Apostles of Modernity Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria [Hardcover]

Between 1830 and 1870, French army officers serving in the colonial Offices of Arab Affairs profoundly altered the course of political decision-making in Algeria. Guided by the modernizing ideologies of the Saint-Simonian school in their development and implementation of colonial policy, the officers articulated a new doctrine and framework for governing the Muslim and European populations of Algeria.Apostles of Modernityshows the evolution of this civilizing mission in Algeria, and illustrates how these 40 years were decisive in shaping the principal ideological tenets in French colonization of the region.

This book offers a rethinking of 19th-century French colonial history. It reveals not only what the rise of Europe implied for the cultural identities of non-elite Middle Easterners and North Africans, but also what dynamics were involved in the imposition or local adoptions of European cultural norms and how the colonial encounter impacted the cultural identities of the colonizers themselves.

Abi-Mershed takes a body of archival sources that are discordant and often contradictory and provides a clear and concise overview of key parts of colonial policy and ideology, one that preserves the atmosphere of contingency and struggle that characterized this and so much other colonial planning. Historical thinking on French Algeria has long been distracted by a theoretical debate over Metropole policies toward the native populations and their place in the colonial order, a debate framed by two binary approaches to ruling subject peoplesassimilation or association. This provocative study breaks out of a long intellectual impasse by re-examining a critical nineteenth-century institution, the Bureaux Arabes, that mediated between Paris and Algiers and diverse Algerian communities on the ground. Osama Abi-Mershed is Assistant Professor of History at Georgetown University. He is the editor ofTrajectories of Education in the Arab World: Legacies and Clƒ°