Remaking the Post-War Colonial Order

This chapter focuses on the question of colonial reform in interwar Algeria, asking how political actors sought to redefine their place within the imperial polity in the wake of the war. Through a close reading of the debates that surrounded the two major moments of prospective colonial reform, the Jonnart reforms (1919) and the Blum-Viollette Project (1936), it shows how activists across ideological and ethnic divides mobilized the memory of the war to reimagine the system of colonial rule in Algeria. Underlining the limited appeal of Wilsonian rhetoric in the colony, this chapter explores the dominance of arguments grounded in concepts of the ‘moral economy of wartime sacrifice’ and ‘mutual obligation’. It considers how political actors sought to legitimize their visons of a just post-war colonial order by maximising their contribution to the war effort while minimising the wartime participation of their opponents, thus undermining their rival claims on the post-war state.