James McDougall | University of Oxford (original) (raw)
Books by James McDougall
New book on the history of Algeria, 1516-2016. (Extract only from the Introduction)
This book brings together contributors across the disciplines to examine the local, national, reg... more This book brings together contributors across the disciplines to examine the local, national, regional and global processes that have shaped Maghribi societies, economies and politics since the colonial period.
Focusing equally on the local shape of global processes and on the broader significance of particular ‘ways of doing things’, these studies move beyond generalisations about globalisation and its impact on local societies, whether developmental or detrimental, of the ‘global in the local’, or of ‘glocalisation’. Cases range from the onset of the ‘first wave’ of globalisation in the colonial era to the most recent developments in identity politics, consumerism, and telecommunications. Contributors show how nationalising and globalising influences are seized, remade, and put to work in very different ways by High Atlas farmers or urban real estate speculators, human rights activists at the edge of the Sahara and amateur theatre actors in Mediterranean towns. Always located somewhere, these social actors nonetheless act in different ways, with different effects, at different levels of engagement, whether with each other, their own governments, or the wider world.
Contents
1. Locating social analysis in the Maghrib James McDougall and Robert P. Parks
Economies
2. Inventive articulation: how High Atlas farmers put the global to work David Crawford
3. Catenating the local and the global in Morocco: how mobile phone users have become producers and not consumers Hsain Ilahiane
4. An effect of globalisation? The individual appropriation of ‘arch lands in Algeria Brahim Benmoussa
5. Spatial and social mobilities in Algeria: the case of Algiers Madani Safar Zitoun
Politics
6. The full place of power: interwar Oran, the French empire’s bullring? Claire Marynower
7. A local approach to the UDMA: local-level politics during the decade of political parties, 1946–56 Malika Rahal
8. From the mountain sanctuary to the nation Fanny Colonna
9. The Moroccan nationalist movement: from local to national networks Fadma Ait Mous
10. Activism under authoritarianism: young political militants in Meknes Thierry Desrues and Said Kirhlani
Cultures
11. The pitfalls of transnational consciousness: Amazigh activism as a scalar dilemma Paul A. Silverstein
12. The man behind the curtain: theatrics of the state in Algeria Jane E. Goodman
13. The challenges of maintaining local identity in international biennale exhibitions: lessons from the third AiM arts in Marrakesh Biennale Holiday Powers
The Sahara has long been portrayed as a barrier that divides the Mediterranean world from Africa ... more The Sahara has long been portrayed as a barrier that divides the Mediterranean world from Africa proper and isolates the countries of the Maghrib from their southern and eastern neighbors. Rather than viewing the desert as an isolating barrier, this volume takes up historian Fernand Braudel’s description of the Sahara as “the second face of the Mediterranean.” The essays recast the history of the region with the Sahara at its center, uncovering a story of densely interdependent networks that span the desert’s vast expanse. They explore the relationship between the desert’s “islands” and “shores” and the connections and commonalities that unite the region. Contributors draw on extensive ethnographic and historical research to address topics such as trade and migration; local notions of place, territoriality, and movement; Saharan cities; and the links among ecological, regional, and world-historical approaches to understanding the Sahara.
Contents
Introduction: Time and Space in the Sahara Judith Scheele and James McDougall
Part I. Framing Saharan History
1. Situations Both Alike? Connectivity, the Mediterranean, the Sahara Peregrine Horden
2. On Being Saharan E. Ann McDougall
3. Saharan Trade in Classical Antiquity Katia Schörle
4. Frontiers, Borderlands, and Saharan/World History James McDougall
Part II. Environment, Territory, and Community
5. The Rites of Baba Merzug: Diaspora, Ibadism, and Social Status in the Valley of the Mzab Fatma Oussedik
6. Celebrating mawlid in Timimoun: Ritual as Words in Motion, Space as Time Stood Still Abderrahmane Moussaoui
7. Villages and Crossroads: Changing Territorialities among the Tuareg of Northern Mali in the Twentieth Century Charles Grémont
8. Ethnicity and Interdependence: Moors and Haalpulaar’en in the Senegal Valley Olivier Leservoisier
Part III. Strangers, Space, and Labor
9. Mauritania and the New Frontier of Europe: From Transit to Residence Armelle Choplin
10. Living Together and Living Apart in Nouakchott Laurence Marfaing
11. Cultural Interaction and the Artisanal Economy in Tamanrasset Dida Badi
Part IV. Economies of Movement
12. Notes on the Informal Economy in Southern Morocco Mohamed Oudada
13. Garage or caravanserail; Saharan Connectivity in al-Khalīl, Northern Mali Judith Scheele
14. Movements of People and Goods: Local Impacts and Dynamics of Migration in the Central Sahara Julien Brachet
The essays in this volume explore the complexities of the relationship between states, social gro... more The essays in this volume explore the complexities of the relationship between states, social groups and individuals in contemporary North Africa, as expressed through the politics, culture and history of nationhood. From Morocco to Libya, from bankers to refugees, from colonialism to globalisation, a range of individual studies examines how North Africans have imagined and made their world in the twentieth century.
