Harbi, quoted on 245, 254).
Sometimes it is “a balance of factions of which Boume-
diene was the architect and arbiter” (256); elsewhere, the
state is equated with le pouvoir (271), and at other times
with the regime (254) or the rulers. Sometimes the author
wants to be specific and mentions the center of the state,
or the state’s centers (295).
This difficulty of defining the state is understandable,
and stems from the fact that the state is one of the most
mystical, elusive concepts in the social sciences—to the
point that its very existence has been questioned. But,
OCTOBER 2018
 Middle East and Northern Africa
combined with the confusion over what the state is in post-
colonial Algeria, McDougall makes judgments in a slip-
pery way that does not help the reader. “However much
material progress such a regime could achieve, it would be
incapable of opening itself to real popular participation
and thus to genuine popular enfranchisement—and its vio-
lence, remaining above the law, would not soon give way
to the rule of law” (255). Whether the state is the FLN or
the army, or les généraux (army generals), as the Algerian
people call them in the streets, the idea that society is man-
aged by violence is not unique to Algeria. All societies are
managed by violence. Violence is inherent in the very
concept of society, as the works of Karl Marx, Max We-
ber, Vilfredo Pareto, Hannah Arendt, and others have
shown. In fact, state violence (in this case, as well) is prac-
ticed through the law and by the law; hence its ultimate tri-
umph.
Connected to this point, the reader of this dense book
will also notice patterns in the violence of the civil war
that look very familiar yet go unexplained. Why is the vio-
lence of the 1990s strangely similar to the violence of the
war of independence? Why do the violent practices of the
army and even the various Islamist actors also seem identi-
cal to the violent practices of the colonial state and the
FLN during the Algerian War? Rather than mere coinci-
dences, these similarities are indicative of the fact that
there is continuity between colonial and postcolonial
times. A postcolonial perspective would have undoubt-
edly shown that, yes, there has been a transformation of
Algerian society since independence, but not a rupture. In
the recent modern history of Algeria, the old actors of the
colonial era are also present, and this includes France.
Hence the fact that, as in colonial times, the war of Algeria
in the 1990s was brought to France—via terrorist attacks
within the metropole itself.
All in all, the book contains a wealth of information and
is useful for students and scholars of Algeria, especially
the ones patient enough to go through the meticulous
details of the narrative. The unique feature of this history
of Algeria is that it covers, in addition to earlier modern
phases, the period after 1992, despite the challenges in-
volved. As McDougall himself acknowledges, the context
of these years is that “of a fundamentally unresolved con-
flict” (292). However, the reader may disagree with the
author that “the tools necessary to the indispensable criti-
cism of the sources are lacking” for this period (292).
There is a rich literature on the study of violence—
resolved and unresolved—especially by historians and
anthropologists working on a variety of geographical
areas. It is regrettable that the author ignored it.
ABDELMAJID HANNOUM
University of Kansas
ADAM MESTYAN. Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Cul-
ture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. vi, 356. $45.00.
In 1829, Sultan Mahmud II issued a clothing law for the
Ottoman Empire. It required most state officials to dress in
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
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European-style clothes and to wear the fez, rather than the
venerable turban—Ottoman naval officers had picked up a
habit of wearing the former after returning to Istanbul
from the western Mediterranean a few years prior. Histori-
ans tend to regard this move as a step in the direction of
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massively reorganizing and rationalizing the Ottoman
state during the official Tanzimat period (1839–1876). I
recounted in my earlier work a much less noted episode of
sartorial politics from the end of the same century, which
also featured an intimate exchange between the eastern
and western Mediterranean. In this case, the young Egyp-
tian nationalist Mustafa Kamil reported an unsettling en-
counter he had had with Algerians at the Lyon Interna-
tional and Colonial Exhibition in the summer of 1894.
These men, dressed in native garb and playing at guarding
the Algerian pavilion of a typical world exhibition, ques-
tioned Kamil about the Egyptians of his class who had
taken to mimicking European dress in their own land.
They left him literally speechless.
Adam Mestyan, who ends his study with the figure of
Mustafa Kamil, shows us how we might interpret the mo-
ment of speechlessness not as silence but as marking a dis-
cursive and ideological shift that was quite voluble in ap-
posite, new, “public” spaces. In Arab Patriotism: The Ide-
ology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt,
Mestyan draws on an impressive array of sources from
multiple archives to provide a fine-grained analysis of
how elite Arabic-speaking Egyptians moved from a condi-
tion of ease with being in wider networks of multi-axial
cultural exchanges (between easts and wests of all sorts)
to a condition of unease, which was accompanied by the
purifying impulses of nationalism. The roping of patriot-
ism to nationalist ends in Egypt by the 1890s also entailed
the narrowing of cultural axes to an East and West now
freighted by the very transformations in sovereign capaci-
ties of the subject and of the state (and in turn in the con-
ception of sovereignty) that prior generations had in com-
plex ways made possible.
The book excavates in fine detail those complex ways
in which Egyptians and Arabic speakers who came to
Egypt from Damascus, Beirut, and Tunis developed a pa-
triotic discourse and deployed it in different registers at
different points in time. Mestyan also attends to how these
discourses were translated, received, and responded to by
the local (khedivial) and imperial (sultanic) rulers. There-
fore, Arab Patriotism is one more work that has heeded
the call of revisionists from Middle Eastern and other re-
gional contexts to reinterpret national development as part
and parcel of the history of empire. A reconstruction of
the history of modern theater in Egypt and of the various
often forgotten personas associated with it anchors
Mestyan’s inquiry into this history of political transforma-
tion in the Middle East. By exploring this previously
understudied institution and its many unknown characters,
he offers us greater insight into the networked fashioning
of Arab patriotism and the related restructuring of
Ottoman-Egyptian relations in the nineteenth century.
Mestyan is at his best when he excavates and recon-
structs lines connecting diverse and often obscure individ-
OCTOBER 2018