Introduction: Settler colonialism and French Algeria

Abstract

The unusual trajectory of settler colonialism in French Algeria, which culminated in Algerian independence and the exodus of European settlers, has often limited the interest of scholars who seek to understand settler colonialism as an enduring structure of oppression. For their part, scholars of French Algeria have yet to fully engage with the intellectual propositions of settler colonial studies, which has focused primarily on Anglophone and Israeli–Palestinian contexts. The Introduction seeks to open a dialogue between these groups of scholars, mobilising the propositions of settler colonial theory to outline the dynamics of the operations of power in settler colonial Algeria, before describing the evolution of these dynamics over five historical phases. Correspondingly, by bringing to the fore questions of cultural and linguistic diversity within both settler and indigenous populations, and underscoring the emotional dynamics of Empire, it is hoped that research on French Algeria might help shed light on understudied aspects of other settler colonial contexts. Through such dialogue, we seek to facilitate comparative and globally connected histories of settler colonialism, bringing multiple imperial spaces into the same frame of analysis.