ABSTRACT
Between 1830 and 1962, Algeria came under French colonial rule. Unlike other French colonies, Algeria was annexed and made officially a part of France in 1848. It became a settler colony almost immediately after the wars of conquest, which largely ended in 1847. The French claimed that its laws applied to all of Algeria, but the legal framework in fact privileged European rights over those of the majority Muslim population. Scholarship related to the complexities of France’s ostensibly egalitarian legal taxonomy in Algeria has thus grown considerably in the past two decades. But literature on the material structure of Algeria’s settler colonial system has remained relatively slim in comparison. This chapter shows that French jurisdiction in Algeria not only resulted in inequities in the regime of rights but that it also ensured that access to land and labor would remain asymmetrical between the European minority and Muslim Algerian majority.