Papers by James McDougall
Ed Naylor (ed.) France's modernising mission: Welfare, citizenship, and the ends of empire, 2017
Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Reimagining democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860, 2018
Pre-edits author draft ms
The critiques of modernity advanced since the 1980s (at least) have not often focused on North Af... more The critiques of modernity advanced since the 1980s (at least) have not often focused on North Africa/the Maghreb, where ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’ impinge so closely on each other. Nor have they often, as yet, allowed us to recover an historical account of the ‘making of modernity’ as a global condition, beyond the largely dichotomous or bifurcating categories introduced by modern relations of power and unequal exchange themselves. As an introduction to this collection of articles, this essay sketches what I call a ‘tectonic’ approach to modernity as an historical process, with the aim of recapturing the dynamics by which, between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, differently located people and places came to occupy divergent positions both in socioeconomic and political structures, and in narratives of ‘modern’ history.
This article examines the rapid and dramatic shifts in position, perception, and possibility that... more This article examines the rapid and dramatic shifts in position, perception, and possibility that characterised the onset of colonialism in the Maghrib. The focus is on a small, inter-related group of families of Algiers notables. Their heads, the merchant and state servant Ḥamdān ibn ʿUthmān Khoja, and the banker and businessman Aḥmad Bū Ḍarba, played important roles in attempting to negotiate an accommodation with the French occupation between 1830 and 1833. By 1836, they found themselves pushed out, both politically and physically, from the cité (both physical and symbolic) that, before then, they had imagined themselves as sharing on equal terms with interlocutors on the other shore of the Mediterranean. Closing down their possibilities of dialogue can be seen as the first, and decisive, step in the emergence of French definitions of a ‘monologic’, exclusively European articulation of the meaning of modernity in North Africa.
in Patrick Crowley (ed.), Algeria: Nation, culture, and transnationalism, 1988-2013 , 2017
Draft author pre-print.
Journal of Modern History, 2017
France’s war in Algeria from 1954-62 was a war of colonial reconquest and at the same time a stru... more France’s war in Algeria from 1954-62 was a war of colonial reconquest and at the same time a struggle to “decolonize” the French state. It was imagined and prosecuted as such on the basis of a widespread belief in the necessity of reinventing and normalizing a transcontinental France that could maintain its global posture after 1945 only by retaining the strategic depth of empire shorn of the colonial legal frameworks on which empire had hitherto depended. “Pacification” in Algeria was seen as the essential precondition for the creation of this renovated, trans-Mediterranean Republic, whose liberal and emancipatory “empire of law” would finally come into its own. Building on recent scholarship which has emphasised both the extreme violence and the unprecedented “integration” that came to characterise this late colonial project in Algeria, this article traces the changing logic through which reform and reconquest came to be entwined, to the ultimate failure of both. In a first phase, as formal citizenship expanded political participation for former colonial subjects, the determination of settler-colonial politics to maintain minority rule and that of the administration to impose “security” by repressing nationalist demands stalled and subverted the reform process, voiding citizenship of substance. In a second phase, with the escalation of the war and the acceleration of a “crash” development program (the Constantine Plan), they turned promises of reform and inclusion into experiences of reconquest and coercion.
Rabah Aissaoui and Claire Eldridge (eds), Algeria revisited. History, culture and identity, 1830 to the present, 2016
Essay to appear in a forthcoming edited volume on contemporary Algeria.
Jens Hanssen and Amal Ghazal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History
Abstract This chapter discusses the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa... more Abstract
This chapter discusses the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on the Arab world between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s. Given the geographic coverage of neighboring chapters and the general tendency in the literature to focus on nationalism in the Levant (bilād al-shām) and Egypt, this chapter incorporates North African and transregional formations into the analysis. It considers the tensions and commonalities between “pan”-nationalisms and movements for territorial sovereignty, the circulation of intellectual and cultural influences, and the articulation of nationalism with the emergence of mass politics in the region between the First World War and the years of decolonization.
