French colonial dispossession of Algerian land substituted for genocide as a practical option

Evidence

In a sustained effort to convert Algeria into a capitalist creature, the French engaged in direct appropriation and exploitation of the agricultural and mineral resources of the country. The problem, as the French saw it, was that too many Muslims lived in the country and that these “natives” were in control of the lands necessary for commercial exploitation and capitalist economy. As genocide involving a population of over two million natives was—at least at the time—not a practical option for the colonial authorities, freeing the land from the grip of the natives by other means dominated all considerations, in the legal field no less than in the political. This option would also afford the opportunity to exploit cheap labor, which would be lost if genocide were to be carried out. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 234

Categorization

• SEED: The framing that land dispossession functioned as a legal-genocidal alternative to literal genocide (‘genocide by other means’) could anchor an essay on jus-territorial expropriation as slow violence.
• DEEPTHINKING: The chilling economic rationale — that genocide would forfeit cheap labor and thus was rejected on cost-benefit grounds — presents dispossession as a rational capitalist substitute for mass murder, a genuinely paradigm-shifting frame.
• XREF: connects to: Irish land dispossession paralleled African colonial land theft in scale — Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 128; the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”