Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship

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.