Wednesday, March 29, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Zoom Virtual Event
Muriam Haleh Davis will discuss her new book (Duke University Press, 2023), which provides a history of racial capitalism, showing how Islam became a racial category that shaped economic development in colonial and postcolonial Algeria. French officials in Paris and Algiers introduced what Davis terms “a racial regime of religion” that subjected Algerian Muslims to discriminatory political and economic structures. These experts believed that introducing a market economy would modernize society and discourage anticolonial nationalism. Planners, politicians, and economists implemented reforms that both sought to transform Algerians into modern economic subjects and drew on racial assumptions despite the formally color-blind policies of the French state. Following independence, convictions about the inherent link between religious beliefs and economic behavior continued to influence development policies. Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella embraced a specifically Algerian socialism founded on Islamic principles, while French technocrats saw Algeria as a testing ground for development projects elsewhere in the Global South. Highlighting the entanglements of race and religion, Davis demonstrates that economic orthodoxies helped fashion understandings of national identity on both sides of the Mediterranean during decolonization.
Muriam Haleh Davis is a scholar of race, development, and the social sciences in North Africa. Her recent book, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria, was published by Duke University Press in September 2022. She has also co-edited North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions, and Culture, which was published by Bloomsbury Press in 2018. Her academic writing has been published by the Journal of Modern Intellectual History, Middle East Critique, the Journal of Contemporary History, Lateral, and 20 et 21: Revue d'histoire. She has also authored pieces for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera English, Public Books, and Truth Out. She is co-chair of the editorial board for MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project) and works with the Maghreb Page for Jadaliyya.
