State capacity has been a central concern in the literature focused on the ontogeny of the modern state in Western Europe and in comparative work on contemporary states. Much of this discussion focuses on the origins, increase, and exercise of what Michael Mann refers to as infrastructural power, or “the capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm” [Mann Reference Mann1984: 189]. One assumption largely shared across these literatures is that the rationalizing processes associated with the state’s increased capacity to penetrate society and implement decisions trend towards homogenization and integration [Tilly Reference Tilly and Tilly1975: 40-41]. Footnote 1 In James Scott’s analysis (1998), “legibility”—the myriad rationalizing practices high capacity states use to simplify governance tasks and “see” society, resources, and land—inevitably homogenizes local diversity and local knowledge, whether in 20th century high modernist projects or in the pre-modern cadastral practices of centralizing states in lowland Southeast Asia. Footnote 2 This form of state capacity is referenced in Bourdieu’s idea of “symbolic power” or “symbolic violence”—the ability to officially name, to “constitute the given” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991: 242; 170]—of which he asserts the state monopolizes the legitimate use within its territory, just as it claims a monopoly over physical violence [1999: 40].
The social effects of the exercise of symbolic power are also assumed to result in integration and homogenization, à la Eugen Weber’s [1976] argument concerning the French Third Republic making “peasants into Frenchmen.” Bourdieu remarks, “cultural and linguistic unification is accompanied by the imposition of the dominant language and culture as legitimate and by the rejection of all other languages into indignity (thus demoted as patois or local dialects)” [1999: 62]. Modernist-constructivist arguments concerning nationalism follow this logic, emphasizing economic structural transformations, the combination of mass literacy and new communications technologies, or political factors as reasons for the production of national imagined communities and the isomorphism of the modern nation-state [Gellner Reference Gellner1983; Anderson Reference Anderson1991; Breuilly Reference Breuilly1985]. Here, the homogenizing forms of legibility enacted by the nation-state—“seeing” the individual citizen as the primary category of political, economic, and legal identity—are intimately connected to structures of legitimacy oriented around popular sovereignty.
Historically, however, there is not just one trajectory for the way in which states employ infrastructural power and attempt to legitimize their exercise of this power. Empire-states, which are defined by the sustained negotiation and maintenance of difference within a single polity [Barkey Reference Barkey2008; Cooper Reference Cooper2005], offer substantial evidence that high capacity states employ various modes of legibility besides homogenization and integration. Modern empires, the global extensions of the high-capacity metropolitan “nation”-states typically studied in the state formation literature, demonstrate that rationalization can easily be coupled with differentiation by these same states. In contrast to nationalizing processes of social integration and homogenization, colonial legibility entails strenuous efforts to maintain or even invent differences through state practices. Empires impose economic and political structural differentiation between metropolitan core and colonial periphery [Wallerstein 1974; Barkey 2008]. They also spend considerable energy making distinctions at the colonial periphery, drawing boundaries between colonizer and colonized, and classifying and categorizing differences (religious, ethnic, tribal, regional) within the “native” population.
Existing work on empire-based contexts of state formation amply demonstrates that there is no single standard legibility toolkit used by the modern state. However, we know less about why and how legibility toolkits differ, and about the effects of these differentiating expressions of infrastructural power in society. Did colonial states in different empires (the Ottomans, Dutch, or British), or even in the same empire (French Indochina versus French West Africa), “see” difference in particular ways? Do the formal nominal differences in labeling of various subunits within the same empire (colony, protectorate, mandate, trust, territory) matter for state practices? And, what are the longer-term effects of using one legibility toolkit versus another within these political units?
This article refines and extends Scott’s argument about legibility by analyzing how infrastructural power worked in one region of the French Empire. Looking comparatively at examples of the modern state’s colonial variant, it demonstrates that legibility practices are influenced by attempts to legitimate colonial rule: in sum, seeing like a colonial state depends, to a degree, on how the state wishes to be seen. Following a discussion of the infrastructural power of the colonial state, the article lays out a framework for analyzing why different legitimization frameworks are created for different colonial units and how these impact the way in which legibility is done within them. I argue that these legibility-legitimization linkages are significant, first, because they influence policy choices made by the colonial power and, second, because these policies activate the political salience of social classifications and boundaries within the colonized society and shape political claims made within these units by the local population during and after colonial rule.
The empirical discussion uses this framework to analyze variation in the symbolic dimensions of state building and technologies of rule implemented in different North African subunits incorporated into the French Empire between 1830-1930. I focus on Algeria and Morocco as representative of contrasting ideal-type legibility-legitimization linkages: colony versus protectorate, with the former characterized by more direct, assimilationist rule and the latter with more indirect, associationist rule. The analysis addresses why these very different formal legitimization frameworks were defined in each case and how these governing imaginaries subsequently influenced the forms of legibility implemented within otherwise very similar units. I then consider how these legibility-legitimacy linkages influenced identity politics in lasting ways in both countries and in metropolitan France itself. The conclusion discusses the comparative implications of the legibility-legitimization linkage, exploring how this mechanism might be used to examine variation in other colonial cases.
Legibility and the modern colonial state
The legibility toolkit used in the context of empire—the cadastral survey, the census, modern cartography (later aided by aerial photography), urban and rural planning [Kain and Baigent Reference Kain and Baigent1992; Cohn Reference Cohn1996; Anderson Reference Anderson1991; Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1980]—was similar to that used by the modern nation-state, but the ends to which it was directed were quite different. Instead of welding together rationalization, simplification, and homogenization, colonial infrastructural power was typically employed to reinforce social divisions, and at times invent them.
Native policy, the specific forms of legibility the modern colonial state applied to the subject local population, was manifested at two registers. First, the basic character of the colonial state revolved around the maintenance of the “rule of colonial difference” between European and native [Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993; Steinmetz Reference Steinmetz2007: 36-40]: i.e. the same French Third Republic state that made peasants into Frenchmen in the Hexagon in the 1880s-1890s was, with very few exceptions, the same state that barred colonial subjects from becoming French in Algeria and Indochina. Colonial logics of legibility required drawing and policing this social boundary between colonizer and colonized using racial, ethnic, or religious criteria. The rule of difference informed colonial policies with regard to property ownership and other economic rights, political representation, and legal status. Mamdani [1996] analyzes how direct rule excluded indigenous society from citizenship on racial grounds and indirect rule constructed a subject category through a “customary” legal mode based in selected authoritarian cultural resources. The preservation of heterogeneous customary legal systems was used to distinguish the native from European citizen. The colonial state also attempted to maintain this boundary through sexual sanctions and prohibitions against miscegenation [Stoler Reference Stoler2002; Saada Reference Saada2012].
