Electric News in Colonial Algeria, by Arthur Asseraf

In this clearly delineated and well-argued study, Arthur Asseraf analyses the circulation of news—defined as ‘what was considered to be recent, factual and interesting’ (p. 3)—in Colonial Algeria from 1881 to 1940. His concern is to explore how the different communities living in Algeria—European settlers, Jews and indigenous Muslims—engaged with, interpreted and understood news, and thus each other. By asking what was distinctive about news in a colonial setting, Asseraf pushes back against what he regards as the Eurocentric and presentist focus of much existing scholarship on this topic. At the same time, he challenges the entrenched historical narrative, most commonly associated with Benedict Anderson, which claims changes in the media were responsible for the emergence of nationalism. Colonial Algeria, with its ‘juxtaposition of a fully-fledged European settler society with all the trappings of modernity alongside a vastly larger society with its own networks for distributing information’ (p. 6), provides...

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine