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his very rich and well-documented monograph is based on primary sources like maps and texts by French geographers and surveyors who worked in Algeria during the colonial period (1830-1962) and archive documents linked to their activities, mainly from the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer and the Service Historique de la Défense. Drawing on French and international literature on geography and empire, Blais stresses the necessity to understand the field experiences through which “space practices take part in colonial politics” (page 10). The imposition of the imperial map, she argues, was not an all-powerful operation, but involved several conflicts and adaptations. Maps nonetheless produced an image of Algeria. It is important to note that before the French conquest, ‘Algeria’ was just a vague toponym which roughly indicated the region surrounding Alger; it did not correspond to the current image of a boundary-bordered state. So, assuming that “geography and imperialism were incontestably linked, the modalities of their articulation should be further clarified” (page 18), mainly through the understanding of their “actors, instruments and proceedings” (page 19).

The first chapter explores the “geographical invention of a colony” through the construction of its “colonial library” (page 28), a concept owing both to Foucault and Said. According to Blais, the colonial library was for a long time grounded in the works of ancient authors like Ptolemy. This was in part due to France’s scant interest in, or ignorance of, Arabian sources, and in part to France’s self-proclamation as "heir" of the Roman Empire and its territorial expansion. The difference between the French strategies for the occupation of space and those previously enacted by the Ottomans are defined as a pretext to “deny the political and military efficiency” (page 39) of the Turkish administration, in line with the classical commonplaces of order and efficiency as quintessentially European attributes.

In the scientific construction of the Algerian colonial library, the former French scientific expedition in Egypt and Peloponnese are frequently evoked and used as models for the scientific mission led by Bory de Saint-Vincent from 1839 in Algeria, which produced 39 volumes of studies and memoirs published between 1844 and 1867 (page 48). During this mission, Ernest Carette published a Géographie de l’Algérie which Blais quotes as a rare example of attention to indigenous and vernacular knowledge drawing on the concept of “testimonial geography, [which remained] nevertheless an isolated voice” (page 49). Blais argues that in the first decades of the French conquest, and at least until the beginning of the twentieth century, an effective colonial sovereignty concerned only the coastal region and the Tell. The ‘penetration’ towards the internal desert occurred much later and it was controversial. The author analyses the numerous disputes within the French field for the definition of a political and military zoning for the settlements of indigenous people and for those of European colons. The definition of the zoning was based on a precise postulate:

“the incompatibility of civilizational degrees; the impossibility of coexistence of colonizing and colonized [subjects] and the consequent multiplication of internal borders” (page 57).

The colonial regionalisation was often a racial one. Such was the case, for example, with the geography imaged by Jacquot. For the French physician “the Tell represent[ed] the firm land, the continent inhabited by the White race” (page 58). This Jaquot argued, was separated from the continent of Black people by the Sahara, which he compared to an ocean. This separation resulted in the institution of “civil territories” settled by Europeans, which appeared like little enclaves in wider “military territories” settled by indigenous people and controlled by the French army.Since 1848, the Algerian provinces settled by Frenchmen were progressively recognized as French administrative departments, that is, as direct extensions of the French territory. As such, they were organised according to the same administrative principles and allowed to elect deputies in the Paris parliament. Blais analyses the constant disputes and the different interests which periodically opposed different components of the French empire. These included the contrasts between fieldwork practices and ‘metropolitan’ armchair work, between settled colons and stakeholders in the home country, or between “the discordant territorial interests of colons and of militaries” (page 66). Similar conflicts concerned the establishment of a southern frontier, for which the more disparate solutions were proposed for morphological, ethnographical or strategic reasons. Nevertheless, Blais observes that the incertitude of this frontier was also functional to keep a road open to further conquests (page 76).

Drawing on the consideration that “territoriality did not pre-exist the nation” (page 78), the second chapter of the book addresses the "politics of maps" deployed in the territorial construction of Algeria. One of the first stakes was the attempt to geodetically attach Algeria to France and render it a “prolongation of the homeland” (page 79).

