Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria – 3 February 2023

From Jadaliyya

Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022), 264 pp.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Muriam Haleh Davis (MHD): This book came out of my PhD dissertation, which was focused on late colonial development in Algeria. While the book is a very substantial revision of that project, there were a number of questions that led me to tackle the relationship between economic development and decolonization as a graduate student: How did economic planning as a discipline account for the cultural and religious specificity of Algerian Muslims? How did the discourses and practices of French development influence the Algerian nation-state after independence? Should we consider that Islam functioned as a racial or religious category in colonial Algeria?

This last question is something that has long animated my thinking, as I was trained in critical race theory at UC Irvine before starting a PhD in history. While I had been steeped in post-colonial theory and discourse analysis, many accounts of the “Othering” of Muslims seemed to focus almost exclusively on representation or textual analysis. It seemed important to think about race and political economy together, especially at a moment where there were charged debates between post-colonial and Marxist theorists. I wanted to show not only the porous line between racial and religious categories, but also how ideas regarding the capacities of Muslims for rational behavior were constitutive of economic thought. While “homo Islamicus” has long provided a foil that allowed “homo economicus” to be legible (as I argue in the book), we can see that these tropes in turn structured the concrete economic reforms. The book therefore focuses on the measures introduced by French colonial planners and their attempts to introduce a liberal market society in Algeria during the Algerian Revolution.

Lastly, I wanted to tell this story using Arabic sources in order show how the racial formation engendered by colonialism influenced Algerian politics after independence. In the fifth chapter, I explore what the creation of a “racial regime of religion” meant for Algeria’s place in pan-Arab and also pan-African discourses in the early 1960s. I show how Algerian politicians and intellectuals participated in broader discussions regarding the relationship between national identity, Islam, and Arabness. The specific use of racial-religious categories by the French state therefore had important ramifications for how Algerian nationalists understood their relationship to the Mashreq.

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Muriam Haleh Davis is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Center for the Middle East and North Africa.

Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria – 3 February 2023

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