An Empire of Facts presents a fascinating account of the formation of French conceptions of Islam in France's largest and most important colony. During the period from 1870 to 1914, travelers, bureaucrats, scholars, and writers formed influential and long-lasting misconceptions about Islam that determined the imperial cultural politics of Algeria and its interactions with republican France. Narratives of Islamic mysticism, rituals, gender relations, and sensational crimes brought unfamiliar cultural forms and practices to popular attention in France, but also constructed Algerian Muslims as objects for colonial intervention. Personal lives and interactions between Algerian and French men and women inflected these texts, determining their style, content, and consequences. Drawing on sources in Arabic and French, this book places such personal moments at the heart of the production of colonial knowledge, emphasizing the indeterminacy of ethnography, and its political context in the unfolding of France's empire and its relations with Muslim North Africa.
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'A richly rewarding analysis that demonstrates convincingly how constructions of cultural knowledge about late nineteenth century Algeria by colonial anthropologists, explorers, and aspirant writers stigmatized entire communities as, at once, inherently criminal and desperately in need of civilization through colonization. In his focus on influential, yet amateur ethnographers - figures whose observations and representations of Algerian social practices typically owed more to orientalist literature than to scientific enquiry - George Trumbull compels us to reconsider the connections between the transmission of ethnographic 'knowledge', the politicization of colonial identities, and the consolidation of colonial states. The result is a clinical dissection of why and how French men and women came to think as they did about colonial Algeria, its culture, its religion, and its people.'

~ Martin Thomas, Exeter University, author of Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914
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'Meticulously researched, this important and original study explores the production of 'facts' as facilitators of colonial rule in French colonial Algeria. Trumbull's ethnographers emerge as 'arbiters of authenticity,' who generated a wide range of usable knowledge through fieldwork, exploration, or surveys. Elucidating the moralizing, primitivizing, or criminalizing gaze of colonial ethnographers, An Empire of Facts tells many compelling stories along the way. This impressive book sheds light on colonial ethnography, relations between colonizer and colonized, on gender and religion in colonial contexts, on the intimacy of colonial rule, and ultimately on the fluid nature of nineteenth century colonial ethnography, whose boundaries with tourism, geography, or with the state itself were often blurred.'

~ Eric T. Jennings, University of Toronto, author of Vichy in the Tropics, and Curing the Colonizers
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'In this elegant exploration of ethnography in French colonial Algeria, George Trumbull deftly traces how field observations became politicized archives - and brings to life remarkable encounters between travelers, nomads, administrators and shaykhs. This book should engage not just scholars of France, North Africa, and Islam, but anyone interested in the relationship between knowledge-production and imperial power. Sophisticated, evocative, and thoroughly original, An Empire of Facts shines as a model example of how to investigate the entwined histories of metropole and colony.'

~ Maya Jasanoff, Harvard University, author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850
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Publication date November 30, 2009