The production of topographic maps remained an essentially military task until the constitution, in 1940, of the Institut Géographique National (page 83). Analysing the survey works based in the field, Blais observes the permanence of visions informed by European models and ways of seeing. These include the comparisons between Algeria and Greece made by the geodesist Emile Puillon-Boblaye, who argued that the Algerian soil was “the same as in Morea” (page 87), or generally, “the naturalisation and erasing of social realities” (page 91). The importance of surveys and map-making owed mainly to the authority conferred to maps as instruments for problem-solving: the disputes between colons and soldiers over their respective territories always occurred “with maps at hand” (page 99), and one of the main stakes was the construction of a new map that would allow “the clear attribution of a territory to colonial sovereignty” (page 101). For these reasons, the Dépôt général de la guerre decided, in 1881, to make a new map of the Tell at scale 1/50.000 and to set up specialized topographic brigades for this task. Addressing the inadequacy of European topographic models to the Tell and Sahara fields, Blais analyses the contradictions between the practices of field surveyors and the corrections operated in France by functionaries and armchair cartographers. She concludes that, in spite of the common interest toward colonisation, “no reconciliation could take place between these two cultures” (page 108).

The third chapter discusses the “discovery of the Algerian field”, stressing cartographers’ difficulties to represent topographically wide and not-yet-surveyed lands, as well as their exercise of “cartographical power” in  “a new country, that they thought to be the first to discover and describe” (page 116). Through these practices, other Eurocentric commonplaces emerged, like the idea of “uniformity and monotony” (page 117) of these lands, or the rigid association between mountains and nomads and between plain and sedentariness, whereas the real ethnographic situation was much more complex and nuanced. The challenge of “joining trigonometrically Algeria to France had [nonetheless] the most important symbolic and political consequences” (page 130).

Among the difficulties encountered by French surveyors was the establishment of trigonometric points. The impression of visible marks in Algerian landscapes encountered indigenous resistance, as Algerians, conscious or unconscious of their political significance, often destroyed the trigonometric points built by Frenchmen in correspondence of rocks or buildings. Another controversial point was the charting of tribes, whose realities were largely unacknowledged, given also that a tribe does not necessarily correspond to a territory and that surveyors’ work was “less concerned by a better understanding of realities than by land monopolization” (page 144). In this sense maps participated to the superposition of new French administrative entities on the former indigenous ones, whereas tribes and traditional groups “were no longer considered as political entities characterised by their territorial sovereignty” (page 152).

The fourth chapter discusses geographers and surveyors’ use of what we nowadays call vernacular sources. Here Blais argues that the charting of Algeria was not a unilateral operation, but the result of contact and of exchange, though sources here are rare. In most cases, in the explorers’ memories, diffidence for indigenous information predominated, whereas in the home country skepticism always accompanied the reception of documents based on vernacular sources. Cultural difference was then interpreted as ignorance or unskillfulness, represented by the “indigenous peoples’ incapacity to make maps” (page 164). Blais observes that this lack of participation in the process of map-making could also be a form of passive indigenous resistance, as “Algerians were not necessarily willing to answer the topographers’ questions” (page 173). In any case, according to French surveyors, indigenous information belonged to a “pre-scientific stage” (page 175) in the context of a “rigid hierarchy of knowledge” (page 177). Finally, if the use of vernacular sources “hardly reached an epistemological value” (page 196), Blais argues that it is important to consider it, as traces of local knowledge lie in the choice of Arabian or Kabylian names in toponymy. This shows how cartographic surveys were a powerful, but not all-powerful, imperial tool.

The fifth chapter addresses the invention of Algerian frontiers, characterized by a heated debate, in the home country, between the supporters of a territorially restrained colonization and those who supported a deeper ‘penetration’. One aspect which deserves to be considered is that the western and eastern Algerian frontiers with Morocco and Tunisia followed approximately the ancient administrative limits of the Ottoman Empire, often without recognizable signals. This produced serious difficulties for the communitarian uses of trans-frontier populations. Another paradoxical output of this situation was that frontier incidents and disputes that still occurred between different French powers, when Tunisia and Morocco were administrated, under different titles, by France. The definition of the southern frontiers occurred late, and owed firstly to inter-imperial Franco-British agreements at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Formerly, according to Blais, the absence of established frontiers in deserted regions was endorsed by the army, which wanted to be free to prosecute rebel groups beyond the limits of an established sovereignty. Thus, “the colony of Algeria maintained undetermined contours, more or less voluntarily, until the beginning of the twentieth century” (page 236).

