‘Water mania!’: drought and the rhetoric of rule in nineteenth-century Algeria

Abstract

This article explores the confluence of water crisis and social-political power in the 1860s in Algeria. An unprecedented series of environmental events – ongoing drought, locust invasion, the outbreak of epidemic disease – conspired with the privations of three decades of colonial rule to kill around 800,000 people between 1865 and 1870. This crisis was the impetus for a reconfiguration of the practice and discourse of water control and hygiene into a unique architecture of power relations. The colonial state appeared in this environment as a singular, unitary entity that could act on the environment for the benefit of society. Actions such as washing streets, repairing wells, building dams, and mandating hygienic measures to protect the population suggested a coherence of power different from what had existed in the colony previously. This apparent coherence, I argue, was an effect brought about by the confluence of hydraulic infrastructural projects, settler rhetoric about water, hygiene, and modernity, and massive environmental crisis. Rather than demonstrating the coherence of state practice, a focus on water allows us to see how the apparently external combination of environmental crises brought disparate social processes together in a relationship that evoked a unitary state.