From the initial French occupation of Algiers in 1830 to the end of direct colonial rule in 1962, the government of Algeria went through many permutations. After dedicating themselves to direct colonization of the territory at the end of the 1830s, the French were largely concerned with establishing physical, military control over the coastal and plains regions of the north. By the end of the 1850s, however, focus had turned to governance or management of the colony. This shift came with a break between the civilian administration (supported by the bulk of colonists), and the military regime (the de facto representative of the Algerians). The negotiation among these various interests in the 1860s – especially as concerned environmental challenges – changed the exercise and appearance of power in Algeria. Through examination of official correspondence, published memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and available environmental data, this paper traces the creation of what came to be a modern colonial “state” in Algeria through the formative years of 1860-1871. Environmental tests of governance and administration – combating epidemics of cholera and typhus, the challenge of maintaining crops through seasons of drought and locust invasion, the ongoing need to supply the larger coastal towns and colonial centers with clean water – brought together various colonial factions and led to the creation or expansion of “modern” tactics of governance and organization, creating a set of apparatuses that took on the appearance of a “state.” In effect, environmental policies created the state itself. This state was a shifting and amorphous congeries of tactics and practices, but nevertheless had a salience and power for the people of Algeria – settlers and autochthonous Algerians alike. While the “state” continued to be unsettled throughout the remainder of the colonial period, the broader contours of what could be identified as a “modern state” appeared for the first time through the environmental challenges of this period.

The paper explores the French discourse regarding agricultural reform in Mandate Syria, and evaluates the ways in which it translated into the use of technologies on the ground, with real impacts on the environment. By exploring the extent to which modern agricultural technologies were implemented, it evaluates how well the colonial discourses reflected realities and the deployment of technologies on the ground. By the early 1920s, the French mandatory authorities in Syria had generated plans for "developing" the region agriculturally. In a discourse that harkened back to a Syria hailed as one of Rome’s richest breadbaskets, they proclaimed a project already under study in anticipation of receiving the mandate to rule Syria. Following its imposition, French official discourse enthusiastically projected great returns from the use of motoculture and other advances in agricultural technologies. The paper uses a report entitled L’Agriculture en Syrie et en Palestine, which was compiled by Paul Parmentier, a member of the French mission sent to Syria after the Congrés française de la Syrie held in Marseille in January 1919, and published for a wider audience in 1922. The report details his observations on the state of agriculture in Syria as reference points for the terms in which agricultural reform was initially framed. However, as attempts to increase production of certain crops such as silk and cotton did not immediately generate the expected, optimistic results, the colonial discourse on agricultural reforms shifted. The paper thus also gauges responses to the impact and achievements of the reforms by analyzing contemporaneous periodicals and reports on the state of agricultural activities and the employment of agricultural technologies. In 1935, Mohammed Sarrage, a Syrian student at the University of Toulouse, published his dissertation La Nécessité d’une Réforme Agraire en Syrie. His dissertation exposes how the actual policies of the mandatory state had not followed through on the promises of its initial rhetoric. Furthermore, while acknowledging the potential benefits of modern technology he points out that additional projects such as a system for its repair as well as education in its use—both of which are lacking—are necessary to realize any such benefits. Sarrage’s views on the nature and scope of the agricultural reforms expose the distance between the discourse of the French mandatory authorities and their actual policies and reveal the expectations of a Syrian nationalist who would later join the resistance to French rule.

This paper challenges the pervasiveness of the French colonial narrative on the Beni Hilal invasions of the eleventh century C.E. It uses sources from the colonial forestry service in 1930's Morocco to introduce a narrative critical of the prevailing “modernist” interpretations of the Beni Hilali incursions in North Africa, and their impact on the local environment. The first wave of French colonizers, who equated sedentary, export-oriented agriculture with modern civilization, believed the Beni Hilal invaded North Africa like a swarm of locusts in the 11th century , imported their nomadic, uncivilized modus vivendi and disrupted the inevitable progress of the native (Christian) Berber civilization. In the 1930s, conventional scholarship on the Beni Hilal posited arguments consistent with the ideology and hierarchies of the civilizing mission. The French civilizing mission would implant a modern, enlightened governance where previously there had been only chaos. In doing so, they would free the current descendants of the Beni Hilal from their self-destructive social, political and economic conditions that had enslaved them for the past eight hundred years . This paper argues, however, that dissent from the dominant paradigms of French historiography existed at the heart of the colonial endeavor. Revisions to the Beni Hilal narrative, done by scholars and foresters attached to the French forestry service in Morocco in the 1930s and 1940s, reveal that the official discourse on the topic had its detractors long before more recent “post-colonial “ assessments of the Hilali invasions. The reports produced by the French forestry service during the 30s and 40s faulted colonialism for inflicting serious harm on the welfare and environment of North Africans. While they prescribed different solutions to contemporaneous conditions, the reports generally advocated a return to pre-colonial environmental policies. Aside from exposing some of the inherent contradictions of the colonial regime , the varying reports by the French forestry service also challenge the main tenets of the standard historiography of North African history.

This paper examines France’s developmental policies in Algeria on the eve of the war of independence. It argues that despite the colonial commitment to the ideals of the civilizing mission, France’s policies of mise en valeur, or “rational development,” drew on the logic of assimilation and universalism, even while, in practice, they repeatedly contradicted these egalitarian principles. Just as the ethnographic scholarship from the 1930s emphasized the existence of a so-called indigenous habitat, the later schemes to industrialize Algeria relied on the “traditions” of the natives, resulting in the Plan de Constantine (1959-1963). Indeed, in formulating this plan, French practitioners continually misread the root cause of the afflictions they sought to address. Rather than look to the daily economic and political realities in a given context, colonial policy-makers relied on theories of acclimatization, religious fervor, biological difference, and cultural resistance to explain native dissent to colonial rule. The debates on the Plan de Constantine elucidate the ways in which colonial technocrats relied on civilizational hierarchies in articulating notions of efficiency and material progress. Thus, this paper aims to show how French notions of cultural and technological superiority were instrumental to the formulation of economic programs and development projects. While many scholars regard colonial policies of development after World War II as a means of reforming an overtly exploitative system, this paper demonstrates that developmental and scientific ideologies were consistent with Enlightenment views of progress, which claimed that France’s technical prowess would be able to subdue the Algerian population while serving both colonial and native interests. Indeed, the French colonial authorities in Algeria maintained that there were universally valid stages through which humanity had to evolve, and they applied this reasoning to various domains of policy-making, from education to economics. This drive for a universal template of human and economic development underpinned France’s civilizing ideology, which sought to instill a more “rational” spirit in the Algerian population so that the natives would be able to master their social and physical environment more effectively. In short, while the colonial emphasis on material progress was renewed in the mid-twentieth century, it had long been a constitutive element in France’s civilizing mission.