What did Muslim, Jewish, and European villagers do when they were sick in colonial Algeria?

What is it about?

Colonial medicine has been described as a "tool of empire", not only in Algeria. The implication is that it existed solely to protect the health of European colonisers and to expand zones of imperial occupation. Medicine has therefore been assumed to have had little impact on ordinary Algerians. I use popular petitions to challenge this view. The French state introduced sanitary regulations to Algeria prior to WW1, many of which were unwelcome and caused distress to those they affected. But in turn, these policies encouraged people to believe that the state had a duty to help them when they were sick. We see this in petitions written by Europeans, Jews, and Muslims demanding the services of a doctor.

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Why is it important?

The everyday experiences of ordinary people seldom feature in histories of Algeria under French colonial rule. Recovering these experiences is important, because it gives us insight into how people navigated the dramatic transformations and themes of the 20th century--colonialism, warfare, capitalism, science and technology, migration, decolonization--all of which have legacies in the present. But it is hard to write this kind of 'history from below', not least because peasants rarely left written documents behind--or if they did, these documents have not been preserved in official archives. By placing petition letters written by Muslim, Jewish, and European peasants and workers at the heart of my study, I show that rural populations under colonialism had more agency than has previously been assumed. What is more, I find that Muslim villagers related to the colonial state and to settler and Jewish populations in more complex ways than previously appreciated.