The history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Algeria is often framed through silences. The French administration’s quiet reticence to acknowledge its violent colonial past, the mutism of Algerian War veterans and the unspeakable legacy of the Black Decade stand in for a seemingly taboo history.Footnote ¹ Missing, destroyed or poorly catalogued archival materials along with recurrent administrative promises to declassify collections exacerbate this aura of secrecy.Footnote ² Despite (or perhaps because of) these silences, academic scholarship on Algeria is particularly vibrant. Algeria’s unique status as the French empire’s crown jewel, a settler colony and a legal extension of French soil, has made it a productive case study for writing about and researching the history of France and the French empire. At a moment of escalating Franco-Algerian tensions and acute Islamophobic and xenophobic backlash in Europe, the five recent books under review here are urgent contributions. They build on a growing body of literature that emphasises Algerian independence in 1962 as a moment of rupture, while also highlighting empire’s unfinished legacies across its divide.Footnote ³ These authors further challenge 1962 as a vanishing point of scholarship, insisting on continuities in colonial language, categories and institutions across the colonial and post-colonial eras. These books complicate our understanding of decolonisation, which is revealed here as a slow, uneven, open-ended and contested process that created new entanglements between France and its (former) colony. This new scholarship also productively reveals Algeria’s potential for illuminating both national and global historical developments beyond a French colonial lens.

Scholars have now fully internalised Frederick Cooper’s call to consider decolonisation as a process, not an event.Footnote ⁴ The collapse of European empires transformed the relationships between former imperial powers and their colonies. It reshaped societies and institutions on both sides.Footnote ⁵ As these new works highlight, this process was also unfinished and non-linear. In Monuments Decolonized, Susan Slyomovics explores the plural and contested afterlives of French Algeria’s colonial monuments, from Algeria’s independence on 5 July 1962 to the present. Drawing on oral history interviews, fieldwork, archival research and a vast collection of colonial postcards, Slyomovics offers a compelling ‘visual ethnography about remnants of Algeria’s colonial heritage’.Footnote ⁶ Between the two world wars, almost 36,000 memorials, statues, sculptures and cenotaphs were built across France, Algeria and overseas.Footnote ⁷ As instruments of colonial world making, these monuments were not merely aesthetic but also key ‘actors in colonization and decolonization’.Footnote ⁸ Building on anthropology, critical heritage studies and settler colonial studies, Slyomovics follows colonial monuments on the move, asking what their removal, vandalising or redesigning can tell us about the material and emotional afterlives of colonialism and decolonisation. In four example-driven thematic chapters, she convincingly shows how these monuments’ making, unmaking and remaking was ‘part of a process of decolonizing the material lived world of French Algeria’s monuments that was gradual, paradoxical, messy and seemingly never-ending’.Footnote ⁹

Favouring the category of ‘post-independence’ rather than ‘post-colonial’, Slyomovics reminds us that, if state independence did not put a full stop to colonialism, it did send French settlers (the pieds noirs) and the military into a frenzy. In the early summer of 1962, they dismantled, packed up and smuggled allegedly immovable parts of Algeria’s urban landscape to France without the Algerian provisional government’s approval, from the Constantine statue of General Lamoricière to the Foreign Legion memorial in Saïda. These ‘removal operations’ (opérations d’enlèvement) claimed colonial monuments as settler patrimony and presented their relocation as a strategy of safekeeping. These statues were moved to and helped produce new sites of colonial memory, in museums, cemeteries and pieds noirs districts in France.

The colonial war memorial of Oran, which now stands at the centre of a public square in Northwest Lyon, crystallises these arguments (Chapter 2). The Oran memorial was one of the few monuments removed ‘consensually and legally’ from post-independent Algeria.Footnote ¹⁰ In 1921, a committee of local settler dignitaries commissioned a victory memorial to commemorate Oran’s 12,000 dead during the First World War. The memorial, inaugurated in 1927 and designed by French Orientalist sculptor Albert Pommier, featured a group of three poilus – the stylised figure of the French infantryman – atop a stela. Two of the men faced forward, one holding a rifle at rest. The third figure, a Senegalese tirailleur ‘with pronounced Negroid features wearing a barely visible chéchia cap’, faced the other direction, mirroring colonial racial hierarchies.Footnote ¹¹ After independence in 1962, the Oran structure was repurposed into a memorial to the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). A new plaque with their names was added to the base, but references to the First World War remained.

