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 deliberately blind to their own partiality. Their biases were both conscious and unconscious, so ingrained that their normativity was rarely questioned. None of this should surprise. From its inception in 1830 to its formal demise in 1962, French Algeria signified a settler colonialist project sustained by the near-total dispossession of the country’s Arab and Kabyle Berber peasantry. Law and policing were never the project’s only instruments, but they were integral to it—and increasingly so from the late nineteenth century. Kalman demonstrates how such colonialist policing worked and why its repressive scope widened even further after the Second World War. Scanning his broad historical horizon, he discerns important continuities: constants included chronic personnel shortages, supposedly “lawless” highland zones, and settler pressure for harsher legal punishments. These deficits, spatial gaps, and ceaseless complaints make it impossible to envision a totalitarian “police state.” Algeria was too thinly administered for that. But here, another continuity: always outnumbered, fearful of being overwhelmed, and confronted with the sullen resistance of community silence, uniformed police were predisposed to violence. What scared them most were groups of Algerian men whose culture they did not understand and whose grievances they did not take seriously. And police fears abided. Presumptions about rural “banditry” before the First World War fed calculations about nationalist paramilitaries in the decade after the Second. For all that, the police themselves were less exposed to violence than others lower down the administrative ranks. Confined to the lowest levels of district governance, Algerian officials, whether caïds and village headmen or forest guards and police informants, were preferred targets for community retribution. So much, then, for the continuities.

In other respects, Kalman highlights decisive changes in the focus of colonial policing. That the Algerian colonial state and its legal apparatus adapted easily to the racist authoritarianism of the Second World War’s Vichy regime was sadly predictable. That, after Vichy’s eviction from Algeria, colonial police and gendarmerie units were increasingly preoccupied, first with a losing battle against black marketeering and, second, with the race crimes of Allied and, above all, French servicemen, is perhaps less so. Most significant, in an expansive fifth chapter on Algeria’s postwar decade, Kalman makes plain that the colony’s legal apparatus, plus the colonial administrations and police services that enforced it, shifted from nonlethal punishment of real and imagined Algerian political opponents toward more calculated use of torture, murder, and collective punishments usually identified as characteristic of the Algerian War from 1954 onward. Kalman’s point is not that police and officials had scrupulously avoided such violence before. They hadn’t. It is, rather, that the scale and intensity of such repression marked a terrifying new departure even so.

The mention of postwar repression returns me to the foundational questions with which this review began. To be sure, Kalman unpicks the racialized thinking, the flawed intelligence analysis, and the unrelenting pressure from European settlers and officials for punitive police interventions to coerce Algeria’s Muslim majority into compliance. The archival material he assembles to prove it is brilliantly deployed to make his case that policing was condemned to fail because it remained the servant of repressive colonialism. If that’s the case, does it make sense to demarcate between periods of peace and conflict in Algerian society at all? If anything, and as Kalman makes plain, Algerians, and young Algerian men especially, faced greater security force violence, including arbitrary detention, torture, and murder in the so-called “postwar” years of 1945–54 than in the preceding “wartime” period. Might one go further still? The book brims with evidence of human suffering so severe that it determined personal choices to a greater extent than religious loyalties or nationalist calls to action. Landlessness and debt combined with harvest failure and price inflation to produce rural starvation, not once or twice but decade after decade. Food riots were endemic. Accusations of hoarding, a staple of famine-struck communities, drove the social radicalization that lent Algerian nationalism its rural impetus. If so, then surely the underlying story of law and policing is the refusal to acknowledge the struggles for survival of those whom colonialism impoverished. One senses that Kalman thinks so. For this, and its innumerable insights, the book will be indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the lived experience of colonial discrimination.