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Allan Christelow, Algerians without Borders: The Making of a Global Frontier Society (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2012). Pp. 266. $74.95 cloth.

In May 1883, Amir Abd al-Qadir ibn Muhyi al-Din al-Jaza iri was laid to rest near the great Sufi master Ibn Arabi’s tomb in Damascus, where the Algerian and his large retinue had resided for several decades in exile. Best known for his determined resistance to the French army in Algeria between 1832 and 1847 and his decisive role in protecting the Christian inhabitants of Damascus during the 1860 uprisings—which earned him kudos from Abraham Lincoln— Abd al-Qadir was also a highly original thinker. On 5 July 1966, the fourth anniversary of independence, the Algerian government repatriated his remains to the Carrée des martyrs in the El-Alia cemetery, calling home the native son to help heal the wounds of civil war and 132 years of colonialism. Yet even before his 1847 surrender to General de La Moricière in exchange for safe passage to the Ottoman Empire (a promise violated by France), Abd al-Qadir had earned a transnational reputation that reached deep into the American heartland—to Iowa, in particular, which was (somewhat ironically) a former colony of New France. In 1845, on the eve of Iowa’s admission to the Union the next year, Timothy Davis, a local surveyor who was scouting the Turkey River basin for land development, decided to name his settlement “ElKader.” (See Samuel G. Freedman, “Iowa Town Named for Muslim Hero Extols Tolerance,” New York Times, 4 May 2013, A16.) Davis had followed American newspaper coverage of the Algerian leader’s struggles against France and decided that he would be a suitable hero, a founding father, for the new town. And so it remains ElKader until today. Abd al-Qadir’s life trajectory and multiple displacements, physical and otherwise, encapsulate Algerians without Borders: The Making of a Global Frontier Society. Allan Christelow’s most recent work invites us on a journey, one in which we accompany Algerians as they traveled far and near, willingly or not, and by so doing created a frontier society at home as well as diaspora communities scattered across much of the globe. This collective journey begins in the late 18th century and continues until the initial phases of the “Arab Spring” in late 2010, although the bulk of the work appropriately examines Algerians’ many histories from 1830 on. Significantly, the author treats the period from World War I until the years of early independence in a single narrative frame characterized as “Exchange and Innovation in the Revolutionary Era,” which reveals important continuities, in contrast to conventional scholarship that interprets 1962 as a moment of total rupture. Throughout the work, Christelow employs biography as a powerful point of entry into a world of social flux and upheaval. We meet Algerians as ransom captives, exiles, muhājirūn, travelers, Sufis, defeated notables, students, colonial soldiers, and impecunious laborers, to name only a few of those who left the country; many returned, but many did not, as far as we know. From “Achmet Ben Ali,” a native of Algiers and a Mason, who found himself stranded in Philadelphia in 1794, to the Algerians residing even now in New Caledonia, the legacy of 19th-century forced migrations to the South Pacific, we observe people in motion. They followed older circuits, or became entangled in new ones, in response to a range of menacing, promising, or merely serendipitous events—the torque of trans-Mediterranean