During the First World War, over 300,000 Muslim Algerian colonial subjects traveled to France as soldiers and workers, participating in every major battle of the Western Front. The Algerian homefront was also fully mobilized - in addition to military and labor conscription, France pursued a policy of extensive material extraction, shipping tens of thousands of sheep and literally tons of grain to France along with mules, horses, ploughs, and other essential goods. Yet, myriad questions about the Algerian home front remain unanswered: How did the wholesale mobilization of Algerian society change the relationship of Muslim colonial subjects to the French state? How did military service change Algerians' perceptions and expectations of France, and how did the prerogatives of empire shape France's response to colonial conscripts’ demands for the rights of citizenship? This paper explores the relationship between the Algerian social experience of the First World War, and the early development of Algerian national consciousness. Although it is commonly accepted that Algerian nationalism entered a new phase of development in the wake of the First World War, we know surprisingly little about the role of the war experience in fueling its emergence. This omission is all the more surprising when we consider the almost complete absence of nationalist movements in Algeria prior to the First World War, and when we consider the central role of émigré workers and soldiers in the emergence of Algerian nationalism. Drawing upon military records, the accounts of ethnographers and petitions written by Algerians, this paper examines how Muslim participation in the French war effort enbled, not only soldiers, but diverse groups of Algerian colonial subjects to make new kinds of claims on the colonial state. Despite the efforts of administrators to draw a strict boundariy between subject-soldiers and citizen-soldiers, Muslim military service fundamentally altered the nature of the colonial relationship. Conscription exposed colonial subjects to a wider social, political and technological world while highlighting their unequal status. The war forged a new culture of contentious politics, by providing Algerians with a conceptual vocabulary of national identity and legitimizing their demands for enfranchisement.My current project re-conceptualizes the history of citizenship and national identity in the French Empire through this case study of the dialectic between state policy and the consolidation of sub-altern identity in Algeria.