I recently read a chapter from Arthur Asseraf’s Electric News in Colonial Algeria (2019). The chapter, entitled “Arab Telephone,” covers the intimate relationship between colonization, the expansion of the telegraph in Algeria, and resistance. Asseraf analyzes the growth of a global pan-Islamist movement through these colonial technologies. As the telegraph spread with colonial expansion, so did access to international news, and with it, a global Muslim identity. For the French, the electric telegraph enabled military communication between remote settlements across the vast expanse of Algerian territory. For Algerians, it enabled a sense of a global anti-colonial Muslim kinship, something mostly unprecedented for the Maghreb.
In a conversation I attended, Asseraf mentioned in passing that the telegraph lines followed the roads of colonial expansion, which eventually resulted in railways. And so, in colonial Algeria, there seems to have been these arteries of communication, following the lines— the direction— of conquest. This stuck with me. I decided to visualize it.
The base map for this project was published in 1889; France was still in the process of conquering Algeria. The French expansion South brought with it roads, towns, and settlements that follow that path of colonization. The roads built for conquest changed the geography of Algeria, changed how people moved, where people lived. This map overlays 2015 human population distribution data onto the colonial map. This exercise reveals that the infrastructures of colonial expansion have embedded these “arteries of communication” into the Algerian landscape—over a century after the military map was published.
