The Destruction of the Islamic State of Being, Its Replacement in the Being of the State: Algeria 1830-47

Abstract

If settler colonies are driven by the impulse of destroying to replace, what was destroyed and how was it replaced in Algeria? This article shows how an Islamic state of being was replaced by the being of the state in the 1830s and the ‘40s; a transformation largely achieved through complementary strategies of spectacular and slow violence, ranging from annihilatory massacres to the seizure of the productive capacity of peoples and their lands. By listening attentively to indigenous writers such as Hamdan Khodja and Ahmed Bey, alongside the banal details of the making of empire found in archival documents, a new picture of the development of ‘Algeria’ emerges, along with its significance in world history.