In early 1881, as the French army invaded neighbouring Tunisia, the police tightly controlled the arrival of two commodities in the port of Algiers: gunpowder and news. Reports target everything from subversive printed material to songs describing distant events told by meddah in market-squares, detailing. This paper aims to examine the uses of news, and specifically news of international events, as an explosive social commodity in colonial Algeria. Such news was widely consumed in a variety of formats: cable wires dashed across the Mediterranean from Paris to Algiers to materialise in newsrooms on French-language newspapers; apocalyptic prophecies roamed the countryside drawing on events in the Ottoman Empire to predict the imminent end of the time of the French; rumours of imminent British invasion paralyzed seemingly remote mountainous towns. Sometimes news was written, sometimes it was whispered in cafés maures, sometimes it was in Italian, sometimes in classical Arabic. All of these formed a complex ecosystem tying the material with the intellectual. Algeria may have been a part of France, but it was not simply cut off from the rest of the world, and once news penetrated into Algeria, it took on a complex life of its own. Since Chris Bayly's work on British India in Empire and Information, historians have pointed to the connection between information control and imperial domination in colonial contexts. Fewer scholars have ventured beyond the concerns of the state, however, to inquire into the uses of information by different groups in colonial society, as the state's paranoia of foreign subversion left it open to manipulation. Settlers, Muslim notables, foreign interlopers and disgruntled peasants used various forms of news to gain prestige, money, or to frame others in complex cabals involving excessive knowledge of faraway places. A particular article or seditious song, if reported to the authorities, could blow up an individual's status or career and easily lead to censorship and deportation. Vast state resources poured into controlling and surveilling news not only failed to prevent information from flowing, they could be harnessed by unscrupulous individuals for their own benefit. For reformers and revolutionaries, news of distant events, events where Muslim lived in independent states or where colonised peoples struggled under other imperial powers, provided tools to envisage an alternative horizon for Algeria beyond French rule.

On June 17th, 1954, the head of colonial police intelligence in Oran wrote an alarmed note to the Governor General of Algeria: local Muslims had overwhelmingly stopped smoking cigarettes in public. Notes, forbidding the sale or consumption of cigarettes in the name of ‘Islam’ or ‘the struggle against French Colonialism,’ to be enforced on pain of death, had appeared on the doors of tobacco shops in the preceding days, garnering considerable public attention in Oran and the surrounding municipalities. In some locales, police estimated that nearly 85 percent of the population followed the ban. Cigarette sales plummeted to as low as a tenth of normal rates, and vendors no longer displayed tobacco on their counters. Furthermore, the movement appeared to be gaining steam: several Muslims caught smoking in public had been beaten or threatened by their young coreligionnaires, and copycat efforts had begun to appear in Algiers. Why had cigarettes suddenly become the focus of anticolonial opprobrium? And who was behind the ban? For French colonial officials, this populist “Operation Cigarettes” was concerning, not only as a novel form of resistance, but because of its truly grassroots nature. While propelled by local members of the reform Ulema and the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD), the cigarette boycott was dismissed by both organizations. Local MTLD leaders even went as far as to smoke ostentatiously in public for the press, demonstrating their rejection of the ban. Rather, the ban seemed to originate with young activists, inspired by the ongoing struggles for independence in Morocco and Tunisia and hoping to provoke popular demonstrations of anticolonialism on Algeria soil. Drawing on police archives, this paper explores the short-lived events of June 1954. While the cigarette boycott quickly crumbled under pressure from the colonial administration, it offers a glimpse into the intersecting politics of anticolonialism, consumption, and youth activism in Oran on the eve of the Algerian War. Why did a consumer commodity like tobacco successfully come to carry such a high political charge, while derivative boycott attempts, like a ban on Muslim domestic workers in European homes, failed immediately? And what can such events reveal about the impact of neighboring independence movements, generational changes, and consumer culture on popular anticolonial nationalism in Algeria?

In 1931, OFALAC (L’Office Algerian d’Action Economique et Touristique) was created in order to ensure the quality and control of Algerian agricultural products. By the late late 1950s, propaganda for the organization was able to declare that Algeria was “The Country of Quality,” going so far as to introduce an official Algerian brand for certain products for export to the Metropole. In the late colonial period, the modernization of Algerian agriculture relied on a series of political, spatial, and technical developments that reflected Algeria’s ambiguous position at the crossroads of European integration and decolonization. The Treaty of Rome, signed in 1957, also applied to Algeria. In moving away from economic protectionism, it undermined the existing "colonial pact," which granted Algerian products a privileged outlet in the Metropole. Faced with competition from countries such as Spain, European colons asserted that Algeria’s place as an integral part of France meant that their commercial interests should be protected. This claim, however, was increasingly untenable given the raging War of Independence as well as the budding Common Agricultural Policy in Europe. This paper thus asks the question: In what ways did the resulting “politique de qualité” reconfigure the relationship between political and economic power? In other words, it asks how shifts in European economy intersected with local practices in Algeria. How did the regional commodification of agriculture (and the attending technologies of shipping techniques, port surveillance, and commercial propaganda), impact the understanding of the “traditional” (often synonymous with Muslim) economy? Drawing from archival research, as well as interviews in Algeria and France, it traces the changing technical and political contexts of commodification. In so doing, it furthers our understanding of how colonial power was able to create a dual economy in which cultural traditions, Islam, and local production were articulated in contrast to an allegedly dynamic, market-based, modernity.

Population regroupment was a long-established tactic of colonial occupation in Algeria and the French military mobilized it throughout the rural countryside during the War of Independence (1954-62) as a means of isolating rural insurgents from their supply lines. French finance inspector Michel Rocard, who first exposed the conditions of what French authorities called the “regroupment centers” (the word “camp” being to closely associated with Nazi concentration camps) in his leaked 1959 report, described them as little more than tents or temporary structures, surrounded often by barbed wire, which sheltered hundreds or thousands of Algerians. The consequences of these policies were devastating for the civilian populations cut off from their land, which provided their main source of income and food through farming and livestock; Rocard’s statistics showed that when a regroupment camp reached 1,000 people, one child died every two days. Yet although the “regroupment centers” were directly under the control of the French military or the SAS (Sections administratives specialisées), a civil-military project that former governor-general Jacques Soustelle had instituted in 1955 as a means of establishing more contact with the rural Algerian population, the vast majority of the food and clothing that sustained the camps came not from the French government, but from Christian groups like Secours catholique and the World Council of Churches. In particular the American Church World Service, working in tandem with the World Council of Churches and the French Protestant aid organization Cimade, sent thousands of tons of American surplus goods to Algeria to be distributed in the regroupments. While much of this aid did eventually arrive at its intended location, this paper examines the ways in which complex diplomatic negotiations, bureaucratic delays, personal and territorial conflicts, and military strategy ensured that bundles of American cast-off clothing and surplus food, which sat untouched for months in warehouses in the port of Algiers, became some of the most contested commodities of the Algerian War. Using governmental and private archives of those directly engaged in the collection and distribution of what they saw as humanitarian relief, I demonstrate how the complex politics at play for the various actors involved in these events, from those engaged in acts of war to those helping its victims, shed light on the commodification of humanitarian relief in war, a situation not unique to Algeria.