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French Administration in the Maghrib

In this outgrowth of a Princeton doctoral thesis, Perkins has investigated the local activities of the French military administrations in the three Maghrib countries the Algerian Bureaux Arabes, the Tunisian Service des Renseignements, and the Moroccan Service des Affaires Indigenes. These were the only purely military administrations of indigenous populations anywhere in the colonial world. His objective is extremely ambitious. He strives to trace the evolution of the military administration in the Maghrib and its impact on social and political developments from its Algerian beginnings (1844-71) and intermediate Tunisian phase (1887-1914) through its culmination in Morocco in 1912-34. TKis he accomplishes by focusing on 'three aspects of local government (the political structure of the tribes, the organization and dispensation of justice, and the operation of the fiscal system) and two areas of social and technical concern (medicine and farming)' (p. 8). Perkins' 'vertical' analysis is intersected by a 'horizontal' comparison of the military administrations with other administrative systems in the colonial set-up. The author has been remarkably successful in his difficult endeavour. On the basis of meticulous research in French and North African archives, he has assembled massive, convincing documentation for his two principal theses. First, that the French managed to progressively enhance both the performance and the acceptability of the consecutive military administrations in the three Maghrib countries, largely by reducing their power from direct to indirect rule and by upgrading their training. And second, that the military administrators 'profoundly affected the Arabs, Berbers, and colons with whom they came in contact' (p. 225). While Perkins carefully avoids categorizing this effect as 'positive' or 'negative', pointing instead to its very mixed results, his ultimate judgment seems to be that, in the long run, these were more beneficial than harmful to the affected indigenous populations. The polemicists are sure to emit indignant outcries at this judgment; they would be hard put to provide the evidence required to refute it.