Law, Order, and Empire: Policing and Crime in Colonial Algeria, 1870–1954 by Samuel Kalman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2024; pp. xii + 261).

Legal codes prohibit certain actions and, sometimes, entire modes of behavior, but the actions of laws' agents determine whether "law, order, and policing" are oppressive.The application of law, in other words, is always political, even if laws, legal codes, and their police enforcers profess to be otherwise.The denial of rights and freedoms might make "oppression" appear easy for the historian to measure.Governing authorities that criminalize behaviors on the grounds of ethnicity, gender, or sexuality might spring to mind in this context.Yet what happens when not only are rights and freedoms denied but so, too, are more basic needs: to food, to shelter, to protection from individual and collective violence?Put differently, what is the relevance of law when the entire social system it helps maintain is predicated on the exploitation of one community by another?This is the dilemma that Samuel Kalman wrestles with in his superb study of policing in French colonial Algeria.His remit covers the eighty years or so before the territory exploded into the violence of anticolonial war and revolution in 1954.Much has been written about police abuses during the Algerian War, less about the years that preceded it.Here, Kalman is a proficient guide.His work explores a welter of laws, police investigations, arrests, and trials with the forensic logic of a legal investigator and the skeptical eye of a historian sensitive to the silences and occlusions of one-sided colonial archives.His book is a testament to the insights revealed when Law and History are deftly combined.So, what about that dilemma?What's left to say when it's obvious that law and policing serve the interests of one social group (European settlers and French colonialists) at the expense of another (the Algerian Muslim majority population)?French colonial law was racially constructed, selectively applied, and always unjust.The police patrols, gendarmerie units, colonial officials, and legal staff who enforced it were prejudiced against Algerian Muslims and