The Historiographic State: How Algeria Once Became French

Abstract

In this article the author seeks to explain how a foreign country, spatially remote and culturally different, was turned, in the matter of few decades, into a French territory. He shows that historical knowledge was the means by which colonialism operated to govern Algeria and to make it part and parcel of French soil. Unlike the ethnographic state described by Nicholas Dirks in the case of India, the colonial state in Algeria, once similarly ethnographic with the Arab Bureaux, became historiographic after their collapse and the advent of the civilian regime which championed and practised large‐scale appropriation of local land and the establishment of European settlements. In this new context, historical knowledge became the dominant mode of knowledge by which a colonial state substantiated and validated itself. This article shows then the dynamics and complexities involved in the production of historical knowledge and its instrumentalization in the colonial project.