The commission of delegates from the bey in Tunis rode the frontier. Marking certain hills, certain wells, and the movements of regional tribes, they described the border to the French Marshal Jacque-Louis Randon. This work created a line for cartographers delineating the frontier between the two powers in 1846. That line’s functionality?its reality as a boundary?was the base of modern sovereign power along the frontier. But how to make that power a reality? Few people who lived in the region in 1846 believed in the border. For instance, border crossings in 1851 were of such a problematic nature that the Algerian and Tunisian authorities agreed another border commission was necessary. In 1861 tensions along the same frontier resulted in the French military deputizing local Algerians to police the border. In 1852 and 1856, 1865 and 1872, 1883 and 1916 we can find similar stories – all indicating the profound unreliability of the border as boundary. This indetermination of the border is a reflection of the indeterminate articulation of modernity in the colonial project. Far from a failure of modern sovereignty, this indeterminacy should be seen as a central component of it. These and other incidents suggest a reading of the border that puts the ongoing practice of “bordering” into conversation with other aspects of social change associated with the appearance of modernity in the region. The bounding of the world into discrete binaries?nature/culture, economy/society, modern/traditional, inside/outside?was the product of repeated performances of those boundaries. The Algerian-Tunisian border is one site where we can watch this performance and the reality it created. This paper will explore how the frontiers of modernity in Algeria depended on the repeated performance of the boundaries between interior and exterior. Based on bureaucratic correspondence, military reports, and colonial newspapers, this paper demonstrates that the limits of modernizing sovereignty in North Africa were produced and reproduced through the constant repetition of boundary performance.

This paper explores the political history of property rights in contemporary Algeria. Specifically, it examines how colonial efforts to usurp land, as well as post-colonial attempts break with that order, have created a palimpsest of property rights in the country, each level with its own set of aggrieved claimants. Colonial administrators in French Algeria went to great pains to mark their sovereignty over that land. Algeria was France and thus in addition to carefully demarcating territorial boundaries, the government sought to show a continuity of institutions and market practices from Paris to Tamanrasset. In order to draw a settler population to legitimize those claims, France needed land, a land market, and property laws. Customary and Sharia law, on which antecedent property regimes were based, needed to be erased in order to transform land from a socially-bounded asset into a commodity, what Henri Lefebre refers to as “abstract space” (1991). French efforts to totally erase antecedent social and legal institutions were unsuccessful. France in Algeria existed, though it was fragmentary and variegated across space: the state had neither the administration nor the settler population to evenly occupy and transform Algerian space into “abstract space.” At independence, the government nationalized colonial land and property. Whereas France had tried to transform land into a commodity to be freely exchanged, unencumbered by social claims, the new regime transformed land into a collective, national good. Land was not restituted to its pre-colonial owners. The property market was frozen until the mid-1980s, when Algeria embarked on a pathway of economic liberalization. Neither colonial France nor the post-colonial regime were able to fully erase antecedent property rights institutions or claims to land. Like a palimpsest, new property regimes have painted over older institutions at multiple periods. Whereas the institutions might have disappeared, claims to the land those institutions adjudicated have aggregated. Contention over land and property – over 30% of protest movements in 2011 were linked to land and property – is a stark reminder of the impact colonial legacies on issues viewed as ‘ancient’ have on contemporary politics in the MENA region.

Drawing on archival research conducted at the French Archives Nationale d’Outre Mer, this paper argues that the French colonial administration viewed religious sound, and particularly the Islamic adhan, or call to prayer, as a significant site of political resistance and thus an important locus of political control. Building on research that has documented the thoroughgoing spatial, architectural, and societal change effected by the French administration, and in conversation with administrative records on state-mosque relations, surveillance, and operations, I demonstrate that French domination in Algeria also manifested through a control of the urban soundscape. Research on colonial French modes of governance that consider the sonic realm at all has focused overwhelmingly on the importance of radio in Algerian resistance efforts and in the eventual War of Independence. Such work, perhaps most evocatively typified by Franz Fanon, has deepened our understanding of international networks, listening practices, and Algerian opposition strategies, yet it rarely deals squarely with the modality of power that undergirds radio’s revolutionary capacity, namely, sound itself. In highlighting sound’s relevance as a mechanism of power that controls both territory and population in colonial Algeria, I establish historical precedence for French state control of Islamic sounds—a precedent that must be taken into account in the contemporary political moment in relation to debates on the call to prayer and the role of a public soundscape in structuring citizenship and national identity in postcolonial France.

This paper draws on records from the National Archives in Tunisia and the Center for Diplomatic Archives in France in order to evaluate how French rule interacted with the ‘waqf,’ or religious endowment, system in Tunisia. Many scholars have argued that pre-colonial land institutions have long run effects on investments in local areas and economic development. In line with these arguments, I demonstrate that, despite attempts by the French colons to expand French land ownership in the protectorate, these endowments presented an important challenge to French rule and expansion. I argue that the French administration’s changes to the property rights regime in Tunisia did not resolve significant issues with the endowment system and, in some cases, complicated later efforts at land reform. Moreover, the French colonial regime’s attempt to control land and redefine property rights had important political implications. Historians generally agree that the endowments provided local elites with an independent economic base and, in particular, the endowments associated with particular mosques or madrasas provided religious scholars with a private economic base that allowed them to maintain greater independence vis-à-vis the state. With the arrival of the French in 1881 and the transformation of the endowments, the distribution of power among local elites was also transformed, with the French regime favoring its own local agents and certain economic elites involved in agriculture and trade. Importantly, the differential effect of colonial endowment policy also had repercussions for geographic and class representation in Tunisia's nationalist movement and post-independence government.