In this deeply researched and ambitious book, Neil MacMaster examines the neglected history of peasant resistance to French colonialism in Algeria's Chelif Valley. War in the Mountains upends the scholarly consensus that has attributed a politically inert and reactive character to the Algerian peasantry, illuminating their central role in the struggle for independence. MacMaster dismantles the consensus view across four sections and twenty chapters, giving readers an unprecedented look at the kinship units, political organizations, and shared histories that together shaped peasant resistance in the valley. Here, there was no need for urban revolutionaries to “awaken” the ignorant peasantry; peasant communities in the surrounding Dahra and Ouarsenis mountains had been organizing mutual aid and nationalist propaganda networks for decades prior to the arrival of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in 1956. When the Algerian Revolution finally came, these rural networks formed a base of support without which revolutionary forces...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
Book Review|
August 01 2022
War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–1958
War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–1958
. By Neil MacMaster. Oxford
: Oxford University Press
, 2020
. 528
pp., $145.00, hardcover, ISBN 9780198860211.Agricultural History (2022) 96 (3): 455–457.
Citation
Nathan Grau; War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–1958. Agricultural History 1 August 2022; 96 (3): 455–457. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00021482-9825350
Download citation file:
Advertisement
26
Views