During World War II, police officers in Marseille and Algiers relentlessly hunted North African black market operatives. Hundreds of reports from these two cities detail the actions taken to prevent individuals from selling contraband goods, exceeding fixed market prices, or ignoring rationing protocols. In police reports, the figure of the North African profiteer is omnipresent, but internal communication acknowledged that Europeans profited from the black market, too. Why, then, the fixation on North Africans as the key to the black market? In this paper, I argue that police and administrative discourses developed a narrative of Algerians as “internal enemies” of France, a population willing at any moment to undermine the French war effort. In this context, police suspicion that Algerians harbored pro-German sympathies dovetailed with their growing certainty that Algerians were denizens of the black market. In drawing a link between Marseille and Algiers, one a colonial city and the other metropolitan, this paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of Mediterranean networks of knowledge and migration for understanding colonial police practice. With the cosmopolitan, Mediterranean population of Marseille and Algiers, police officers found skin color inadequate to define who was “North African,” instead constructing ideas of race inscribed in language, dress, custom, and, perhaps most importantly, space. Police officers in both cities wove a spatial understanding of black market activity that relied on racialized understandings of urban space. In Marseille, the police efforts to repress the black market focused on Rue des Chapeliers, the heart of Marseille’s North African immigrant neighborhood, while in Algiers, the police scoured the streets of the Casbah. In seeking “anti-French” Algerian black market operatives, the police arrested individuals, but they approached Algerians as a collective threat, targeting neighborhoods the police understood as Algerian. Reading “against the grain” of police reports, this paper explores how the police themselves helped create the imaginary of the Algerian black marketeer and how the tactics police used to control this supposed threat brought them into the lives of ordinary Algerians whose connection to a shadowy black market world was tenuous at best.

On July the 3rd of 1936, the Director of the Bank of Algeria and Tunisia issued a report on new measures to protect the colonial currency. He warned that currency trafficking networks in the Tunisian protectorate were “growing even beyond the borders of the colony” because natives “lacked an economic education” and couldn’t decipher between real and fake currency. This paper looks at this archive among other official reports circulating between French authorities in the Tunisian protectorate focusing specifically on reports from the 1930s when new sets of coins and banknotes were issued. I interrogate the issue of counterfeit money and fake currencies during the French colonial period in the Tunisian Protectorate. Counterfeit money has across times been considered a threat to authority and is labeled as an offense across regimes and periods. However, in the context of the Tunisian protectorate, reports that mention counterfeit money can help us decipher the anxieties of rule and the limits to colonial power. Instead of viewing criminality and fraud as a given category, this paper considers how crimes are productive historical threads to follow and that can help us analyze the limits of rule and control. To that extent, this paper asks: Why did counterfeit money become a site of anxiety for French authorities? How do reports on currency and counterfeit money enlighten on the nature of colonial power as « anxious power »? By reading “along the grain” (Stoler 2009), this paper analyzes how French officials described fake currency as the material symptom of subterranean networks that were threatening the colony. These counterfeit coins, rumored to circulate provoked a set of anxieties over the power to govern. In contrast, other reports of that era, detail the making of official currency forms and emphasize material uniqueness as a sign of authority. By putting reports on counterfeit and those on official currency in conversation, this paper examines how attempts to materialize money into currency produce the “possibility of the simulacrum” (Derrida 1992, 46) and brings together the relation between material alterations and moral claims over what's “real”. In doing so, I read French archives on money as an assemblage of different documents where the anxiety of fraud, and by extension of colonial authority, always seem present. Ultimately this paper argues that the struggles over the material form of money, as unique or reproducible, fake or real unravels anxieties of power in a colonial setting.

The period after 1945 in Algeria was one of belated reform across the political and socio-economic spectrum. One such reform project concerned the integration of poverty relief for so-called Europeans and Muslims. This paper focuses on the administrative machinations the Mayor of Oran deployed to make this integrated charity a reality. In addition to private charities, two French state establishments engaged in poor relief: hospitals and bureau de bienfaisance (charity offices). These charity offices were divided along colonial categories: there were charity offices for Muslims and charity offices for Europeans. One particularity of the Muslim charity office was its funding structure. While the European charity office was funded through fundraising and state subsidies, the Muslim charity office was funded through habous or religious donations. Among the post-1945 reforms, a decree was issued that ordered the fusion of the two charity offices. This order went largely un-enforced, but when Mayors and administrators attempted to follow through on this fusion order, they ran into significant obstacles. While the European charity offices were ready comply with the fusion order, the Muslim charity offices balked at the idea that religious donations would be used to help the European poor. Furthermore, the funds allocated to the joint European-Muslim charity bureau would be split evenly between the two population groups, which the Muslim charity bureau decried as absurd given that there were more poor Algerian Muslims than Europeans. It seems that the Mayor of Oran took extreme measures to attempt to force the merger of the European and Muslim charity offices in his city. The Mayor made the odd decision to nominate a troublesome figure to the presidency of the Muslim charity office. This triggered a flurry of complaints about the new president's alleged corruption and incompetence. This paper’s analysis of local council meeting minutes and investigative reports from 1950s Oran reveals the stakes for this planned charity merger, not only for the Oranais poor but also for the employees of the Muslim charity office and its administrative board seeking to protect it from the merger. Through an analysis of local politics concerning poverty relief, this paper's investigation of the debates surrounding the late colonial charity office merger is revelatory for understanding the planned socio-economic reforms of post-1945 Algeria on the local level.

The dahir of November 12, 1932 marked a watershed moment for cannabis control in French Morocco. Despite its monopolistic control over the cultivation, production, and sale of cannabis, the clutch of the Société Internationale de Régie Co-Intéressée des Tabacs on cannabis had remained tenuous since its inception in 1911. Cannabis traffickers operated a parallel market that cultivated, moved, and sold raw cannabis and cannabis products, such as kif, around the French zone. In an effort to clamp down on the illegal flow, the French protectorate administration promulgated a dahir that consolidated previous cannabis legislation and introduced new policing measures. This paper studies the cannabis crime reporting published in colonial newspapers that came in the wake of the 1932 dahir. Papers such as Le Petit Marocain and La Vigie Marocaine increasingly documented seizures and sentences throughout the 1930s. The main question here revolves around the proliferation of this coverage: Why was cannabis crime and punishment closely followed and announced to the French-reading public? In offering an answer, this study pays particular attention to the language that journalists and editors used to describe the traffickers and their illegal trade. A focus on language reveals the conceptual construction and circulation of the idea that cannabis traffickers posed several threats. For one, papers described traffickers as risks to the physical safety of the community. Their use of firearms and fast cars, among other actions, endangered authorities and innocent by-standers alike. Traffickers also jeopardized the finances of the régie and its authorized vendors. Publications usually listed the amount of illicit cannabis seized as a way to stress the potential lost profits. Publicizing the success of police and régie authorities thus became a way to convince readers of the importance of channeling time, money, and resources towards ending cannabis trafficking. Coverage later declined in the early 1940s with paper rationing in the protectorate and public attention redirected toward World War II and Vichy France.