Pages without borders: global networks and the settler press in Algeria, 1881-1914

This article traces processes of political and cultural identification in the settler press in Algeria at the turn of the twentieth century. These processes, the article argues, extended beyond the triangular dynamics of the settler colonial situation, to be shaped by the wider global networks which sustained the rapid growth of the settler press in this period. Press networks created inter-imperial connections which allowed Europeans in Algeria to compare themselves to other settler societies across the world, providing points of reference for their own debates about sovereignty. If historic and contemporary examples of rebellion set by Europeans in the USA, the Transvaal, and Cuba proved attractive to journalists who resented the political authority and cultural influence of the French state, they were also perceived as risky in a demographic context of settler diversity and minority. Instead, journalists drew upon their global networks to imagine a transnational model of ‘Latin’ community. Their claims to ‘Latin’ identity expressed a profound ambivalence towards French authority, allowing them to seek protection from the French state without abandoning their mixed European heritage to the assimilative projects of the ‘one and indivisible’ republican regime. While journalists’ promotion of an internally-differentiated ‘Latin’ cultural and racial community may have disrupted the ‘register of sameness’ amongst settlers, it ultimately reinforced the exclusion of Algerian Muslims and Jews as agents and subjects of news.