In 1967, Lyon officials negotiated the monument’s partial repatriation to France. Faced with exorbitant shipping costs and Oran’s refusal to part with the column, Lyon only moved the statue of the three soldiers to the pieds-noirs district of La Duchère and attached it to a new, much smaller pedestal. Stone plaques were added to celebrate soldiers of the African Army who liberated Lyon during the Second World War. The original supporting plinth and column remained in Oran. In the 1980s, the soldier-less memorial underwent significant changes, including the addition of multi-coloured tilework and Arabic script.Footnote ¹² Records of Algerian soldiers who had fought for France’s various wars disappeared. The Oran memorial’s split, removal and alterations continue to ‘trigger a nostalgia for and a memory of French Algeria that binds Algeria and France materially and emotionally’.Footnote ¹³

Slyomovics shows that decolonisation not only dissolved ties between France and Algeria but also created new commemorative entanglements in a process of ‘substitution and additions’.Footnote ¹⁴ Colonial-era monuments were sometimes dismantled, relocated, defaced, preserved, repaired, altered or supplanted after Algerian independence. Slyomovics turns to colonial postcards as a ‘visual portal’ to monuments’ afterlives.Footnote ¹⁵ Recreating these images in the present allows the author to identify missing pieces as well as ‘recognizable erasures’ – that is, how a colonial monument, despite modification or relocation, remains identifiable as such, continuing to evoke a range of emotions about France’s and Algeria’s shared colonial past.Footnote ¹⁶ Some, like the Oran memorial, were transformed into monuments to the martyrs of the Algerian War of Independence. Sometimes, these monuments outright replaced colonial memorials. In other cases, like in Misserghin (chapter 3), town officials preserved colonial statues and erected newer structures commemorating Algerian revolutionaries, juxtaposing Algerian combatants’ deaths in multiple twentieth-century wars.

Monuments Decolonized underscores the variety of post-independence responses to colonial relics. Whether to destroy and replace colonial-era monuments or preserve them and add explanatory plaques was profoundly contested and remains so now. Some, like Algerian artist Ahmed Benyahia in 1968, argued that war memorials honouring Algerian auxiliary troops, which fought alongside France in various conflicts, could be reinterpreted as ‘material proof’ for colonial disregard for Algerian lives (Chapter 4).Footnote ¹⁷ In examining his work and tracing colonial monuments’ wide array of trajectories, Slyomovics powerfully underscores that there is no one way to decolonise Algeria’s French colonial heritage. The project of decolonisation is contentious, unfinished and plural. While the book does not quite explain why monuments’ fates differed so much, it opens productive avenues to think through the many possible futures of colonial cultural heritage.

Like Slyomovics, Terrence Peterson shows that the French army’s work in Algeria was a story of both destruction and creation. Soldiers preserved and removed statuary and French Algeria’s patrimony and settler cultural heritage. They also sought to remake Algerian society. In Revolutionary Warfare, Peterson compellingly locates the origins of modern counter-insurgency – as a set of military doctrines and practices – in the Algerian War of Independence. For French military officials, modern warfare was as much about restructuring society as it was about defeating the enemy. In fact, many came to believe that winning the war required the ‘profound transformation’ of a now-expired colonial social order.Footnote ¹⁸ Theorists and on-the-ground officers argued that the ‘revolutionary warfare’ of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), and Communist insurgents before them, had transformed warfare itself, shifting the terrain of war ‘from territories to its inhabitants’ by mobilising local populations en masse.Footnote ¹⁹ The solution, dubbed ‘pacification’, appropriated the revolutionary focus on population. This programme of armed social reform sought to capture civilians’ loyalties by fusing colonial violence ‘to the technocratic and modernizing ideologies of the postwar French state’.Footnote ²⁰ Revolutionary Warfare is structured around the five pillars of ‘pacification’ that General Maurice Challe identified in his landmark 1957 doctrinal document Instruction for Pacification in Algeria: to integrate, protect, organise, engage and guide the local Algerian population toward a new (French and modern) Algeria. These chronological chapters trace the emergence, expansion and downfall of pacification from 1955 to January 1962.