Keywords
nationalism, sovereignty, nation-state, mass politics, pan-Arabism
Apologies for occasional inaudibility; this is a working paper, please exercise indulgence!
International J. of Middle East Studies, 2013
Biographical note and bibliography on Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis, appearing in Encyclopedia of Islam ... more Biographical note and bibliography on Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis, appearing in Encyclopedia of Islam (3rd ed)
Encyclopedia of Islam, 3rd ed. , 2014
Journal of North African Studies, 2013
As an introduction to this special issue, this essay surveys problems of scale and perspective in... more As an introduction to this special issue, this essay surveys problems of scale and perspective in historical and social scientific scholarship on the Maghrib. It locates the studies collected in this volume in the longer perspective of trends in scholarship on the region, identifies some analytical challenges shared across disciplines, and suggests some ways of addressing the difficulties of articulating different (local, regional, national, and global) levels of analysis.
ch. 4 in James McDougall and Judith Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in northwest Africa, 2012
Places which yield only the bare necessities of men's lives must be inhabited by barbarous people... more Places which yield only the bare necessities of men's lives must be inhabited by barbarous peoples, since no political society is possible. […] The least populous countries are thus the most fitted to tyranny; wild beasts reign only in deserts.
R.A. Hinnebusch and S.N. Cummings (eds), Sovereignty after Empire , 2011
New book on the history of Algeria, 1516-2016. (Extract only from the Introduction)
This book brings together contributors across the disciplines to examine the local, national, reg... more This book brings together contributors across the disciplines to examine the local, national, regional and global processes that have shaped Maghribi societies, economies and politics since the colonial period.
Focusing equally on the local shape of global processes and on the broader significance of particular ‘ways of doing things’, these studies move beyond generalisations about globalisation and its impact on local societies, whether developmental or detrimental, of the ‘global in the local’, or of ‘glocalisation’. Cases range from the onset of the ‘first wave’ of globalisation in the colonial era to the most recent developments in identity politics, consumerism, and telecommunications. Contributors show how nationalising and globalising influences are seized, remade, and put to work in very different ways by High Atlas farmers or urban real estate speculators, human rights activists at the edge of the Sahara and amateur theatre actors in Mediterranean towns. Always located somewhere, these social actors nonetheless act in different ways, with different effects, at different levels of engagement, whether with each other, their own governments, or the wider world.
Contents
1. Locating social analysis in the Maghrib James McDougall and Robert P. Parks
Economies
2. Inventive articulation: how High Atlas farmers put the global to work David Crawford
3. Catenating the local and the global in Morocco: how mobile phone users have become producers and not consumers Hsain Ilahiane
4. An effect of globalisation? The individual appropriation of ‘arch lands in Algeria Brahim Benmoussa
5. Spatial and social mobilities in Algeria: the case of Algiers Madani Safar Zitoun
Politics
6. The full place of power: interwar Oran, the French empire’s bullring? Claire Marynower
7. A local approach to the UDMA: local-level politics during the decade of political parties, 1946–56 Malika Rahal
8. From the mountain sanctuary to the nation Fanny Colonna
9. The Moroccan nationalist movement: from local to national networks Fadma Ait Mous
10. Activism under authoritarianism: young political militants in Meknes Thierry Desrues and Said Kirhlani
Cultures
11. The pitfalls of transnational consciousness: Amazigh activism as a scalar dilemma Paul A. Silverstein
12. The man behind the curtain: theatrics of the state in Algeria Jane E. Goodman
13. The challenges of maintaining local identity in international biennale exhibitions: lessons from the third AiM arts in Marrakesh Biennale Holiday Powers
The Sahara has long been portrayed as a barrier that divides the Mediterranean world from Africa ... more The Sahara has long been portrayed as a barrier that divides the Mediterranean world from Africa proper and isolates the countries of the Maghrib from their southern and eastern neighbors. Rather than viewing the desert as an isolating barrier, this volume takes up historian Fernand Braudel’s description of the Sahara as “the second face of the Mediterranean.” The essays recast the history of the region with the Sahara at its center, uncovering a story of densely interdependent networks that span the desert’s vast expanse. They explore the relationship between the desert’s “islands” and “shores” and the connections and commonalities that unite the region. Contributors draw on extensive ethnographic and historical research to address topics such as trade and migration; local notions of place, territoriality, and movement; Saharan cities; and the links among ecological, regional, and world-historical approaches to understanding the Sahara.