The second type of legibility work carried out by native policy was “seeing” distinctions within the local society. Work on colonial India [Dirks Reference Dirks2001] has described how, in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, the British constructed a vast “ethnographic state” to produce more accurate and comprehensive knowledge of the colonized “other.” This knowledge was needed in order to more effectively formulate native policies. Here and elsewhere, legibility—seeing, naming, and counting tribes, ethnic groups, religious minorities, and castes—was a strategic concern of the colonial state. There was no single type of colonial ethnographic state, however, nor a single expression of legibility practices. In his work on Malaysia and the Philippines, Daniel Goh demonstrates that, rather than a confident engineer “inscribing” universal technologies of modernity in which modern state forms were transplanted into the Third World, the colonial “ethnographer-official” actually functioned as a transcriber attempting to discursively “adapt Western institutions of government to local societies fraught with sociological tensions” [2007: 136]. Idiosyncrasies were expressed in the type of native policies enacted in various colonial contexts.
Why did native policy—how the colonial state exercised its infrastructural power to see, name, and count within the subjugated society—sometimes take vastly different expressions? In his sophisticated analysis of the German overseas empire, George Steinmetz argues that native policy in a given colonial unit was determined by six factors: pre-colonial ethnographic discourse, competition among colonial bureaucrats for an ethnographic form of symbolic capital, colonizers’ cross-identification with the colonized, the colonized responses ranging from resistance to collaboration, economic dynamics, and pressures from the international interstate system [2007: 2-3]. Steinmetz argues that the first four, particularly pre-colonial ethnographic discourse, are primarily responsible for the extreme variation of native policy (ranging from genocide to paternalistic preservationism to more peer-like cultural exchange) in the cases he analyzes—German Southwest Africa, Samoa, and Kiachow (in coastal China).
One factor Steinmetz does not include is the way in which empires tried to legitimize colonial rule. While acknowledging that the colonial state has a “strong symbolic presence,” he denies that it makes “serious efforts seeking to gain legitimacy in the eyes of its subjects” [2007: 33]. Like most scholars analyzing colonial rule [Young Reference Young1997], Steinmetz makes a case for the colonial state as an object of analysis qua state. However, he also asserts that the failure of the colonial state to gain legitimacy in the eyes of its conquered subjects is one criterion that makes it exceptional in terms of a Weberian conception of stateness. I argue that it is a mistake to too quickly look past the colonial state’s “symbolic presence”—that this symbolic work reflected serious efforts to legitimize colonial rule. The fact that colonial states almost universally encountered (and put down) local resistance does not ipso facto mean that colonial states are exceptional with respect to legitimacy. Virtually every state, appealing to popular sovereignty or not, encountered armed internal resistance at some point in its formation.
Here it is critical to distinguish between the state’s attainment of legitimacy (legitimate in a strong Weberian-sense) and its attempts to legitimize rule. While the concept of legitimacy in the former sense has been roundly critiqued as tautological [Przeworski Reference Przeworski, O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead1986], this does not diminish its importance in the latter sense. Regardless of whether they succeeded, colonial states strove to legitimate their exercise of power to a variety of audiences, including, as I demonstrate below, colonized subjects. I propose that these legitimizing efforts are an important factor, sometimes much more than the others outlined by Steinmetz, shaping how native policy was implemented and thereby how identity politics played out in different subunits of empire.
Linking legitimization and legibility
My model affirms 1) that colonial states employed implicit and explicit modes of legitimization, 2) that these efforts influenced legibility practices in a given colonial unit, and 3) that these legitimization-legibility linkages profoundly shaped identity politics in colonial subunits, activating certain social boundaries as politically salient and setting up terms by which the colonized society made claims against the colonial state. The primary features of this approach are three-fold. It first focuses careful attention on critical junctures at which formal legitimation frameworks were defined for given colonial units, Footnote 3 then, second, traces how these forms of legitimation impacted legibility practices, how the colonial state wielded its infrastructural power in that unit. Third, it traces the manner in which various combinations produce divergent identity politics in different types of colonial subunits.
At a basic level, the colonial state’s legitimization activity and legibility practices were implicitly linked in the exercise of symbolic power, or the state’s power of “official naming” and capacity to “constitute the given” [Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991: 170; 242]. Legibility—the determination of what categories are used in a census; the naming of cities, streets, regions; the counting of this crop or livestock versus another; the recognition or non-recognition of this or that tribe, religious order, or civil association—is by definition an expression of the state’s symbolic power. As Loveman [Reference Loveman2005] has demonstrated in the case of Brazil, colonial states relied on a range of mechanisms—including the innovation of new practices and the imitation, co-optation, and usurpation of existing ones—to accumulate then routinize everyday forms of symbolic power. Colonial states expressed these implicit forms of legitimization related to the extension of infrastructural power through quotidian administrative practices such as assigning last names; creating addresses; requiring travel permits; and registering births, marriages, and deaths.
The more important point is that explicit forms of legitimation had an impact on the exercise of this type of power. This type of legitimization relates to the colonial state’s exercise of “ideological power,” or the meaning construction used to justify colonial rule and to enhance this schema through “aesthetic” and “ritual” practices [Mann Reference Mann1986: 22-23]. Barkey [2008: 13] observes that empires anchor their rule in some type of “supranational ideology”—their protection of a universalist religious order (i.e. Christendom or Islam), for example, and/or the empire’s fulfillment of a universalist “civilizing mission” (religious, cultural, economic, political, or social). But, ideological power is not uniformly employed under these empire-wide legitimating umbrellas. By definition, empires are heterogeneous political frameworks, and colonial rule was formally justified in various subunits in myriad ways (reflected in the use of diverse nomenclatures used to denote colonies, protectorates, trusts, mandates, or territories). Thus far, little scholarly attention has focused on why these diverse labels were used and whether nominal variation mattered among colonial units in terms of policy.
Typically, the choice of one of these labels versus another for a colonial subunit was dictated by a set of initial contingent factors in play at the moment a given territory was incorporated within an empire. These could include dynamics in the international diplomatic field including Great Power competition, internal struggles within the metropole, debt structures, or factors on the ground. Once this formal framework for colonial intervention was defined, it typically had a significant impact on how the colonial state used ideological power to try to legitimize its rule within that unit for three possible audiences—the broader international community, the metropole, and the local populations ruled by the colonial power.
