2025/06/27 by Clifford Rosenberg · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Environmental Science · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #History of Science and Medicine #Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses
paper · doi:10.1093/jsh/shaf048
openalex publication_date 2025/06/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Samuel Kalman has written a deeply researched, authoritative account of French colonial policing in Algeria. The chronological focus, running from the foundation of the Third Republic to the outbreak of the Algerian War, centers attention on civil authorities, as does the book’s subject, the police. It introduces an implicit comparison between the military regimes that bookend the period and, more broadly, inform debates over European imperialism. What was the difference, in practice, between the civil and military governments, between states of exception and normal rule? Kalman sides with those who minimize the difference. The police, he demonstrates, acted with virtual impunity. The kinds of restraints that applied on the French mainland—fears of blowing a promotion, an increasingly professional culture in these years—did not limit violence in colonial Algeria, especially in eastern Algeria where settlers were vastly outnumbered, even in cities like Constantine. Rather than a constraint on colonial violence, civil law worked in practice to encourage police violence. Police leaders used lenient sentences as a pretext to take matters into their own hands, whether that meant exemplary physical punishment, murder, or detentions of dubious legality.