The study of colonial Algeria has long enabled historians to examine the contradictions of French republicanism, the limits of assimilation, and the unstable meanings attached to citizenship. Avner Ofrath’s Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship enters this conversation by tracing how citizenship was imagined, legislated, and practiced under French rule. He contends that Algeria was “a crucial site in the making of French citizenship” (18), where republican claims to universality were refracted through colonial governance and transformed into racialized legal categories. In Ofrath’s account, citizenship in Algeria was never a static legal status but “a battlefield” shaped by violent exclusion, failed reform, and Algerian struggles for inclusion and autonomy. French universalism produced both aspiration and exclusion, and Algerians negotiated and contested forms of belonging offered by the colonial state before rejecting them.

Ofrath’s most significant contribution is his argument that Algeria functioned as a laboratory for French citizenship, where legal categories were tested, hardened, and racialized. He shows how colonial institutions codified “Muslim” and “European” as legal identities and turned them into the basis of exclusion. By tracing how these categories were constructed and politically mobilized, he reveals that French citizenship itself was racialized through colonial practice. Building on scholarship by Emmanuelle Saada’s Empire’s Children (2012), Frederick Cooper’s Citizenship Between Empire and Nation (2014), and Todd Shepard’s The Invention of Decolonization (2006) on race, filiation, and political rupture in the making of citizenship across the French empire, he shifts attention to the intellectual labor through which jurists and administrators defended colonial distinctions and exclusions. Officials portrayed Islamic personal law as incompatible with the Code civil, calling it “a religious, anti‑democratic law, immutable in its sacred Quranic text” (135), and repeatedly invoked “mores and manners,” drawing on Montesquieu to recast racial hierarchy as a matter of cultural difference.

The book foregrounds Algerian voices that metropolitan archives have long obscured. Through petitions, political slogans, and everyday encounters with administrators, Ofrath shows how Algerians pressed claims within the narrow field created by colonial rule. His analysis of Jewish petitioning in the 1860s demonstrates this clearly. While scholarship on the Crémieux Decree often presents Jewish emancipation as a metropolitan decision, he shows that it followed repeated local demands, including a bilingual 1869 petition declaring that “an entire population asks for justice” (49). Reading both the French and Judeo-Arabic versions, he reveals how these claims drew on local understandings of communal belonging rather than simply mirroring republican discourse.

Ofrath structures the book around six turning points between 1848 and 1945, each showing how political conflict reshaped the meaning of citizenship. He begins with the ulama’s hopeful invocation of the Republic in 1848, “Oh God, make forever prosperous the days of the Republic and protect her” (21) and places this optimism against the rapid consolidation of dual legal systems separating Muslims and Europeans. In the 1890s, anti-Jewish mobilizations voiced through “Ta’ish al-République! À bas les Youdis!” narrowed belonging through violence. The First World War brought the “levy of blood,” as Algerians linked military service to political rights the administration refused to grant. The collapse of the Viollette Plan in 1936 revealed the limits of reform, and by 1945 the Sétif uprising marked a rupture, when “the belief in the transformative capacity of French citizenship … had evaporated” (138). Ofrath concludes that these crises did not merely disrupt the path to inclusion; they forged a political order in which colonial exclusions were so entrenched that negotiation was no longer possible, making total, uncompromising violence the only remaining avenue.

Although the book makes a substantial contribution, some areas remain underexplored. Ofrath’s reliance on French legal and administrative archives narrows the range of Algerian voices in the narrative. While petitions receive careful treatment, the wider field of Algerian Muslim political thought and other forms of political expression receives limited attention. The comparative dimension also remains thin. Many dynamics he traces, including legal dualism and racialized exclusion, were present in other French colonies, and a brief comparison with West Africa would have clarified what was distinctive about Algeria. The gendered dimensions of citizenship appear only briefly, despite the central role that marriage, family structure, and household authority played in the legal distinctions French officials used to define political inclusion. These limits do not diminish the book’s significance, but they indicate where the argument could have been widened and where additional perspectives would enrich the study.

Still, the book offers a compelling account of how the colonial state built and defended a racialized legal order and how that structure shaped political conflict in Algeria. By foregrounding the contested nature of citizenship, Ofrath forces a rethinking of the boundaries of French republicanism and the lived experiences of those it governed. The contradictions of French citizenship functioned as practical constraints that narrowed Algerians’ political possibilities. This study advances work on empire, law, and identity, providing historians of Algeria with a careful reconstruction of colonial politics and offering scholars of citizenship a compelling account of how colonial governance shaped belonging. For readers interested in colonial legacies, it shows how racialized legal categories of citizenship outlasted empire itself.