The sixth chapter addresses the question of Sahara, stating that "Algerian Sahara" was a French invention, as “the geographical invention of the colony of Algeria was largely based on Saharan projections, owing to territorial imageries in constant evolution” (page 237). In this sense, the author works on the French ‘Saharan library’ stating that the interest for the Saharan world was firstly an intellectual one. For example, in 1844 Carette imagined the union between Tell and a not-well-defined “Sahara oasis” as the realization of “the complete Algeria” (page 243). The desert was a challenge for European cartographic attempts to “put order in these spaces without limits” (page 246). The first European images of the Sahara thus deal with great ‘empty’ spaces and the more current metaphors presented it as an “interior sea” (page 251). The first serious attempts to survey the desert were linked to the project of a Trans-Saharan railway joining Algeria and France to the territories of the Afrique Occidentale Française: this kind of geo-strategy built “an image of the desert as a space linking French colonies” (page 253).

On a human standpoint, only in the 1890s, thanks to the ethnographic works by Camille Sabatier, the Sahara began to “lose its reputation of human desert” (page 255). While French scholars and politicians were not unanimous in the definition of a Saharan politics, their advancements through the desert were always accompanied by the idea of "penetration" (page 258) and by brainwaves like “the French invention of the Touat region” (page 261), an area in the centre of the desert which was considered strategic to secure French access to sub-Saharan Africa.

In this sense, the Sahara represented a shift from a “colonial space to an imperial one” (page 272), as it concerned different French administrations and protectorates in Africa (Morocco, Algeria, AOF, AEF, etc.), even if these administrations did not only share the same projects, and the territorial link between them “always remained a military one” (page 275). Nevertheless, while the desert continued “to offer apparently insurmountable difficulties to scientific norms” (page 284), the Sahara featured as “the symbolic space for the spatial emprise of colonisation” (page 284). Blais finally observes that only in 1930, with the first Saharan car rally, the idea of a Trans-Saharan railway was definitively abandoned.

The conclusions stress the centrality of maps and map-making to “anticipate and deploy spatial imageries” (page 288) and the necessity to consider the multiple adaptations of scientific practices to field conflicts, as well as the constant dialectics between different instances within the imperial field, challenging “mirages of all-powerfulness” (page 289).

If there is any limitation to this solid work, it would be its rather narrow French standpoint, as already remarked by former reviewers (Slimane 2015). I should add that in this book the appreciation of French colonialism may seem politically ambiguous for international critical readers: only once, in the conclusions, is “the violence of colonisation” explicitly evoked (page 287). No other explicit allusions are made to colonial crimes and colonial massacres, though they were denounced by geographers like Elisée Reclus and other French anti-colonialists from the 1880s (Deprest, 2012; Ferretti, 2003), whereas the author often evokes the problem of the "security" for French colons (page 66) and for some French surveyors, who fell “victim of an attack” (page 133) by indigenous people. The only quoted "massacre" is that of the French mission Flatters (page 172) by the Tuaregs and the only quoted ‘murderers’ are those of the French explorers Duperré and Joubert (page 260). Likewise, the Lamy military expedition is defined as “dramatic [only?] for Frenchmen” (page 270), without apparently seeking more specific information on the role which maps and surveys could have played in the dramas lived by indigenous people.

This does not seem to be a specific feature of this book, but of a recent tendency of several French scholars to avoid an explicit political judgement on colonialism, after the 2005 heated debates on the ‘rehabilitation’ of French colonialism. These scholars seem to advance a sort of "neutrality" which implies, for instance, the use of the words colonisation or fait colonial, rather than colonialisme, as the last is considered to contain a political condemnation of the phenomenon. This poses a clear problem, which may deserve further debate on research ethics in the frame of critical social theory: do researchers have the right to be "neutral?" 

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References

Ben Slimane F (2015) Hélène Blais, Mirages de la carte. L’invention de l’Algérie coloniale, XIXe-XXe siècle, Paris, Fayard, (2014), p. 347. Le Mouvement social.

Deprest F (2012) Élisée Reclus et l’Algérie colonisée. Paris: Belin.

Ferretti F (2013) They have the right to throw us out: Elisée Reclus’ New Universal Geography. Antipode 45(5): 1337-55.