Le Désordre colonial: l’Algérie à l’épreuve de la colonisation de peuplement par Hosni Kitouni (review)

This engaging book re-examines the first century of Algeria’s colonial era (1830 – c. 1914), framing its engagement through the insights of settler colonial studies. This emerging field focuses on colonies planned for landed settlement by outsiders with policies typified by the ‘logic of elimination’ (Patrick Wolfe), or the notion that the lands needed by settlers required the expulsion or extermination of local people. While the settler approach has attracted scholars from around the world, few have taken up its questions for the French empire, and this book represents a rare French-language contribution to the field. Settler studies allow Hosni Kitouni to seek different perspectives to understand colonialism in Algeria, ultimately arguing that it tied itself singularly to realizing the economic and demographic success of European settlers. This conclusion makes less pressing older debates about this period that centred on shifts between civilian and military governance, along with something of an obsessional interest in untangling the internal personality struggles within the French administration, which tended to reduce colonial policy to a lutte des clans. Even as his book brings Algeria into new fields, Kitouni reconnects with earlier Algerian historiographic traditions represented by scholars such as Mostefa Lacheraf, who wrote searing accounts of French colonialism in the decades after independence. Indeed, I would place Kitouni’s effort to use history to ‘nous réapproprier notre part d’Humanité’ (p. 19) alongside Assia Djebar’s work in her canonical novel L’Amour, la fantasia to ‘reconstitue[r], à mon tour, cette nuit’ ((Paris: J.-C. Lattès, 1985), p. 84). Kitouni divides the book into four parts. The first part begins with the settlement and elimination discourses of the 1830s. Part Two addresses military practices in the 1830s to 1871, which he calls ‘par le feu et par la faim’, an ironic retake of General Bugeaud’s famous saying that colonization proceeded ‘par l’épée et par la charrue’. The book ends in an examination of land transfers (Part Three) and tax policy (Part Four). Here Kitouni shows how racialized law extracted Algerians’ wealth and labour to build white settler society. Specialists may feel they know this era well enough from other accounts; however, Kitouni makes important new contributions. His account of the mass asphyxiations in the Dahra mountains, the most infamous atrocity of Algeria’s nineteenth century, is the most detailed and complete to date, and it includes several new sources. His case studies of land confiscation and the punitive responses to forest fires also stand out. Kitouni uses his work in the little-explored archives housed in Constantine to give a fine-grained illustration of the way that the state expropriated Algerian property. Writing this process from the Algerian perspective, Kitouni brings out the Kafkaesque dimensions of the land transfer, as well as the response of Algerians to the loss of their property, including an 1883 petition to the French president. This is Kitouni’s second book, following La Kabylie orientale dans l’histoire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013), and he comes to history after a career in documentary filmmaking. This latest book is soundly researched, heartfelt, and engaged. Along with its contributions of interest to historians, Kitouni’s project to use history to reclaim the colonial past will interest readers of decolonization, postcolonial studies, and decolonial thinking.