Colonial and military observers understood anti-colonial discontent as a symptom of under-development and socio-economic inequalities. For Jacques Soustelle, named governor general of Algeria in February 1955, only state-driven economic and social development could curb the FLN’s appeal.Footnote ²¹ His proposed policy of ‘integration’ put modernising reforms at the centre of the French war response. Faced with increased setbacks and a slow – if not at times uncooperative – civil administration, his successor, Robert Lacoste, looked to military personnel, already deployed to rural Algerian confines, to become the ‘face of integration on the ground’.Footnote ²² The French military distributed free medical care, set up work programmes and organised local ‘self-defence’ militias to both reduce poverty and draw rural Algerians into contact with the state. These army-led social services expanded with Charles de Gaulle’s 1958 Constantine Plan, an ambitious socio-economic development programme that sought to bring Algeria and France closer together.Footnote ²³ As the war continued, these military services especially sought to mobilise Algerian women and youths. However, the army profoundly misunderstood the society it sought to transform. Knitting circles and youth clubs were often empty as Algerian women and young people worked outside the home.

Whether in theoretical discussions at the High War College or on the ground in the Aurès-Nemencha, military officials ‘shared the conviction that the population occupied a central role in deciding the outcome of war’, and that Algerian civilians played a critical role in supporting and fuelling the insurrection.Footnote ²⁴ This military focus on population collapsed the categories of insurgent fighter and civilian, which legitimised collective punishments, forced resettlement, torture and summary executions. Historians have emphasised how, during the Algerian War, welfare was a weapon of empire.Footnote ²⁵ The framing of welfare as warfare may be too simplistic – as Elise Franklin shows, it fails to account for social work and programmes for Algerians’ post-independence afterlives. However, Terrence Peterson compellingly argues that ‘modern warfare is social welfare’.Footnote ²⁶ Social aid and projects to improve the welfare of Algerians became part and parcel of counter-insurgency. These policies were paternalist and coercive. Social aid was always secondary to control. Yet they should be taken seriously, as not an accessory but rather a core component of repression. This violence eventually proved pacification’s downfall, which Peterson argues drove ‘many more to actively and openly support independence’.Footnote ²⁷

Drawing on extensive archival work in colonial and military archives, Peterson deftly weaves together the often-opposing perspectives of military thinkers in Paris, commanding officers and army personnel on the ground in Algeria and (albeit less centrally) the Algerian civilians at the core of their concerns. In doing so, Peterson reveals that pacification was profoundly contested, even in army circles. Revolutionary warfare theories slowly gained traction amid a crisis of faith in the French army in a global Cold War context. Pacification’s expansion and doctrinal solidification occurred through trial and error. Experiments like the 1957 Opération Pilote in Orléansville, a joint venture between civil and military authorities, tested methods to ‘organise’ the Algerian population – here through clandestine political agents, village councils and social committees linked to the French army. Its achievements were not clear cut. While Pilote became ‘a blueprint for Pacification writ large’, its expansion to the rest of the Algerian territory was met with the reticence, disinterest and at times outward rejection of French officers in the field.Footnote ²⁸ Pilote not only provided a framework to control local populations but also drove institutional shifts that disciplined the army itself.

If the pacification apparatus collapsed in summer 1961, ‘the army’s techniques, however, lived on’, in both France’s warzones and Western militaries’ playbooks.Footnote ²⁹ The French army capitalised on the growing interest of foreign militaries in its methods, inviting foreign officers to Algeria on observation visits and informational tours. Some of these visitors, like Portuguese colonel Hermes de Araújo Oliveira, spent several weeks embedded in Algerian operations in 1958, later advising on the repression of anti-colonial insurgents in Angola (1961–74). After Algerian independence, French military leaders repackaged pacification for global military audiences, finding captivated publics in the Spanish, Portuguese and American militaries. The works of former French officers in Algeria like Lieutenant Colonel Roger Trinquier and Captain David Galula bore a significant influence on American counter-insurgency projects, in not only the latter half of the Vietnam War (1964–75) but also Iraq in the early 2000s. Although a fuller explanation of French counter-insurgent thought’s circulation in the post-independence moment would be a welcome addition to the project, Revolutionary Warfare powerfully hints at the long-lasting impacts of decolonisation on the way war was understood and fought in the twentieth century.