Contents
Introduction: Time and Space in the Sahara Judith Scheele and James McDougall
Part I. Framing Saharan History
1. Situations Both Alike? Connectivity, the Mediterranean, the Sahara Peregrine Horden
2. On Being Saharan E. Ann McDougall
3. Saharan Trade in Classical Antiquity Katia Schörle
4. Frontiers, Borderlands, and Saharan/World History James McDougall
Part II. Environment, Territory, and Community
5. The Rites of Baba Merzug: Diaspora, Ibadism, and Social Status in the Valley of the Mzab Fatma Oussedik
6. Celebrating mawlid in Timimoun: Ritual as Words in Motion, Space as Time Stood Still Abderrahmane Moussaoui
7. Villages and Crossroads: Changing Territorialities among the Tuareg of Northern Mali in the Twentieth Century Charles Grémont
8. Ethnicity and Interdependence: Moors and Haalpulaar’en in the Senegal Valley Olivier Leservoisier
Part III. Strangers, Space, and Labor
9. Mauritania and the New Frontier of Europe: From Transit to Residence Armelle Choplin
10. Living Together and Living Apart in Nouakchott Laurence Marfaing
11. Cultural Interaction and the Artisanal Economy in Tamanrasset Dida Badi
Part IV. Economies of Movement
12. Notes on the Informal Economy in Southern Morocco Mohamed Oudada
13. Garage or caravanserail; Saharan Connectivity in al-Khalīl, Northern Mali Judith Scheele
14. Movements of People and Goods: Local Impacts and Dynamics of Migration in the Central Sahara Julien Brachet
The essays in this volume explore the complexities of the relationship between states, social gro... more The essays in this volume explore the complexities of the relationship between states, social groups and individuals in contemporary North Africa, as expressed through the politics, culture and history of nationhood. From Morocco to Libya, from bankers to refugees, from colonialism to globalisation, a range of individual studies examines how North Africans have imagined and made their world in the twentieth century.
Ed Naylor (ed.) France's modernising mission: Welfare, citizenship, and the ends of empire, 2017
Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Reimagining democracy in the Mediterranean, 1780-1860, 2018
Pre-edits author draft ms
The critiques of modernity advanced since the 1980s (at least) have not often focused on North Af... more The critiques of modernity advanced since the 1980s (at least) have not often focused on North Africa/the Maghreb, where ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’ impinge so closely on each other. Nor have they often, as yet, allowed us to recover an historical account of the ‘making of modernity’ as a global condition, beyond the largely dichotomous or bifurcating categories introduced by modern relations of power and unequal exchange themselves. As an introduction to this collection of articles, this essay sketches what I call a ‘tectonic’ approach to modernity as an historical process, with the aim of recapturing the dynamics by which, between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth, differently located people and places came to occupy divergent positions both in socioeconomic and political structures, and in narratives of ‘modern’ history.
This article examines the rapid and dramatic shifts in position, perception, and possibility that... more This article examines the rapid and dramatic shifts in position, perception, and possibility that characterised the onset of colonialism in the Maghrib. The focus is on a small, inter-related group of families of Algiers notables. Their heads, the merchant and state servant Ḥamdān ibn ʿUthmān Khoja, and the banker and businessman Aḥmad Bū Ḍarba, played important roles in attempting to negotiate an accommodation with the French occupation between 1830 and 1833. By 1836, they found themselves pushed out, both politically and physically, from the cité (both physical and symbolic) that, before then, they had imagined themselves as sharing on equal terms with interlocutors on the other shore of the Mediterranean. Closing down their possibilities of dialogue can be seen as the first, and decisive, step in the emergence of French definitions of a ‘monologic’, exclusively European articulation of the meaning of modernity in North Africa.
in Patrick Crowley (ed.), Algeria: Nation, culture, and transnationalism, 1988-2013 , 2017
Draft author pre-print.