The key claim I am making is that these formal, explicit legitimization frameworks mattered for how legibility was practiced: in sum, how a colonial state wanted to be seen (how it justified colonial rule to these audiences) affected how it saw the social (indigenous and settler), the spatial (urban and rural), the territorial, and the temporal. Infrastructural power was intentionally employed to name, count, categorize, and catalogue for specific purposes related to the overall legitimization structure operative in a given political unit. One of the most important effects of how these legitimization-legibility linkages were implemented to define and maintain difference in the subjugated society was to politicize particular symbolic boundaries (ethnic, religious, gender, etc.) that became key sites of nationalist and post-colonial contention [Wimmer Reference Wimmer2013].
The next task is to determine how legitimization was linked to legibility in empirical cases in the French Empire. France’s invasion of Algeria in 1830 inaugurated a second period of overseas colonial expansion that incorporated large swaths of West Africa, Oceania, and Southeast Asia over the course of the 19th century and also encompassed Algeria’s neighbors, Tunisia (in 1881) and Morocco (1912). Footnote 4 The following sections focus on two cases in North Africa, Algeria and Morocco—the first and one of the last territories incorporated during this period of French imperial expansion—of similar size, topography, population, demographic composition (in terms of ethnicity and religion), culture, and political structure. These cases demonstrate how, in these otherwise similar colonial subunits, different legitimization frameworks were defined and how these influenced legibility practices. In North Africa, two divergent ideal type modes of rule were implemented: 1) assimilationist, direct-rule in Algeria versus 2) indirect, associationist rule in Morocco. Though no colonial state consistently implemented a pure form of colonial policy—assimilationist or associationist, direct or indirect—very different paradigms of colonial rule were imagined and invoked by colonial administrations in these two countries.
Seeing and being seen like a colonial state in French North Africa
The wide range of legibility-legitimization linkages expressed within the French Empire was on full display at the International Colonial Exposition (ICE) in 1931. That summer, over 7 million visitors passed through the exposition held in the Bois de Vincennes on the eastern edge of Paris. Footnote 5 The ice was the crowning celebration of the French imperial dream of la plus Grande France, “Greater France,” and a final interwar crest of European High Imperialism. A colonial propaganda extravaganza whose motto was “A tour of the world in one day,” it was intended to showcase the grandeur—economic, cultural, and military—of the French empire for the metropolitan and broader European audiences. Footnote 6 The two levels of differentiation maintained by empires—between metropole and colony and among different colonies—was inscribed in the physical layout of the exposition itself. The visitor entered through modernist exhibition halls dedicated to the French metropole’s scientific and technological progress and then proceeded to the Grand Avenue of the Colonies. In this imperial space, pavilions were positioned along the route dedicated to each of France’s overseas possessions from Madagascar to West Africa to Indochina—each painstakingly constructed to exhibit “authentic,” traditional architectural styles.
At the end of this avenue, France’s three treasured North African possessions—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco—were showcased around the Place d’Afrique du Nord. Inside the pavilions, each colony’s respective administrations had organized a series of rooms with display cases, mechanized dioramas, posters, maps, slide shows, photographs, and artifacts intended to catalogue, narrate, and promote the mise en valeur (development or enhancement) achieved in constructing each of these colonial entities. Traditional suqs, or markets, and Moorish cafes serving mint tea were also built to provide local color. The pavilion for Algeria, the crown jewel of France’s Third Republic Empire, celebrated what one brochure called “the second metropole,” l’Algérie française. This representation of the assimilationist incorporation of “French Algeria” over the past one hundred years since 1830 was contrasted with the palaces constructed for the “protectorates” that France administered in Tunisia and Morocco. These carefully represented France’s associationist partnership with indigenous dynastic rulers, “on behalf” of whom the French had been working so hard in the project of colonial economic, cultural, and political development.
The differentiating logics of empire were blatant at the ice: metropolitan and colonial spaces were carefully segregated but perhaps even more effort was expended to spatially and visually differentiate individual parts of the empire, even within geographically and culturally linked administrative units such as French North Africa. The North African pavilions, though in some respects similar, portrayed very different modes of colonial rule ranging from assimilationist settler colonialism in Algeria to varying levels of, at least nominally, indirect rule in protectorate Tunisia and Morocco.
Why did the French use, and steadfastly adhere to, very different types of colonial states, or very different representations of these colonial administrations, within their empire? Barkey argues that, for a case like the Ottoman Empire, different modes of rule were employed because various societies incorporated into the empire were fundamentally different than one another [2008: 13]. But, in North Africa, the social, political, and economic structures—particularly in Algeria and Morocco—were incredibly similar. Why did the French use the labels colony and protectorate in North Africa and what difference did this make?
The empirical analysis of this article addresses both of these questions, first by looking at the initial conditions in which Algeria and Morocco were incorporated into the French Empire and the critical junctures at which the formal legitimization structure for rule within these units was defined. I then examine how variations in the assimilationist and associationist systems of legibility expressed in policies towards natives and colons (settlers) were employed by the different colonial states in North Africa, with attention to the following important mechanism: how legibility was linked to the way the colonial state tried to legitimize its domination over indigenous society.
Making Algeria French?
With their landing on the coast at Sidi Ferruch and their occupation of Algiers in the summer of 1830, the French embarked on a one hundred year period of colonial state building in North Africa that entailed a total military conquest of local resistance and the extension of governing structures over carefully delineated territorial administrative units in Algeria, Tunisia (from 1881), and Morocco (from 1912). Each country was incorporated into the French Empire at very different historical moments, and these initial conditions had lasting effects on each colony. The first, Algeria, was distinguished by the ad hoc nature of the intervention and by a long initial period (1830-1870) during which its formal status was contested among military and civilian administrators and various factions within the French metropole. Amidst these struggles over the trajectory of the colony, the legibility-legitimization linkage oscillated to and fro between direct and indirect administration and between assimilation and association. Footnote 7
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• An ambivalent legitimization-legibility linkage (1830-1870)
France’s expansion into the northern coast of Africa in 1830 represented a pivotal moment transitioning from two older phases of empire making, including the sea-based iteration largely oriented towards holdings in North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia, and Napoleon’s continental land-based empire. Footnote 8 Algeria marked the start of a third stage of empire building carried out over the next hundred-plus years in Africa and Southeast Asia, and set lasting precedents for this subsequent expansion [Saada Reference Saada and Steinmetz2013: 323-328].
The unique feature of this early period of imperial expansion was the relative autonomy by which the French were able to intervene across the Mediterranean in Algiers compared to the much more structured international diplomatic context in which European powers would scramble for Africa and Asia in the later 19th century. The 1815 Congress of Vienna stripped France of its continental empire in order to create a balance of power following the Napoleonic Wars. However, the European powers, many of whom were also engaging militarily with North African corsairing city-states in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, did not restrict France’s unilateral intervention against Algiers 15 years later.