Elise Franklin is similarly interested in tracing the impacts of decolonisation. Like war memorials, Algerian-specific welfare organisations and services persisted and even expanded after Algerian independence. Disintegrating Empire focuses on the post-1962 afterlives of specialised social aid associations like the North African Family Social Service (SSFNA), created after the Second World War to facilitate the integration of Algerian families in France and dismantled in the 1970s. These welfare services illustrate the ‘institutional continuity of empire after independence’.Footnote ³⁰ If these services no longer functioned as part of a project to keep Algeria French, Franklin shows how they continued to work on behalf of Algerian migrants in France to further their integration, tethering the Fifth Republic to its former empire through the 1960s. Franklin shows how the social rights that Algerian families were promised, whether as French citizens or foreigners, hinged on the ‘demonstration of their deservedness – their commitment to integration’.Footnote ³¹ In the 1960s and 1970s, social workers accompanied families to the grocery store, fielded housing requests and organised homemaking courses. They focused primarily on women, which social workers saw as ‘the linchpin to adaptation to life in the metropole’.Footnote ³²

Franklin examines three interrelated threads: the mid-century welfare state, family migration from Algeria and the social work relationships these created. Showing continuities across the inter-war and post-war moments, Disintegrating Empire paints a portrait of the mid-century welfare state as a messy hodgepodge of offices, para-state and private organisations, each with a distinct agenda. While initially accessed through the family, France’s regime of benefits became attached to labour after Algerian independence. Bilateral agreements continued to entitle Algerians to the same social rights as French citizens, incentivising family migration to the metropole – the book’s second thread. Franco-Algerian discussions over migration crystallised around families. While Algerian authorities deplored emigration’s effects on the country’s social and economic fabric, French officials weighed the costs of hosting the family relative to the labour the father provided. The relationships between social workers, specialised social aid and their clients (the third analytical thread here) are key to decolonisation. As Peterson also highlights, social action and welfare were intensely politicised during the Algerian War. Despite their apolitical ethos and increased professionalisation, social workers never shed their work’s colonial underpinnings. By tracing these three threads’ unravelling over distinct but connected chronologies, Disintegrating Empire makes a clear case for decolonisation’s unevenness. Faced with the difficulty of rendering the messiness of the empire's collapse in a linear narrative, Franklin focuses on each thread in separate, almost standalone chapters. Two synthetic chapters on the emergence and eventual cuts to Algerian-specific welfare bookend the project and provide essential framing.

Algerians in France found themselves in a ‘double bind of specificity’. French colonial constructions of Muslim sexual difference and gender relations legitimated Algerians’ long-standing exclusion from French citizenship. Franklin reveals how the Algerian family’s imagined dysfunctions – misogynist, polygamist, with numerous children and sequestered, unemployed mothers – turned it into a target for intervention in the post–Second World War era. Social workers argued that specialised welfare for Algerian families was imperative to ensure their adjustment to metropolitan life. As Franklin powerfully notes, however, these integrationist efforts were never quite attainable, because they were predicated on Algerian difference. Algerian migrants’ use of these services allowed French bureaucrats to ‘politicize and pathologize Algerians as a population with extraordinary need’.Footnote ³³ Disintegrating Empire offers an in-depth account of how, by emphasising obstacles to integration, social workers made Algerian migrants ‘especially visible as recipients of specialized social aid’, constructing Algerians as a unique burden on the welfare state.Footnote ³⁴ These difficulties legitimated cutting these services and increasing restrictions on immigration in the 1970s.Footnote ³⁵ Ironically, in a particularly fascinating reinvestment of republican universalism, French administrators argued that separate services for Algerians ‘had the perverse effect of marginalizing Algerians from the immigration system rather than integrating them’.Footnote ³⁶ Bureaucrats instead prioritised European beneficiaries, like Portuguese immigrants, based on shifting parameters of whiteness. If Algerians’ welfare was separate from other beneficiaries, its effects were not. As Franklin underscores, the racist legacies of empire ‘shaped social policy for all foreign beneficiaries of the French welfare state’.Footnote ³⁷

The analysis of casework files and SSFNA organisational documents, coupled with state archives, allows Franklin to weave a textured account of the welfare state’s transformations. ‘Family stories’ form the bulk of the book and illustrate social aid impacts on Algerians’ everyday lives. Disintegrating Empire significantly challenges scholarly and popular accounts of the 1960s as a golden age for France’s welfare state. For Algerians, ‘welfare was always imperiled . . . whether they were subjects or citizens of France or foreign nationals living abroad’.Footnote ³⁸ Franklin crucially reframes the history of the modern French welfare state, urging scholars to consider it as a story of inclusion and exclusion rather than successes and failures. Algerian family migration reveals the limits of the mid-century welfare state as ‘colonial in nature, patchy by design and explicitly concerned with delimiting access to its reputedly generous benefits’.Footnote ³⁹ These colonial legacies are still felt today, as the imagined figure of the unemployed Algerian abusing family benefits continues to hold strong in French political imagination.

