A multiplicity of human destinies : development and settler colonialism in French Algeria 1860-1940
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- A Multiplicity of Human Destinies: Development and Settler Colonialism in French Algeria 1860-1940 provides a new account of the historical origins and institutionalization of development in empire, beginning in the ninteenth-century. A formative politics of development arose in Algeria as a form of proxy for institutionalized settler privileges; it compensated for struggling and then retreating European rural settlement. In the 1860s an advisor to Napoleon III named Ismaÿl Urbain (1812-1884) advanced a Saint-Simonian model of state-financed, modern economic development for Algeria, based on cultural recognition for subject populations and curtailing their summary dispossession. A decade later, an export industry based on fiber harvesting, on extraction of a steppic grass known as halfa (alfa in French), adopted the Kingdom's principles. This industry captures how both the conceptual framework and policies of development changed as officials improvised responses to indigenous protest. At the turn of the century, officials' concern to conserve the grass contributed to the theory that nomadism (mobile pastoralism) was a product of the universal human adaptation to environmental constraints. French officials leading new institutions such as the Southern Territories of Algeria embraced this new case for the accommodation of mobile pastoralism. Yet as the settler colonial regime became more and more cognizant of the value of mobile pastoralism and adopted a raft of measures to reflect this change, conditions for it on the ground were worsening. This paradoxical situation illustrates how prototypical development was shaped as much by officials' inconsistencies and blind spots as by formal epistemic systems of rationality, science and technology.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2015 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Monkman, Laura K |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of History. |
| Primary advisor | Daughton, J. P. (James Patrick) |
| Thesis advisor | Daughton, J. P. (James Patrick) |
| Thesis advisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Thesis advisor | Satia, Priya |
| Advisor | Crews, Robert D, 1970- |
| Advisor | Satia, Priya |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Laura K. Monkman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of History. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2015. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2015 by Laura Katherine Monkman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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