Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship - by Avner Ofrath (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book explores citizenship politics in colonial Algeria, which became a key battlefield for struggles over participation of the body politic and the reach of universal promise in 1789. In examining these struggles, Avner Ofrath shows how colonialism dissolved the political community as a frame of participation and negotiation, first in the colonies and ultimately in the metropole.

Revealing the racialization of citizenship from the late 19th century onwards, this book shows how lawmakers under the Third French Republic construed colonial subjugation around rigid ethnic-religious criteria in order to protect settler privileges and exclude Algerian Muslims. Portraying Islam as oppressive and unmodern, the exclusion and othering of Muslims led to a concept of citizenship that was deeply hostile to religious difference.

Despite this, Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship shows how Algeria witnessed some of the most powerful contestations of racialized citizenship seen in a colony. From a successful Jewish campaign for full political rights in the 1860s, to Muslims' demand for reform in the 1930s, Algerians insisted on Maghribi languages, religions and history as indispensable dimensions of political life. Tracing intellectual and political networks throughout the Maghrib, the Mashriq, and across the Mediterranean, Avner Ofrath weaves Algeria into a global history of citizenship in the age of empire.

Review Quotes

Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship offers a sorely needed study of the politics of legal status in French Algeria. Drawing on fascinating and often surprising sources, Ofrath deftly demonstrates that colonial projects of inclusion and exclusion were not limited to Algeria's borders, but shaped the nature of belonging in France itself.
Jessica Marglin, Associate Professor of Religion, Law, and History and Ruth Ziegler Early Career Chair in Jewish Studies, University of Southern California, USA

Avner Ofrath's excellent book shows that citizenship was an ever-shifting site of political contestation in colonial Algeria, bringing Muslims, Jews, and French people into both conflict and productive debate about the ways that "unity" need not mean "uniformity." Richly documented, the book has obvious relevance to contemporary debates about citizenship.
Joshua Cole, Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA

This important book demonstrates how the French colonial regime in Algeria was dominated throughout its history by a hierarchy of racial, confessional, and ethnic differences. But, in doing so, it also provides a much wider insight into the ways in which citizenship was constructed in the borderlands of modern Europe.
Martin Conway, Professor of Contemporary European History, University of Oxford, UK

About the Author

Avner Ofrath is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bremen, Germany. He is working on a major project on the coming of Judeo-Arabic political writing. He received his PhD from the University of Oxford, UK, in 2018.