Sara Rahnama and Elizabeth Perego further challenge the primacy and ‘teleology of the Algerian War of Independence’ in scholarship, decentring colonialism as the only meaningful lens through which to recover Algerian experiences in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ Sara Rahnama reminds us that Algeria was not solely defined through its relationship to France. Inter-war Algerian conversations on Muslim modernity often turned to the Middle East, rather than Europe, as a point of reference and model to emulate. The Future Is Feminist examines Muslim press debates about women’s roles in inter-war Algeria. The end of the First World War ushered in a moment of ‘fluid possibility’ characterised by a buzzing public life.Footnote ⁴¹ Muslim men and women across class lines and religious, cultural and political affiliations gathered in cafés, theatres, mosques, cemeteries, schools and political rallies. Muslim women traversed the casbah to go work in European households as domestic workers. Drawing on French- and Arabic-language newspapers and periodicals, Sara Rahnama reveals the inter-war Muslim press as a ‘key site in which Algerian Muslims, colonial authorities, and French feminists advanced different, often conflicting, visions for Algeria’s future and women’s role in creating it’.Footnote ⁴² For many Muslim commentators – primarily elite, educated men – women’s status was ‘inextricably linked to Muslim society writ large’.Footnote ⁴³ If women’s advancement would lead to a more equitable and modern society, the contours of women’s participation in public life often remained vague.

Rahnama provides a multivocal account of press debates. She shows how debates over women’s advancement allowed Muslim commentators to not only transcend but also make sense of the changing fabric of Algerian society, including increasingly fluid divisions between men and women, rural and urban, working-class and elite, Sufi and reform Muslims. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the vibrant world of inter-war Muslim public intellectual life. The press offered a space for Muslims in Algeria to take part in transnational conversations over the promises and perils of modernity, working through anxieties about the present and imagining feminist futures ‘in conversation with developments abroad and new reformist interpretations of Islam’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Chapters 2, 3 and 4 elaborate on some of these anxieties: female domestic workers, women’s education and headwear. These questions also concerned French feminists, for whom women in the Middle East appeared as both a source of hope and a symbol of France’s failures to advance women’s issues at home and overseas (Ch. 5). The last chapter considers the post-war afterlives of these debates through the women’s pages of as-Salam (1946–7). Women writing to the periodical harnessed the language of nationalism to criticise Muslim men’s role in limiting women’s advancement.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Muslim press not only is Rahnama’s rich source base and object of study but also was a key player in turning women’s issues into a dynamic public debate.

The Future Is Feminist undermines the metropole/colony framework to consider Algeria’s connections to the Middle East.Footnote ⁴⁶ While Algeria was legally French, Rahnama reminds us that it was first a predominantly Muslim, former Ottoman territory and a culturally Arab and Amazigh space in North Africa. Exclusive attention to the dialectic dynamics between France and Algeria necessarily obscure ‘how social questions about women equally animated public life in the inter-war years and connected Algeria to the Middle East’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Algerian periodicals like La Voix des Humbles, middle-class French educated Muslim school teachers frequently reprinted articles from the Egyptian feminist publication L’Égyptienne. Commentators in Algeria praised Atatürk’s women’s education projects in Turkey and reforms in Iran and Afghanistan, calling for similar transformations in Algeria. Although Middle Eastern engagement with Algerian debates is left largely unexplored, Rahnama convincingly shows how these multidirectional conversations promoted ‘multiple modes of belonging that transcended geographical and temporal bounds’, including to a global Muslim umma.Footnote ⁴⁸

