'A richly rewarding analysis that demonstrates convincingly how constructions of cultural knowledge about late nineteenth century Algeria by colonial anthropologists, explorers, and aspirant writers stigmatized entire communities as, at once, inherently criminal and desperately in need of civilization through colonization. In his focus on influential, yet amateur ethnographers - figures whose observations and representations of Algerian social practices typically owed more to orientalist literature than to scientific enquiry - George Trumbull compels us to reconsider the connections between the transmission of ethnographic 'knowledge', the politicization of colonial identities, and the consolidation of colonial states. The result is a clinical dissection of why and how French men and women came to think as they did about colonial Algeria, its culture, its religion, and its people.' Martin Thomas, Exeter University and author of Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914
'Meticulously researched, this important and original study explores the production of 'facts' as facilitators of colonial rule in French colonial Algeria. Trumbull's ethnographers emerge as 'arbiters of authenticity,' who generated a wide range of usable knowledge through fieldwork, exploration, or surveys. Elucidating the moralizing, primitivizing, or criminalizing gaze of colonial ethnographers, An Empire of Facts tells many compelling stories along the way. This impressive book sheds light on colonial ethnography, relations between colonizer and colonized, on gender and religion in colonial contexts, on the intimacy of colonial rule, and ultimately on the fluid nature of nineteenth century colonial ethnography, whose boundaries with tourism, geography, or with the state itself were often blurred.' Eric T. Jennings, University of Toronto and author of Vichy in the Tropics, and Curing the Colonizers
'In this elegant exploration of ethnography in French colonial Algeria, George Trumbull deftly traces how field observations became politicized archives - and brings to life remarkable encounters between travelers, nomads, administrators and shaykhs. This book should engage not just scholars of France, North Africa, and Islam, but anyone interested in the relationship between knowledge-production and imperial power. Sophisticated, evocative, and thoroughly original, An Empire of Facts shines as a model example of how to investigate the entwined histories of metropole and colony.' Maya Jasanoff, Harvard University and author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 17501850
' [Trumbull's] analysis makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the process by which prejudicial views about Islam came into being during the colonial period and persisted in its aftermath.' Jamil M. Abun-Nasr, Journal of Islamic Studies
