‘Algeria’: The Archaeology of Barbary

Abstract

In European historical and geographical literatures, the people who would become known as Algerians were described as being among the most fearsome that walked the earth. Writing soon after the French invasion, the British author Lord Percival Barton described a people who could at times display great humanity towards others, but who contained within themselves the potential for ‘savage atrocity’ and an ability to ‘throw aside all sense of moral obligation’.¹ For this reason Europeans had traditionally seen themselves as having been justified in behaving in ways which mirrored the brutal posture of Algerians towards others. The Maghreb was established as a specific moral realm in which locally appropriate forms of behaviour were sanctioned, as was seen in Britain’s raids on the coast throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British admiral Lynam remarked on one of these sorties, ‘There can be no reasonable objection […] to an occasional bombardment of a pirate town; it is a good drill for a rusty navy.’² In other words, violence begat violence, which was a necessary expression of European power, while there existed no distinction between combatants and civilians in this realm. Rather presciently, Barton remarked that such raids ‘repressed’ the ‘evil’ of the Barbary Coast, but that it was ‘not exterminated’.³ France would need to complete that task, in what Barton would call the Algerian ‘experiment’.