Rahnama (and her actors) significantly subvert the colonial-era myth that posits the incompatibility between Islam and feminism.Footnote ⁴⁹ Contributors wrote about ‘Islam’s feminist possibilities’, locating their activism for women’s education as ‘an essential part of the Islamic tradition’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In their debates, Muslim commentators drew on Islamic texts and history to highlight at times competing visions of Islam’s feminist potential. Commentators insisted that Islam was progress-oriented, with some, like Chérif bin Larbi Cadi, describing the prophet Muhammad as ‘the First Arab feminist’ in the newspaper La Voix Indigène.Footnote ⁵¹ Women like Djamila Depèche argued that veiling was not an Islamic mandate. While some Sufi voices feared that girls’ education beyond Qur’anic memorisation could lead to women losing their religiosity, Muslim reform publications celebrated women leaders who continued to wear the hijab as proof that women’s education could spur Islamic renaissance in the present. Since claims about Muslim misogyny legitimated Algerians’ continued legal and political marginalisation under the French colonial state, locating women’s emancipation within the Islamic tradition unseated the very basis of French rule.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, Muslim commentators’ turn to the Middle East as an alternative model for modernity allowed them to critique France through comparison. They ‘reclaimed Islam as a modern force more feminist than other legal regimes’, pointing out, for example, that, unlike their French counterparts, Turkish women could vote and independently enter contracts.Footnote ⁵³ Commentators ‘insisted on Muslims’ right to see themselves as modern’ and access progress as Muslims, toppling French claims to cultural and civilisational superiority.Footnote ⁵⁴

Elizabeth Perego takes a similar step to decentre France in Algerian history. Humor and Power in Algeria, 1920 to 2021 explores the changing history of humour and its transformative role in Algerian society and politics in the twentieth century. Perego glosses over the Algerian War of Independence to focus instead on Algeria’s Black Decade, the ‘dirty war’ between the military and armed Islamist groups (1992–2002) and its aftermaths. Reflecting on the relationship between humour and power from the inter-war period to the 2021 protests against the Abdelmadjid Tebboune government, Humor and Power is a deeply researched and systematic study of the role of humour in Algerian political culture. Perego argues that humour can both bolster and challenge political authority. Humour was a ‘tool of war or peace’ and should be taken seriously, not only for what it tells us about Algerian culture but also as a tool for social and political change.Footnote ⁵⁵ Changing uses of humour also provide a window into the experiences of civilians during the Black Decade, and the globally informed ways in which various actors made sense of and responded to political and social crises.

Humor and Power in Algeria is made of a close reading of thousands of caricatures and hundreds of jokes in French, Arabic and Tamazight. Unlike print culture or film, there was virtually no cost to accessing jokes, which were often retold in both vernacular languages and dialects. Caricatures published in newspapers had broad readership. Perego filled in the blanks between the telling of jokes and their reception by conducting over fifty oral histories. Since authoritarian regimes tend to fear political humour, and the Black Decade remains a sensitive topic in Algerian politics, these interviews are mainly with public figures. They nonetheless add depth and texture to her account. This careful methodology attuned to the production and circulation of humour allows Perego to highlight the perspectives of elite and ordinary Algerians from various backgrounds.

In the late colonial and early post-colonial period, Algerians used humour to delineate what was Algeria, and who could claim to be Algerian, ‘uniting populations around a common notion of a singular Algerian identity’ (Ch. 1).Footnote ⁵⁶ During the October 1988 Revolution and subsequent democratic revival, lighter censorship allowed a freer form of humour to flourish in non-state-controlled outlets. Jokes and cartoons mirrored and exacerbated political divisions (Ch. 2). Throughout the Black Decade, humour allowed joke tellers, cartoonists and consumers to make sense of and distance themselves from violence as un-Algerian. Jokes and cartoons emphasised belligerents’ fearsome presence and power while showcasing civilian resistance. Interestingly, Black Decade jokes often made fun of the victims more than the perpetrators of violence, bolstering the imagined (and real) power of combatants rather than challenging it (Ch. 3). Cartoons advanced situated interpretations of the conflict, distinguishing Algerian Islam from the violence of political Islamism (Ch. 4). In both genres, Algerians remained pacifist civilians. In the civil war’s aftermath, some cartoonists used their art to challenge government rhetoric during the reconciliation process, confronting the state-driven forgetting of atrocities and encouraging the formation of specific social memories surrounding the conflict (Ch. 5).