Given the lack of constraints at the international level, the initial context for France’s 132 year-long colonial intervention in Algeria was primarily influenced by two other contingent factors: the domestic French political context and bilateral tensions between France and the Algerian dey. It is perhaps the only world historical development tracing back, in part, to a critical juncture involving a flyswatter. During a visit by the French consul on April 29, 1827, a spat over debts owed by the French government for grain shipments degenerated, and the dey allegedly struck the consul three times with the handle of a peacock-feather flywhisk. Footnote 9 The incident sparked an escalation between the countries over the next three years that included a blockade of Algiers and retaliatory cannon fire. In July 1830, the Polignac government under Charles x, eager to create a domestic distraction and bolster the Bourbon dynasty’s flagging popularity, ordered a French expedition to occupy the coastal principality. That same month, Charles x fell in the July Revolution, and his Orleanist cousin, Louis Philippe, inherited the situation on the ground in Algeria, including the occupation of Algiers and other coastal enclaves.
Over the next several decades, military and civilian officials on the ground and in Paris fought over the direction of the colony as the territorial conquest progressed in three phases: the initial penetration on the coast and establishment of enclaves; the open plains and inland towns in the hinterland; and finally the mountains and desert fringe [Sessions 2011]. At each of these stages the French encountered different levels of resistance: the vestiges of the Algerian-Ottoman state under the dey, an Arab movement under the Amir Abd al-Qadir in the west and Ahmad Bey in the east rooted in mobilized Sufi networks, and millennial jihad movements led by mahdist leaders. The overall result of these intra-French struggles and violent conflict with Algerian groups was an ad hoc and ambivalent form of territorial expansion, land expropriation, settlement, and development and administration of native policy that mixed elements of direct and indirect rule, assimilation and association, and integration and differentiation.
In the early 1830s, a policy of restricted occupation was pursued, limited to coastal enclaves including Oran, Bougie, and Bône in addition to Algiers, and in 1834, a government-general was established for these areas. The 1837 Treaty of Tafa recognized Abd al-Qadir and Ahmad Bey as native rulers in the interior. By the early 1840s, however, this political coexistence was deemed untenable. The balance tipped away from limited occupation and a military governor general, Thomas Bugeaud, pursued the complete conquest of Algerian territory. Footnote 10 Bugeaud perfected the razzia technique of systematic destruction of the countryside in order to incapacitate sustained resistance [Brower Reference Brower2009; Gallois Reference Gallois2013]. Eventually, Abd al-Qadir, who had been forced to take refuge in eastern Morocco, was captured and exiled to Damascus. Having achieved dominance over Algeria’s Tell, or inland plateau, the “pacification” turned in the 1850s to the mountain enclaves, using razzia techniques to quell Berber resistance in Kabylia and the Aurès Mountains. After a decade of relative calm in the 1860s, France faced a final massive indigenous uprising in 1870 that coincided with the tumult of the Franco-Prussian war, but this final military resistance was put down in 1871.
During these initial decades of conquest, the way the nascent colonial state exercised infrastructural power, the legibility practices it employed to see society (settler and native) and resources, reflected the colony’s ambiguous formal status. Incrementally, as France expanded its military conquest, Algerian territory was de facto assimilated. In 1834, the coastal areas were annexed to France, and a Governor General was appointed. In 1848, the constitution of the Second Republic declared Algeria an integral part of France, and the areas under civil control were divided into three departments with representation in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris (with franchise denied to native Algerians).
Three basic administrative zones of rule—exhibiting the fundamental ambivalences between civilian/military and direct/indirect incorporation—were imposed over this time frame. The communes de plein exercice were civilian regions with self-government, replicating mayoral and local council structures in use in France. After 1831, French metropolitan law was fully extended into these. Second, the communes mixtes, with Muslim majority and European minority demographics, had a mixed administration, with French officials and native chiefs sharing duties. Finally, newly pacified zones, with exclusively Muslim populations, were administered by the military, which established an elite corps of native affairs officers, the bureaux arabes, in the 1840s. These officers, trained in the Saint-Simonian influenced Ecole Polytechnique, were to serve as intermediaries between the local chiefs and the French command, mediating an indirect rule sensitive to local customs in zones broken down by tribe, fraction, and douar (a group of tents or huts).
During the period 1830-1870, the colony was thus divided between zones of direct rule in civilian areas that had been incorporated as three departments of metropolitan France and military zones of indirect control administered through the Arab Bureaux. In this framework, the colonial state “saw” European settlers as French and ascribed to them the same status, with extra economic privileges, as in the metropole. The development of native policy, as the French expanded control over Algerian territory from 1830 onward and brought the entire Algerian population under French rule, was much more convoluted.
Because scholars including Said (Reference Said1978) and Steinmetz (Reference Steinmetz2007) have emphasized how pre-colonial ethnographic knowledge determined native policy, it is important to emphasize that the French initially went into North Africa more or less ethnographically blind. In contrast to later colonial ventures in which scientific missions attempted detailed ethnographic and geographic surveys prior to colonization, pre-colonial Algerian society was virtually illegible to the French. In a letter written in 1837, Alexis de Tocqueville lamented the “profound ignorance” the French had displayed thus far in their dealings in Algeria. Footnote 11 For Tocqueville, the haphazard entry of the French into Algeria was tantamount to the emperor of China invading France, burning all public records without reading them, eliminating the ruling class without having bothered to learn anything from them, attempting to rule knowing “nothing about the religion, nor the language, nor the laws, nor the administrative practices” of the new country [2003: 14]. The colonial state thus attempted to ethnographically see Algerian society only in the aftermath of military conquest, many times after this society had been ravaged by brutal pacification campaigns.
Fundamental legibility questions––how the French saw a boundary between themselves and the local population and what boundaries they saw within Algerian society––were ambivalently negotiated during this formative period. In writing about the relationship between the French and the local population in 1837, Tocqueville optimistically claimed, “There is, then, no reason to believe that time will not succeed in amalgamating the two races [Arab and French]. God is not stopping it; only human deficiencies can stand in its way” [2003: 26]. However, after four more years of military confrontation with the forces of Abd el-Qadir, he argued in an 1841 report for a completely separate French government for the French, claiming “The fusion of these two populations [Arab Muslim and European Christian] is a chimera that people dream of only when they have not been to these places. There can, therefore, and there must, be two very distinct legislative systems in Africa, because there are two very separate societies there” [ibid.: 111]. The military and political challenge posed to the French by Abd el-Qadir and his proto-state hardened a boundary for metropolitan observers like Tocqueville and for colonial administrators between indigène and French.
