Avner Ofrath. Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. 208 pp. Bibliography. Index. $35.95. Paperback. ISBN: 9781350260054.

The study of colonial Algeria has long enabled historians to examine the contradictions of French republicanism, the limits of assimilation, and the unstable meanings attached to citizenship.Avner Ofrath's Colonial Algeria and the Politics of Citizenship enters this conversation by tracing how citizenship was imagined, legislated, and practiced under French rule.He contends that Algeria was "a crucial site in the making of French citizenship" (18), where republican claims to universality were refracted through colonial governance and transformed into racialized legal categories.In Ofrath's account, citizenship in Algeria was never a static legal status but "a battlefield" shaped by violent exclusion, failed reform, and Algerian struggles for inclusion and autonomy.French universalism produced both aspiration and exclusion, and Algerians negotiated and contested forms of belonging offered by the colonial state before rejecting them.Ofrath's most significant contribution is his argument that Algeria functioned as a laboratory for French citizenship, where legal categories were tested, hardened, and racialized.He shows how colonial institutions codified "Muslim" and "European" as legal identities and turned them into the basis of exclusion.By tracing how these categories were constructed and politically mobilized, he reveals that French citizenship itself was racialized through colonial practice.Building on scholarship by Emmanuelle Saada's Empire's Children (2012), Frederick Cooper's Citizenship Between Empire and Nation (2014), and Todd Shepard's The Invention of Decolonization (2006) on race, filiation, and political rupture in the making of citizenship across the French empire, he shifts attention to the intellectual labor through which jurists and administrators defended colonial distinctions and exclusions.Officials portrayed Islamic personal law as incompatible with the Code civil, calling it "a religious, anti-democratic law, immutable in its sacred Quranic text" (135), and repeatedly invoked "mores and manners," drawing on Montesquieu to recast racial hierarchy as a matter of cultural difference.The book foregrounds Algerian voices that metropolitan archives have long obscured.Through petitions, political slogans, and everyday encounters with administrators, Ofrath shows how Algerians pressed claims within the narrow field created by colonial rule.His analysis of Jewish petitioning in the 1860s demonstrates this clearly.While scholarship on the Crémieux Decree often presents Jewish emancipation as a metropolitan decision, he shows that it followed repeated local demands, including a bilingual 1869 petition declaring that "an entire population asks for justice" (49).Reading both the French and