Colonial property and penal laws worked together to reshape colonized identity

Evidence

Typical of nearly all colonialist projects, the imposition of laws pertaining to property and commercial activity came hand in hand with the imposition of penal laws, which were designed to regulate and discipline the colonized populations as a first step toward further domination and ultimately transformation of identity. The Loi Warnier from 1873 decreed that all land in Algeria would henceforth be regulated by French law and that Shariʿa courts would be restricted to adjudicating cases of inheritance and personal status. The high point in the imposition of criminal law came less than a decade later, with the promulgation of the highly and infamously repressive Code de l’indigénat, a law that did not recognize due process and gave free hand to civil administrators to inflict excessively harsh punishments against Muslim subjects at will. Sovereign European power, reflected in the Schmittian state of exception (or, as I shall argue later, along with Agamben, the state of extraordinarity), becomes normative law. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 244

Categorization

• XREF: The Code de l’indigénat and Schmittian state of exception connect to Agamben’s bare life and to the ‘state of extraordinarity’ concept Hallaq flags for later chapters. — connects to: Colonial policing hardened fluid status groups into fixed racial identities. — Erin K. Jenne and Promise Frank Ejiofor, Ethnopopulism and genocidal…, 50
• DEFINE: Introduces the Loi Warnier (1873) and Code de l’indigénat, two specific French colonial legal instruments, plus the Schmittian ‘state of exception’ as an analytic frame.