In the aftermath of the initial conquest, the French did develop social categories to make sense of the Algerian population in terms of its ethnic and sectarian composition. For the French, these categories were spatially differentiated, as Tocqueville writes in a description of the country’s inhabitants:
In the mountains were the Kabyles, more or less independent; in the plains the Arabs, quite incompletely subordinated; in the towns, the Turks and the coulouglis [offspring of Turkish officers and local women] and a mixed population without any fixed character”, the latter group of which he goes on later to describe as Jews and Moors (the Muslim populations of Andalusia that took refuge in North Africa) [2003: 12].
In the 1840s, the period in which increasing Algerian territory and population groups were brutally incorporated by the military under French control, cadres of Saint-Simonian trained native affairs officers, medical personnel, sociologists, and geographers began constructing a body of ethnographic knowledge about the language, customs, religion, law, etc. of Algerian society. One of the outcomes of the hardening of the ethnographic legibility described above was the emergence of what has been described as the “Kabyle Myth” [Ageron Reference Ageron1972; Lorcin Reference Lorcin2014]. In this binary generated through the experience of the initial conquest, the French valorized the sedentary, “Berbers” of the upland Kabyle region over the supposedly nomadic “Arab” inhabitants of Algeria’s plains. The Kabyles were stereotyped as more secular, more similar to the French, and therefore more assimilable than the Arabs, who were stereotyped as fanatical about Islam. This reification of an Arab-Berber classificatory binary would have profound long-term effects on notions of ethnic identity throughout the colonial, and far into the post-colonial, period.
During the first two decades of colonial intervention in the 1830s-1840s, civilian and military officials fought over two types of legitimization-legibility linkages—assimilationist direct rule and associationist indirect rule—with varying implications for the local population. With the advent of the Second Empire in the 1850s, the pendulum swung towards the paradigm of indirect rule supported by the military. This was due to the influence of Louis Napoleon, who envisioned himself as the patron of an “Arab Kingdom” in Algeria. In 1863, a Sénatus-consulte was passed in Paris guaranteeing Algerian property rights and, in 1865, another declared that Algerians were French but retained their status under Islamic law. Provisions were made for Algerians to be naturalized as French “citizens” but, to do so, they had to relinquish their Muslim civil status and come under French civil law. This associationist orientation attempted to preserve Algerian social structures. However, it is significant that it continued to differentiate on the basis of religion, with Islam being the primary marker of “native” identity.
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• Formalizing the assimilationist legitimization-legibility linkage
The fall of Napoleon III’s Second Empire in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 constituted a contingent, exogenous factor that finally settled this long period of ambivalent rule in Algeria and swung the pendulum firmly towards assimilation and direct rule. The advent of the Third Republic in the early 1870s in the metropole also determined Algeria’s official legitimization framework: the territorial space carved out through the pacification would be l’Algérie française, French Algeria. This formal definition of Algeria as a direct-rule, assimilationist form of settler colony had profound ramifications on the forms of legibility employed.
After 1870, the Algerian colonial state, under the Third Republic, shifted modes, with historical, rather than ethnographic, knowledge needed to Frenchify Algeria. Seeing and being seen as “French Algeria” required a historiographic form of legibility and, in the late 19th century, as Hannoum describes, an entire infrastructure of societies, journals, and publishing houses were employed in the construction of a French past for Algeria [2008: 91]. This project involved an archaeological project reclaiming Algeria’s Roman and Byzantine Christian past, of which the French claimed to be the direct heir. It also involved a historiographic denial of Arab North African history, including a racialization of Arab and Berber categories in which the Arabs were vilified as destructive invaders and the Berbers were lauded as freedom-loving autochthones, imagined as the descendants of Iberians and Celts. France, as a liberator, had arrived in Algeria to restore Western Civilization on the coast of Africa. Generations of scholars in the Algiers historical school including Mercier, Gsell, and Gautier re-narrated the Algerian past between 1880-1930.
This shift in the legitimization-legibility linkage was also carried out on practical levels in the state’s exercise of symbolic power through the renaming and Frenchification of Arabic place names. The word, Algeria (or Algérie), itself had been invented as a name for the territories formerly known in Arabic as al-Jaza’ir, or the islands (the fertile spots north of the Saharan sea). City names were Frenchified (Algiers, Bougie, and Oran) or completely changed (Phillipeville, Orleansville), villages were similarly renamed, and streets took on classical references from Roman times [Prochaska Reference Prochaska2004].
Most importantly, the definitive shift to a governing imaginary of assimilationist, direct rule had profound implications for the status of this colonial state’s Algerian subjects. In 1870, after many years of lobbying by influential French Jewish leaders and groups, the 1870 Crémieux decree unilaterally naturalized Algeria’s Jewish population en masse as French citizens. Footnote 12 With this move, the colonial state practically constructed a native category synonymous with Muslim identity. In 1881, a repressive code de l’indigénat (indigenous code) was implemented under which the Muslim native Algerian population was subjected to a system of summary justice. From this point forward, the boundary between French and native was drawn at Islam, with Latin-originating (Christian) colons (from Italy, Iberia, and France) and Jews included as French citizens and Muslims, whether Arab or Berber, excluded. This ascendant “French Algeria” legitimization framework and the legibility logics that flowed from it directly influenced identity politics in both Algeria and France itself over subsequent decades. The paradoxical integration and distinction of Algeria and its European and native inhabitants from France impacted the violent process of decolonization and continues to influence contemporary French debates about the integration of second and third generation descendants of Muslim Algerians.
Protecting Morocco
In contrast to the settler colony imaginary that eventually gained dominance by the late 19th century in Algeria, its neighbor, Morocco, was incorporated in the French Empire from the beginning under a “protectorate” rubric. Compared to Algeria, very different initial contextual conditions subsisted at the moment of France’s colonial intervention in Morocco. These conditions shaped the legitimization framework used as this territory was incorporated into the French empire. Here, changes in the international field in the late 19th century and the imbrication of French (and other European) financial institutions in loans to modernizing Muslim states in the southern and eastern Mediterranean directly impacted on the form of colonial control that was implemented first in Tunisia in 1881, in 1882 in Egypt (by the British), and finally in Morocco in 1912.
