Abstract
This book endeavours to apply Cedric J. Robinson's notion of ‘racial capitalism’ to Algeria. A brief explanation is necessary. Developed in the 1980s, the American academic's writings posit that racism was intrinsic to European civilization, permeating it since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Rather than an outgrowth of capitalism's inexorable search for expansion and profit – including by the harnessing of precapitalist means, such as slavery, forced labour and expropriation, as well as the essentialization of differences to benefit from inequalities and to maximize exploitation and division – racism is portrayed as the crucible and the matrix of capitalism itself. It is said to pre-exist capitalism and to be its precursor. The concept of ‘racial capitalism’ shifts attention from economic/material to cultural/ideological factors, and reflects the influence of postmodernism (and the correlative ebbing of Marxism), culturalism, identity politics, and race-centrism. It prompted some controversy, with supporters highlighting its relevance, especially to the history of Afro-Americans subjected to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and pervasive racism, and critics pointing to various flaws, among them the fact that racialism is a modern phenomenon evolved as a pseudo-scientific justification for recourse by capitalism to indentured labour, chattel slavery, commodification of human beings, colonization and apartheid. The debate boils down to determining the causal connection: does capitalism engender and foster racism, or is it a byproduct and an offshoot of racism?
Davis has produced a compelling study. The revised version of her doctoral dissertation is a tightly packed text, pruned to the bone. Sentences are terse, more often than not supported by a footnote. The mastery of archival sources and the literature is impressive. For a 175-page text, notes take up 49 pages in small print and the bibliography extends over 31 pages in equally small print.
It argues that French colonial rule in Algeria racialized the religion of Islam and turned it into an ethnic marker. Islam became a racial category that determined and shaped economic development. ‘Rather than studying the mechanisms of formal belonging [to the French state], this work focuses on economic policies to elucidate the functioning of a racial regime of religion’ (p. 6). Central to ‘racial capitalism’, race is everywhere in this book in the form of Islam. The author eschews economic history and political economy. She does not embrace the approach that ‘treats race as an ideological justification for capitalism's uneven exploitation of the workforce’ (p. 12). So be it, but she understands this Marxist view as an articulation of liberal economic orthodoxies (p. 12). The theme of the book is how, abiding by their predecessors’ conflation of Islam with race, twentieth-century French planners strove to modernize Algeria by transforming traditional homo islamicus into market-wise homo economicus, turning Algerians from backward subjects into forward-looking economic agents.
The author is on firm ground as she details how French officialdom essentialized differences. This was common practice in European Empires and a glaring negation of the universalist, secular and colour-blind principles France espoused. Nowhere was this more evident than in Algeria. Settler colonialism, French or non-French, in Algeria or elsewhere, is by its very nature an order of privilege, exemplified by segregation, institutionalized inequality and legalized discrimination. The raison d’être of a settler colony is to install foreigners on land that does not belong to them, dispossess the indigenous population, exploit it to the hilt and, when necessary, massacre it. Any rationale for the enterprise will do, the easiest to invoke being religion, race, ‘natural’ aptitudes, property claims put forward by the colonizers and putative material benefits bestowed on the colony. In Algeria, Islam welded the colonized while, at the same time, serving as an all-purpose reference point to the colonizers, who also distorted it as a racial construct. Settler colonialism stigmatized the Algerian Other by racializing Islam.
With the intensification of the Algerian uprising, French authorities had to come to grips with the economic drivers of the revolt, allay poverty and make Algerians stakeholders in an economy dominated by the colons. The Constantine Plan (1958) was devised to promote development, in other words, to backtrack urgently on over a century of underdevelopment and settler colonialism. Interestingly the author points out that modernizers implementing the plan were carriers of established religious-racial prejudices behind a liberal technocratic outlook (pp. 69–95). Nevertheless, their biases cannot rank as a major reason for the failure of the Plan. There were more fundamental causes. Much has already been written about the Constantine Plan.
Chapter 4 (‘Fellahs into Peasants’) demonstrates a good grasp of the agricultural context and the impediments in the way of Algerians working what land settlers left them. Going beyond the colonial era, chapters 5 and 6 present the challenges faced by Algeria in the aftermath of independence. As could be expected, the role that Islam would play in economic development and in the quest for modernity was debated but the outlook was unrelated to ‘the racial regime of religion constructed by the French occupation’ (p. 134). Religion ceased to be a racial category in postcolonial Algeria. Much can be learned from this book, whatever the merit of the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ and the use of race as the prism to analyse capitalism and settler colonialism.