The figure of Hassan Terro exemplifies these changes and continuities across the pre- and post-colonial divide. Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina’s cult-following 1967 film, Hassan Terro (Hassan the terrorist), followed the story of a ‘bourgeois simpleton and coward’ who accidentally becomes a nationalist hero in the Battle of Algiers, despite his best efforts.Footnote ⁵⁷ His satirical figure emphasised ‘a sense of a common past’ while poking fun at false revolutionary war fighters’ claims of grandeur.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hassan Terro’s image was repurposed in the 2019 Hirak demonstrations, ridiculing Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s bid for re-election as a hypocritical betrayal of revolutionary principles.

If Rahnama eschews nationalism as a meaningful framework, it is a central category in Humor and Power in Algeria. Perego investigates humour as a tool for ‘thinking through, defining, and testing the limits of belonging to the Algerian nation’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Her chronology, however, does not equate the Algerian nation with the one proposed by FLN leaders during the Algerian Revolution. Muslim Algerians turned to humour to articulate ‘competing visions of unity’ in a divided society through the birth of a new nation, a violent war of independence and a brutal civil conflict.Footnote ⁶⁰ Humour could act as a national ‘binding agent’.Footnote ⁶¹ However, the future of the nation was wide open. Crucially, Perego shows, humour not only reveals those multiple possibilities but actively shaped Algeria’s path forward.

The books under review all invite us to consider Algeria’s singularity. Algeria’s unique status in France’s second colonial empire has tended to silo its study within the fields of North African and French colonial histories. In many ways, these authors confirm the specificity of the Algerian case. Elise Franklin underscores Algerians’ unique place in France’s welfare state, which treated Algerian migrants distinctly from both Europeans and other immigrants from the former empire. Settler colonialism in Algeria explains the mass removal of statues and memorials at independence (Slyomovics). It also sets Algeria apart from other Muslim countries in the Middle East. Unlike in Turkey, Iran or Afghanistan, there were no state-sponsored feminist projects nor women-led movements for women’s emancipation in Algeria (Rahnama). Algeria’s privileged place in French colonial imagination may also explain the French army’s virulent late-colonial efforts to transform its society (Peterson).

These new books, however, do not take this singularity for granted. Algeria’s uniqueness is part and parcel of French colonial discourse and practices, which legitimated violent efforts to conquer the territory and keep it under French rule. The underside of Algerian specificity comes through most strikingly in Elise Franklin, Sara Rahnama and Terrence Peterson’s discussion of Muslim women and families’ sexual difference. Colonial understandings of Islam as inherently misogynist and patriarchal shaped inter-war imperial feminist campaigns (Rahnama), armed social work during the Algerian War of Independence (Peterson) and the initial persistence of specialised social aid associations for Algerians in the metropole after independence (Franklin).Footnote ⁶² As Elise Franklin points out, the historical construction of Algerian difference made Algerians and Muslims more visible as imagined ‘problems’ to solve – often violently. This new scholarship raises important questions about the legacies of these colonial frameworks on historical work.

If the history of France cannot be told without Algeria, is the reverse true? Of course, French rule bore a significant imprint on Algerian society, culture and institutions. The history of twentieth-century Algeria is marked by the haunting presence of French colonialism. However, it does not mean that it must be written in its shadow. This means, as Sara Rahnama and Elizabeth Perego convincingly argue, that Algerian perspectives cannot be understood through a strict reliance on colonial French state archives. Attending to documents in Arabic and Tamazight, including non-state sources like the press, powerfully underscores that colonialism and nationalism were two among many meaningful frameworks through which Algerians made sense of their society, war and belonging. These sources also reveal a multiplicity of voices, experiences and debates otherwise eclipsed by colonial state documents, inviting us to think with and across political, social, gender, religious and colonial divides. As these volumes emphasise, the ‘colonised’ are far from unitary and monolithic and are not exclusively defined through their relationship to France. Algerian history was multidirectional. Algerians wove complex local and global networks across the Middle East and the Muslim umma. They moved across the Mediterranean and back and drew global bonds of solidarity with other modernising nations and colonised people. In France, Algerian migrants were pitted against other non-European immigrants. In addition to broadening our sources, these five fantastic books show the potential of comparative and globally situated studies for understanding Algeria, North Africa, the Middle East and decolonisation.