The Russian defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1877-1878 shifted the international framework for the late 19th century European and American scramble for Africa and Asia. Concerned about Russia’s southern expansion, the other European powers met at the Congress of Berlin to decide the fate of the Ottoman question. While maintaining the nominal territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, the Congress acknowledged the colonial interests of certain European countries, particularly in terms of its semi-autonomous provinces of the southern Mediterranean, Tunisia and Egypt. Despite intense protests from the Italians (overwhelmingly the largest European demographic in Tunisia), the Congress acknowledged France’s prerogative in Tunisia and Britain’s in Egypt. By 1882, both had established de facto colonial rule in these countries, while maintaining the local dynasties as nominal rulers in order to maintain the fictional integrity of the Ottoman Empire.
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• The protectorate legitimization-legibility linkage
In Tunisia, as well as in Egypt, the other critical justification for the use of a “protectorate” form of nominally indirect rule was that the Tunisian state had accumulated an enormous debt in the course of modernization reforms (tanzimat) in the 1860-70s of its military, administration, and infrastructure. By legally maintaining the existence of the Tunisian state, the protectorate formula allowed the French, whose banks had major interests in this debt, to continue having it repaid through tax revenues. Concerned that the Italians would preemptively intervene in Tunisia, the French seized on the border skirmish of 1881 as a pretext for invading and concluding a protectorate treaty that formally preserved the sovereignty of the Husseinid Bey, but which allowed the construction of a French colonial state alongside the Tunisian state apparatus.
The French colonial state in Morocco followed a very similar logic. In the 19th century Morocco benefited from a strategic deadlock, related to its control of the Strait of Gibraltar, in which no European power would unilaterally provoke hostilities by occupying the country. The French were cleared to move forward after the 1904 Entente Cordiale agreement with Britain, in which both countries accepted each other’s respective interests in Egypt and Morocco. An intense debate was waged over whether to proceed with a tribes policy of direct rule, conquering the country tribe by tribe (advocated by the Algerian lobby that viewed this as an opportunity to expand westward), or a makhzen (Arabic shorthand for the Moroccan state) policy of indirect rule, championed by the Quai d’Orsay, which would maintain the existing Moroccan state and partner with it in a protectorate arrangement [Hoisington Reference Hoisington1995: 22-45]. Here, France’s prior colonial experience in Algeria was used by both sides, either to justify or as a cautionary tale against extending an Algeria-style administration.
Again, the financial factor––the Moroccan state owed vast sums to French financial concerns from two large debts in 1904 and 1910––clinched the decision. A makhzen policy was expressed with the imposition in 1912 of a formal protectorate treaty with the Moroccan Sultan, in which the French pledged to pacify rebellious tribes and modernize the makhzen’s institutions on behalf of the Sultan. Thus, the Treaty of Fes (almost verbatim based on the Treaty of Bardo signed in Tunisia 30 years earlier) created the formal dimensions of the protectorate in which a colonial state would be constructed under the leadership of the first Resident General, Hubert Lyautey.
In contrast to the post-1870 assimilationist legitimization-legibility linkage ascendant in Algeria, where the French had obliterated local political hierarchies, in Morocco colonial intervention was legitimized in terms of state-building and development on behalf of a local leader, the sultan, whose sovereignty was nominally recognized in international treaties. Preservationist and ethnographic modes of “seeing like a colonial state” flowed from the indirect, associationist legitimizing framework through which the colonial state wanted to be seen by outside observers and by Moroccan society itself. Extraordinary measures were thus undertaken by the colonial state to catalogue, classify, codify, and preserve traditional society and culture [Burke Reference Burke2014].
Prior to occupying Morocco, the French had sent scientific expeditions beginning in 1903 from Oran in Algeria and from Tangier to gather data on Moroccan society, history, government, religion, tribal structure, and geography [Burke Reference Burke2007]. In the first decade after the protectorate was imposed in 1912, an institutional infrastructure producing ethnographic knowledge on Moroccan society was established in Rabat, including the Institut des hautes études marocaines, with civilian and military researchers producing a colonial archive on Moroccan urban and rural society, language, law, and political structures that was published in journals including Villes et Tribus du Maroc, Archives Berbères, and later Hespèris. This body of knowledge informed the formulation of native policy as the French progressively incorporated Moroccan territory, proceeding over the next two and a half decades from the coasts and plains, up into the Atlas Mountains and down into the Sahara in the south.
The legibility practices of the protectorate colonial state flowed from what Burke coined as the “Moroccan Vulgate,” an ethnographic bundle simplifying Moroccan history and society into a series of interrelated binaries (many of which were drawn from the earlier experience in Algeria), opposing the land of government/land of dissidence, Arab/Berber, urban/rural, plains/mountains [Burke Reference Burke, Gellner and Micaud1972]. Under the first Resident General, Hubert Lyautey (1912-1926), a champion of indirect, associationist rule, tremendous efforts were made to modernize Morocco while simultaneously preserving its traditional cultural and social structures according to this vulgate’s governing imaginary.
Following this dual logic of modernization and preservation, the protectorate colonial state applied infrastructural power within Morocco to maintain legibility classifications dividing the modern European/French and traditional Moroccan native. In urban areas, the first division was inscribed in the design and layouts of cities that preserved the traditional space of the medina and constructed modern villes nouvelles (new cities) alongside it for Europeans [Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1980; Rabinow Reference Rabinow1986]. Urban planning codes stringently controlled new construction, and the Beaux Arts ministry was charged with protecting heritage sites.
Ethnographic legibility was mapped on to a division between the plains, coasts and cities (Arab) and the bled, the rural mountainous and desert countryside (Berber), with a survey cataloguing Arabic and Berber differences and charting the practice of customary law being commissioned as early as 1913. Institutionally, the colonial state used distinct legal, linguistic, and educational structures to maintain boundaries within traditional society between elites/non-elites, Arabs/Berbers, Muslims/Jews, Men/Women. Separate shari‘a, customary, and mosaïque courts were maintained for Arabs, Berbers, and Jews, as were separate schools [Hoffman Reference Hoffman2010; Segalla Reference Segalla2009; Benhlal Reference Benhlal2005; Laskier Reference Laskier1984]. Schools were also differentiated in terms of gender and socio-economic status. In direct contrast to Algeria, the Residency in Morocco steadfastly refused to issue a Crémieux style decree naturalizing Morocco’s Jews as French citizens. Here, the legitimization logics of the protectorate directly constrained the colonial state’s legibility logics, as the Residency argued naturalizing the sultan’s Jewish “subjects” would violate the provisions of the Treaty of Fes. In the early 1940s, the vagaries of Moroccan Jews’ status as sujets of the Moroccan sultan rather than French citoyens would offer them a measure of protection when the Vichy government imposed its anti-Semitic Statut des juifs.
