A desert named peace : the violence of France's empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 / Benjamin Claude Brower.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Brower, Benjamin Claude.

Series:

History and society of the modern Middle East series.

History and society of the modern Middle East

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French--Algeria--History--19th century.

French.

Violence--Algeria--History--19th century.

Violence.

Slave trade--Algeria--History--19th century.

Slave trade.

Imperialism--History--19th century.

Imperialism.

Algeria--History--1830-1962.

Algeria.

Sahara--History--19th century.

Sahara.

Algeria--Colonization.

Algeria--Ethnic relations--History--19th century.

France--Colonies--Africa, North.

France.

France--Territorial expansion.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 417 pages) : illustrations, maps

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, c2009.

Language Note:

Text in English.

Summary:

In the mid-nineteenth century, French colonial leaders in Algeria started southward into the Sahara, beginning a fifty-year period of violence. Lying in the shadow of the colonization of northern Algeria, which claimed the lives of over a million people, French empire in the Sahara sought power through physical force as it had elsewhere; yet violence in the Algerian Sahara followed a more complicated logic than the old argument that it was simply a way to get empire on the cheap. A Desert Named Peace examines colonial violence through multiple stories and across several fields of research. It presents four cases: the military conquests of the French army in the oases and officers' predisposition to use extreme violence in colonial conflicts; a spontaneous nighttime attack made by Algerian pastoralists on a French village, as notable for its brutality as for its obscure causes; the violence of indigenous forms of slavery and the colonial accommodations that preserved it during the era of abolition; and the struggles of French Romantics whose debates about art and politics arrived from Paris with disastrous consequences.

Contents:

Introduction : Understanding violence in colonial Algeria

Part 1: The "Pénétration Pacifique" of the Algerian Sahara, 1844-52

1. The peaceful expansion of total conquest ; 2. Theorizing the "pénétration pacifique" ; 3. The "pénétration pacifique" in practice, 1847-52

Part 2: Exterminating the French at Djelfa, 1861

4. The Ouled Naïl and colonial rule ; 5. The leadership crisis and rural marabouts ; 6. A holiday gone wrong : the attack on Djelfa

Part 3: Slavery in the Algerian Sahara Following Abolition

7. Saaba's journey to Algerian slavery ; 8. The Saharan slave trade and abolition ; 9. Colonial accommodation

Part 4: Imagining France's Saharan Empire

10. Romanticism and the Saharan sublime ; 11. The "blue legend" : Henri Duveyrier and the Tuareg

Conclusion.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612796494

9781282796492

1282796496

9780231519373

0231519370

OCLC:

831121382