Understanding the Context

During the 1830 French conquest of Algeria, witnesses watched, aghast, as officers looted administrative buildings, and soldiers used official Ottoman documents to light their pipes. In the following years, the plunder continued until most of the official records from Algiers and neighboring cities were either lost, stolen, or destroyed. The case of Algeria, outlined in this chapter, highlights the problematic nature of colonized archives and the question of what decolonizing data means in such a context. The few extant fragments of knowledge from Ottoman Algeria emerge from French and Algerian chronicles of the governors, travel narratives, and consular records. In this chapter, I trace the provenance of these documents and reflect on their advantages and drawbacks in relation to representation, languages, and computational tractability.