As had been the case in Algeria, civilian zones were juxtaposed in Morocco with military zones. While the former were not formally incorporated into France, increased colon settlement led to a steady expansion, through land expropriation, of civilian and commercial interests that pressured for a more assimilationist Algerian style of direct rule. Here the legitimization/legibility linkage inflected how integration and differentiation were applied in this subunit of the French Empire. The formal protectorate status of Morocco, including the fact that it was administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (like Tunisia and later Lebanon and Syria) rather than the Ministry of the Interior (as was the case with Algeria) functioned as a firewall against territorial assimilation.
For the French residency (under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), the technical sovereignty of the sultan and the façade of traditional governing structures had to be maintained as a matter of diplomatic protocol. In its historiographical enterprise, rather than erasing Morocco’s past, the colonial state focused on documenting it meticulously. By constructing a historically rooted archetypal Moroccan traditional society, the colonial state could first legitimate its own necessary role by documenting the “failed-state” thesis of a historically weak Moroccan government and, second, mine court historians’ accounts for a template of the “traditional” forms and trappings of rule that could be used for the purposes of the protectorate state. Thus, on a symbolic level, though the French were modernizing the country, the colonial state was also “protecting” and “preserving” traditional Moroccan culture and society. Particularly under Lyautey, significant attention was paid to reinventing the pomp and protocol of the palace, to the creation of a new Moroccan national flag and national anthem, and to cultivating the symbolic presence of the Sultan, which was deemed advantageous in legitimizing the Residency. Using the ideological power of the colonial state in this direction directly impacted the state’s use of infrastructural power, and how it achieved legibility.
The outcomes of this linkage in Morocco were very different from what occurred in Algeria. In Algeria, after a four-decade period of struggle between rival associationist and assimilationist visions of how to integrate the territory into the French Empire, a dominant assimilationist, settler form of direct rule gained ascendance. This concept reimagined a French Algeria and bracketed off the local population with exclusionary legal and economic restrictions. In Morocco, the fact that indirect rule was formally maintained, at least nominally, throughout the colonial period profoundly affected how political, ethnic, and religious identities were defined during anti-colonial nationalist mobilization and in the postcolonial period. The last section addresses the influence of these linkages on the divergent trajectories of identity politics in both countries.
Legacies of colonial infrastructural power on the politics of identity in Algeria and Morocco
One of the most important effects of legibility-legitimization linkages is how they politicized notions of collective identity and influenced claims-making in the colonized society during and after the colonial period. In this respect, the legitimization-legibility linkage model helps clarify how social boundary making, maintenance, and contestation functions in colonial and post-colonial contexts (Lamont and Molnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002; Wimmer Reference Wimmer2008). Colonial intervention represents a particularly influential rupture creating or redefining state-sponsored symbolic and classificatory schemas and thereby shaping social process of identify formation. A careful consideration of the colonial past is therefore imperative for understanding the contemporary constitution of ethnic and national identities, including their manifest and repressed dimensions, in myriad contemporary cases. Rather than a predictive model, this approach offers a framework for comparative analysis that emphasizes 1) the importance of critical junctures at which legibility-legitimization linkages were established, and 2) how these initial conditions influenced the terms (or “rules of the game”) through which identification processes consequently played out.
In their North African empire, the French, according to the historian Benjamin Stora, ended up buttressing two divergent visions of France: the Jacobin Republic in Algeria and the Legitimist Monarchy in Morocco [Stora Reference Stora2002]. At the onset of the colonization of Algeria in 1830, there was no prior clear legitimization narrative for imperial expansion. The attack on Algiers was thinly justified to the metropolitan audience as necessary to protecting French prestige, and other European Powers were content to allow the French to intervene against the North African principality. A contentious debate ensued, though, about continuing occupation and expansion. After four decades of struggle between competing associationist and assimilationist legitimization-legibility linkages, defeat in the Franco-Prussian war and the rise of the Third Republic led to a permanent shift towards an assimilationist vision legitimating and influencing the practices involved in making Algeria French. From the 1880s onwards through decolonization in the early 1960s, the infrastructural power of the state was used to explicitly and implicitly implement legibility practices systematically excluding Muslim Algeria’s past and present while striving to assimilate the country into France. The conquest of Morocco, begun almost a century later, took place at a time at which careful consideration had to be paid to the European international balance of power and to domestic opinion. These exogenous factors directly influenced why a protectorate-style, associational form of colonial rule was implemented that preserved the Moroccan sultan and state apparatus. In contrast to a simple homogenizing trajectory of modern state formation, the protectorate created in Morocco grew out of a very different French conception of modernity, what Rabinow [Reference Rabinow1986] calls “techno-cosmopolitanism.” In this case, a system of legibility was implemented that, rather than homogenizing social complexity, would ossify, and at times invent, it in terms of racial, ethnic, and cultural differentiation.
The particular legibility-legitimization link the French forged in these two subunits of their empire had a major impact on the types of claims made by Moroccans and Algerians. It also activated the political relevance of particular ethnic and religious identity markers, shaping notions of collective identity during anti-colonial nationalist mobilization and later under the post-colonial state. In Algeria, the dey and other potential local leaders like Abd al-Qadir were eliminated in the first decades of colonization. As a result, no equivalent symbolic figure to the Moroccan sultan was available for making claims about national sovereignty or as a rallying point for collective identity. Instead, immediately before and after World War I, the Young Algerians and prominent leaders like Ferhat Abbas mobilized to pressure the French to live up to the assimilationist legitimizing model, to actually extend the legal and political rights of French citizenship to Muslims: in sum, their claim was, make us French. Footnote 13 The failure of this campaign during the interwar period led to a shift towards independence-seeking anti-colonial nationalism in the 1940s-1950s. This project drew on an Algerian nationalist historiography that contradicted the legitimizing narrative of French Algeria and affirmed an Algerian Algeria. This counter-imagined identity was founded on three pillars articulated in the motto of the Algerian Association of Ulama: “Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, and Algeria is my country” [McDougall Reference McDougall2005]. Eventually, the FLN (National Liberation Front) waged an armed revolution from 1954 to 1962 to liberate Algerian territory from French jurisdiction. During that struggle, they themselves projected infrastructural power (registering marriages, births, deaths; administering justice; and collecting taxes) in competition with the French, forging their own legitimization-legibility linkage that defined Algeria with an integrationist vision of Arab and Muslim identity.
