This book is intended as an exploration of ‘the role which cultures of medicine played in the creation of Algeria in the nineteenth century’ through an ‘ethical’ method that ‘asks whether French medicine was good and just’ and what its effects were on both indigenous Algerians and colonial settlers of European origin (p. 3). Rather than an institutional or social history, however, Gallois offers a series of reflections based on recurrent themes of certain discourses produced loosely around questions of ‘health’ in nineteenth-century Algeria. The chapters follow an exposition of ‘the idea of medical imperialism’, ‘humanitarian desire’ (in fact a disquisition on notions of race), ‘extermination’, ‘attendance to suffering and demographic collapse’ (on the ‘genocidal’ nature of French colonialism in Algeria), and two concluding chapters on ‘autonomy’, focussing on the careers and testimonies of the (few) Algerians working in the French colonial medical establishment. The final chapters are certainly the most interesting for, while Gallois has already published a shorter study on some of these individuals,Footnote ¹ the archival evidence (from rarely accessible personnel files) used here gives a welcome glimpse into little-known aspects of the question. It is all the more unfortunate that these short chapters come at the end of a book otherwise reliant on a fairly narrow range of published French books, tracts, and pamphlets, generally the work of ideologues, that are bound to give a very particular sample of the kind of language produced about early colonial Algeria and that cannot be used, as Gallois tries to use them, to illustrate ‘the creation of Algeria’ in the nineteenth century.

Although the central claim is that ‘the idea of medicine was a cornerstone of the Algerian project’ (p. 64), this is never demonstrated from the evidence adduced. The medicalizing literature examined is not consistently connected to a history of colonial governance (or even of ‘policy’, if it existed), and often the language of ‘health’ and ‘sickness’, as in Gallois's title, is metaphorical. Nor can a ‘broad culture of attitudes’ (p. 95) be convincingly derived from the particular (and relatively few) authors cited. The book is at its weakest when trying to use the more-or-less overtly exterminatory discourse of some French thinkers to demonstrate that ‘French colonialism in Algeria was founded upon an exterminatory logic’ (p. 94), ‘an annihilatory instinct’ (p. 96), ‘a genocidal culture’ that existed ‘from the inception of the colony’ (p. 173). This argument takes the discredited diatribes of Olivier Le Cour GrandmaisonFootnote ² much too seriously and extrapolates from too narrow a base in too partial a literature to be sustainable. The one cited example of a particular exterminatory atrocity (there were many others), the asphyxiation of the Awlad Riah in the caves of the Dahra mountains (not in Kabylia) in 1845, is well known in the literature and was scandalous even at the time. That such atrocities were common, and have been well documented since the work of Julien, does not make the conquest genocidal, however much the ‘eliminationist’ writers relied on here might have wished it. The effects of the conquest were sufficiently catastrophic without there being a need to label them as ‘genocide’, a preoccupation that distracts from more serious engagement with the case at hand. For example, the fact that the cholera epidemic beginning in 1865 was introduced, however unwittingly, from France (by a group of nurses) is not mentioned; fundamental works on historical demography by Kamel Kateb and Djilali Sari are missing from the bibliography; Algiers was not ‘devastated by plagues’ (p. 34) in the 1920s (though there was a typhus epidemic in 1920–21); the 1936 census showed 7,817 Muslim Algerians ‘naturalised’ as French citizens at that date (not ‘about seven thousand’ between 1865 and 1962, p. 86); ‘massacre’ in French does not have an Arabic etymology (p. 103); the MTLD was not an ‘Islamist’ movement (p. 88) and its ‘D’ is for ‘démocratiques’ not ‘démographiques’! The Saint-Simonians are much talked of but Ismaïl Urbain almost ignored.

Perhaps this book was written too quickly. It certainly strikes the reader as an overly hasty and at times disappointingly superficial treatment of what ought to be an important and enlightening study: not only are the several fields to which it seeks to speak growing rapidly at present in English, but the Algerian experience certainly stands as one that has very frequently been considered a ‘limit case’ for the questions of violence, ethics, and ‘civilisation’ that are the main concerns here. Regrettably, however, by a lack of sustained coherence in its arguments and an overly narrow base of empirical evidence, this book fails to convince.