Journal of Modern History, 2017
France’s war in Algeria from 1954-62 was a war of colonial reconquest and at the same time a stru... more France’s war in Algeria from 1954-62 was a war of colonial reconquest and at the same time a struggle to “decolonize” the French state. It was imagined and prosecuted as such on the basis of a widespread belief in the necessity of reinventing and normalizing a transcontinental France that could maintain its global posture after 1945 only by retaining the strategic depth of empire shorn of the colonial legal frameworks on which empire had hitherto depended. “Pacification” in Algeria was seen as the essential precondition for the creation of this renovated, trans-Mediterranean Republic, whose liberal and emancipatory “empire of law” would finally come into its own. Building on recent scholarship which has emphasised both the extreme violence and the unprecedented “integration” that came to characterise this late colonial project in Algeria, this article traces the changing logic through which reform and reconquest came to be entwined, to the ultimate failure of both. In a first phase, as formal citizenship expanded political participation for former colonial subjects, the determination of settler-colonial politics to maintain minority rule and that of the administration to impose “security” by repressing nationalist demands stalled and subverted the reform process, voiding citizenship of substance. In a second phase, with the escalation of the war and the acceleration of a “crash” development program (the Constantine Plan), they turned promises of reform and inclusion into experiences of reconquest and coercion.
Rabah Aissaoui and Claire Eldridge (eds), Algeria revisited. History, culture and identity, 1830 to the present, 2016
Essay to appear in a forthcoming edited volume on contemporary Algeria.
Jens Hanssen and Amal Ghazal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History
Abstract This chapter discusses the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa... more Abstract
This chapter discusses the emergence of nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa, with a focus on the Arab world between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s. Given the geographic coverage of neighboring chapters and the general tendency in the literature to focus on nationalism in the Levant (bilād al-shām) and Egypt, this chapter incorporates North African and transregional formations into the analysis. It considers the tensions and commonalities between “pan”-nationalisms and movements for territorial sovereignty, the circulation of intellectual and cultural influences, and the articulation of nationalism with the emergence of mass politics in the region between the First World War and the years of decolonization.
Keywords
nationalism, sovereignty, nation-state, mass politics, pan-Arabism
Apologies for occasional inaudibility; this is a working paper, please exercise indulgence!
International J. of Middle East Studies, 2013
Biographical note and bibliography on Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis, appearing in Encyclopedia of Islam ... more Biographical note and bibliography on Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis, appearing in Encyclopedia of Islam (3rd ed)
Encyclopedia of Islam, 3rd ed. , 2014
Journal of North African Studies, 2013
As an introduction to this special issue, this essay surveys problems of scale and perspective in... more As an introduction to this special issue, this essay surveys problems of scale and perspective in historical and social scientific scholarship on the Maghrib. It locates the studies collected in this volume in the longer perspective of trends in scholarship on the region, identifies some analytical challenges shared across disciplines, and suggests some ways of addressing the difficulties of articulating different (local, regional, national, and global) levels of analysis.
ch. 4 in James McDougall and Judith Scheele (eds), Saharan Frontiers: Space and Mobility in northwest Africa, 2012
Places which yield only the bare necessities of men's lives must be inhabited by barbarous people... more Places which yield only the bare necessities of men's lives must be inhabited by barbarous peoples, since no political society is possible. […] The least populous countries are thus the most fitted to tyranny; wild beasts reign only in deserts.
R.A. Hinnebusch and S.N. Cummings (eds), Sovereignty after Empire , 2011
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2011
In Algeria as in many other cases, experiences of exile and diaspora played a major role in the c... more In Algeria as in many other cases, experiences of exile and diaspora played a major role in the creation of nationalist politics in the 20th century; exile has also been a recurring literary figure in expressions of Algerian cultural politics since independence. This article examines a range of literary sources to consider the politics of language and culture in Algeria since the 1940s. It shows how identification with Arabism has enabled Algerians to articulate claims to community, solidarity, and sovereignty, first in a conception of national "salvation" against the colonial state and then as both a state-sponsored project of political legitimacy and an indication of the limits of that project. A sense of these limits can be gained by a brief consideration of the complexity of the country's sociolinguistic landscape and the often unorthodox creativity of its literary self-expression since independence.
Comp. Studies of S. Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2011
Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 30, 2010
K.E. Hoffman and S. Gilson Miller (eds), Berbers and Others: Beyond Tribe and Nation in North Africa, 2010
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2010
Junior Research Fellow, History of the modern Middle East and North Africa, Academic rigour, jour... more Junior Research Fellow, History of the modern Middle East and North Africa, Academic rigour, journalistic flair A group of Oxford academics has written the below letter following the debate surrounding an article in The Times entitled "Don't feel guilty about our colonial history" by Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of moral and pastoral theology at the University of Oxford.