Conclusion

This conclusion ties together the different cases studied throughout the book to illustrate the centrality of the Great War to political discourse in the Algeria of the 1920s and 1930s. It analyses the effectiveness of the evocation of the Great War as a framing strategy for political, economic, and social demands in a colonial context. In particular, it considers how efforts to shroud rival conceptions of the relationship between the colonial state, its citizens, and its subjects in the cloak of legitimacy conferred by the war often had unforeseen consequences. The book concludes by arguing that the predominance of the Great War in political discourse in colonial Algeria may have, in the short term, ensured that most political actors envisaged reform within the bounds of the imperial polity, but it also created expectations that, in the long term, the colonial state proved unwilling and unable to satisfy.