In Morocco, the nationalists were also impacted by the legitimizing logics of the protectorate treaty. They focused from the beginning on the symbolic importance of the sultan, pressing claims in petitions, media campaigns, and parliamentary lobbying in the early 1930s that the French were infringing on Morocco’s historic autonomy and sovereignty, and needed to live up to the terms of the 1912 Treaty of Fes. The failure of this reform campaign in the interwar period led to a shift after World War II towards the goal of independence. In contrast to Algeria, the Moroccan postcolonial state adopted the triptych “God, Nation, King” as its national motto, retaining the king as a central component of Moroccan collective identity [Rachik Reference Rachik2003].
In both cases, the ethnic and religious boundaries the colonial state used to render Algerian and Moroccan society legible were focal points for struggles over collective identity, and have remained so since independence. Nationalists in both countries engaged in energetic classification struggles against the colonial Arab-Berber binary distinction to defend the “Arab” identity of the nation [McDougall Reference McDougall2005; Wyrtzen Reference Wyrtzen2013]. In the post-colonial period, however, both countries have seen the rise of a political influential Berber identity movement challenging this mono-ethnic definition of the nation [Maddy-Weitzman 2011]. In Morocco, the monarchy coopted Berber identity politics and pushed to have Tamazight (Berber) recognized as a national language alongside Arabic in the new 2011 constitution; the Algerian state has also, more reluctantly, finally acceded to Kabyle demands for cultural-linguistic recognition by accepting Tamazight in January 2016 as one of the country’s languages, though Arabic remains the language of government.
Anti-colonial nationalists in both countries also used Islam as a primary boundary for defining the imagined national community, reacting to France’s use of Islam as the criterion for the colonial “rule of difference” in North Africa. Religious identity, however, has been negotiated very differently in the two countries since independence, with Algeria taking a more confrontational and Morocco a more cooptational approach to the Islamist challenge. In Algeria, the fln emphasized its revolutionary credentials in the 1960s-1970s then faced an intense challenge from the Islamist opposition after electoral reforms in the late 1980s that, after elections were canceled in 1991, escalated into a near decade-long civil war. In 1960s-1970s in Morocco, the king Hassan II cracked down on the Leftist opposition. He responded to a nascent Islamist opposition in the 1980s-1990s by cultivating and wielding his cultural capital as Amir al-mu’iminin (Commander of the Faithful) to attempt to monopolize religious legitimacy, a policy his son Mohamed vi has refined and expanded since coming to the throne in 1999.
The divergent politics of identity with respect to religion in the two countries is also evident in the position of the Jewish minority during and after the anticolonial struggle. Virtually all of Algeria’s Jews, naturalized as French citizens since 1870, left the country for France or Israel at independence. In Morocco, where they were classified by the colonial state as subjects of the sultan, many also emigrated, but tens of thousands stayed through the 1960s. Up through the present, Morocco retains the largest Jewish population in the Arab world, and Morocco’s Jewish minority (and, perhaps more importantly, the memory of Morocco’s Jews), constitute an integral component of a state-sponsored multi-cultural conception of national identity [Boum Reference Boum2013; Kosansky and Boum Reference Kosansky and Boum2012].
Conclusion
This essay demonstrated that the infrastructural power of the modern state—typically associated with nation-building processes of integration and homogenization—could also be directed towards frameworks of legibility that reinforced differentiation and heterogeneity in the context of empire. It also analyzed why this ordering of difference was carried out differently in various colonial subunits, emphasizing how legitimating frameworks for colonial intervention influenced legibility practices enacted within those subunits. The effects of these linkages on how infrastructural power was used by colonial states is of particular theoretical, empirical, and practical relevance because the vast majority of the world’s modern states (including most in Europe) Footnote 14 had their origins and development within the context of empire and are institutional heirs of some form of colonial administrative structure. Footnote 15 These legacies thus influence a large number of contemporary states and the types of identity politics that play out within various post-colonial national contexts.
The leverage provided by a comparative analysis of legibility-legitimization linkages has clear ramifications beyond the study of colonial North Africa. The mechanism could be used to analyze the sub-empire variation expressed in the British (Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq) or French (Syria, Lebanon) mandates in the interwar Middle East. For example, Palestine, like Algeria, was greatly influenced by a formative period in which contradictory pledges to Jews and Arabs built into the League of Nations mandate ambivalently defined the colonial political field’s legitimization structure as well as its logics of legibility. Spatially the field was subdivided into separate state-governed territories in Palestine and Transjordan, creating separate trajectories. The ambiguous and contradictory legitimization-legibility linkages applied in Palestine (which remained unresolved up until the British termination of the mandate in 1948) greatly influenced how various actors on the Jewish and Arab sides made their claims. In Transjordan, the 1921 British decision to recognize Abdullah as amir established a completely different legitimization framework, and legibility policies differentiating Bedouin and sedentary groups greatly influenced the development of the colonial army and power structure within the mandate and post-independence state of Jordan [Massad Reference Massad2001].
Beyond North Africa and the Middle East, this framework offers a resource for other single case studies or for comparatively studying internal variation within an empire or among different empires, tracing the different trajectories of identity politics in various formal legitimization frameworks (colony, protectorate, mandate, territory). It could also be used to analyze internal variation in a single colonial unit like India, in which multiple frameworks were combined or tested with regard to earlier epochs of empire, looking at different outcomes in various units of British North America or in different parts of the Ottoman Empire.
Finally, the model might also be used for metropolitan cases in analyzing the critical junctures at which state legitimization is renegotiated or locked in (i.e. the three-fifths compromise in the drafting of the United States’ constitution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man for France, the Right of Return for Israel), creating path dependencies that influence subsequent classificatory and categorizing legibility practices. Recent work has begun to explore shifts in how nation-states see or do not see racial and ethnic categories in response to internal and external factors [Loveman Reference Loveman2014]. For modern states with historic empires (which includes most of Europe and the United States), these processes have been closely connected to the negotiation of difference, and legitimization of this work, at the colonial periphery. Future research should address how colonial legacies continue to influence the way in which legibility is imposed by modern nation-states in different ways through the recognition or non-recognition of politically salient racial, ethnic, and religious social categories.
Acknowledgements
I benefited from comments by Nicholas Hoover Wilson, Julia Adams, Emily Erickson, Philip Gorski, Dan Slater, Deborah Davis, Scott Boorman, Immanuel Wallerstein, Matthew Norton, Samuel Stabler, Sadia Saeed, and the EJS reviewers. I presented this research at Yale University's Comparative Research Workshop and at the Social Science History Association in 2012. Direct correspondence to Jonathan Wyrtzen, Department of Sociology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06517 USA.
