Keller on Kalman (2024)

Scholars and students of colonial policing have long argued that its primary goal in European empires was to defend European life, property, and power. Samuel Kalman’s new book Law, Order, and Empire: Policing and Crime in Colonial Algeria, 1870-1954, concurs with this historical assessment. But the book goes further, taking readers inside the everyday operation of the colonial police in Algeria and the reactions of people living under colonial rule.

Kalman’s introduction opens with the story of two crimes. One was an attempted robbery that ended in the victim being shot to death. The other was a simple robbery. Although the first crime was more serious in nature, it was the latter crime that got more attention from the police because the victim was European. Kalman uses these two episodes to begin laying out his argument that the policing of crime in colonial Algeria was never disconnected from colonial power. This theme of prioritizing the protection of Europeans over Algerians is threaded throughout the book. 

In addition to the introduction, the book is organized into five chapters. Chapter one provides a useful institutional history of the police in Algeria that will especially serve students of colonialism who are looking to make sense of colonial bureaucracy. In chapter one Kalman charts the establishment, organization, and evolution of police institutions in Algeria since the 1880s. It introduces readers to the institutions of policing (the gendarmes, judicial police, municipal police, and the Renseignements généraux) as well as the technology of policing (fingerprinting, photography, and handwriting analysis). Kalman points out that racial hierarchy was always at the heart of policing. For example, he explains, “Algerian authorities refused to seriously consider widespread adoption of indigenous policing” (40). By chapter four, which takes place during the Second World War, these institutions have expanded and transformed again, now with Vichy’s anti-resistance and xenophobic goals deeply entrenched. According to Kalman, the Vichy-era left behind a “legacy of xenophobia and brute force” (147). In both eras, Kalman shows the police to be consistently under-staffed and under-funded. He mentions budgetary shortfalls or constraints at least six times in chapter one. During the Second World War, Kalman sees the police facing a “familiar problem” of having “too few agents” to clamp down on the black market (139).

Kalman’s most ground-breaking argument comes in chapters two and three. Here he refuses to draw a strict distinction between the policing of crime and the policing of politics. He argues that a broad range of criminal activity also had an anticolonial dimension. From banditry to violence against conscription, to railroad sabotage, to rowdy behavior at football matches, to sexual assault, acts of violence or harassment often targeted French people or the state. In particular sports arenas became the sites of such subversive activity. Kalman writes, “Algerians often fought Europeans at sports stadiums, where the humiliation of being beaten by the colonized, along with the sabotage of officially sanctioned league sporting events, reverberated with French officials and the general public in equal measure” (96). These chapters are not only convincing, but fascinating as Kalman finds widespread anticolonial activity in interwar Algeria. Because these chapters focus on behavior and not organizations or leaders, Kalman reveals that a variety of anticolonial activity occurred decades before an official movement existed. 

Historians of the Second World War will be particularly interested in chapter four because it brings to life colonial Algeria in this era by providing vivid descriptions of popular antisemitism, growing Muslim dissent, the emergence of a flourishing black market, and plenty of drunken brawls during this tumultuous period. For example, Kalman describes a scene in 1943, in which “four U.S. soldiers crashed into a brothel, firing shots at the manager as she ran to the police station” (141). This was not an isolated incident, as Allied soldiers frequently caused disturbances at cafés and targeted the police with physical and verbal abuse. 

In chapter five Kalman explores the “criminalization of nationalist politics” that occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War (148). The use of surveillance, arrests, trials, and eventually torture and even murder up the ante of colonial policing significantly. The colonial police were now directly addressing a mass political movement led by the Parti du Peuple Algérien. Readers familiar with the Algerian War, a topic Kalman does not address until the conclusion of the book, will undoubtedly recognize the brutal tactics used by French authorities in that conflict in its infancy. Kalman writes that the violent takedown of the PPA’ s militia only served to turn them into “folk heroes” among the Algerians (161). This chapter is a more conventional history of police repression of a nationalist revolt than the other chapters which tend to probe smaller and more fleeting stories of crime. But by placing the repression of the PPA in a historical narrative that begins with the earlier chapters, it becomes even clearer how the policing of crime and politics are all part of the same story. 

This is a clearly written and well-organized book. It relies extensively on archival sources, especially materials from the Algiers, Constantine, and Oran collections of the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence. Students of North Africa, the French empire, policing, and colonialism generally will find it to be interesting, well-argued, and innovative.

Law, Order, and Empire sheds light on a perplexing paradox of colonial power. Through an analysis of the police, Kalman depicts the colonial state as both powerful and weak. On the one hand the state asserted itself through unrelenting racial violence. At the same time, the police organizations were underfunded, understaffed, fearful and constantly vulnerable. Anticolonial activity in Algeria was only successful in casting off French rule after 1954 when this book ends. Kalman successfully shows that the seeds to this rebellion were present long before.