WEST COMES EAST 245With its government gone, Algeria was a power vacuum, and you know
how nature abhors those things. Instead of setting up a proxy or puppet,
France decided to incorporate Algeria into its national structure as three
new provinces. In other words, the French treated Algeria not as a colony
but as part of France. A "joint stock" company was set up to sell land to
French citizens who would immigrate to these new provinces and help
"develop" them.
Even here in Algeria, which France out and out invaded, the foreign-
ers flooding in as immigrants didn't fight a war with the natives. They just
bought up 80 percent of the land, fair and square, and set up a whole new
economy that didn't compete with the native economy so much as ignore
it. Algerian Arabs remained free to plant what they wanted on whatever
land they retained, ship what they grew to Algerian ports if they could
afford the freight charges, and sell their products in world market if
they could find any buyers, which they couldn't. Or if they preferred, they
could leave the land and move to the cities and start businesses, if they
had the capital-which they didn't-and if they could get a business li-
cense from French officials, which for various good and legal reasons, they
often couldn't.
So the Arabs of Algeria ended up buying and selling to each other in
the old traditional ways while the bulk of the country, absorbed as it was
into the European and world markets, did business in streamlined, super-
productive modern ways.
If any Algerian had been asked whether he opposed or supported sell-
ing 80 percent of the country to French buyers, he would surely have said
he opposed it. If anyone had been faced with that decision, he would al-
most certainly have decided no. But no one ever had a chance to decide
whether to sell off 80 percent of the country. Each landowner who sold
property to "the French'' was only deciding whether to sell his one piece of
land to this one buyer. It was quite possible to oppose selling 80 percent of
the country to foreigners while seeing persuasive reasons to sell one partic-
ular bit of it to one particular foreigner.
Over the next century, the French community in Algeria grew to seven
hundred thousand French citizens. They came to own most of the land and
considered themselves native Algerians, since they were born on Algerian
soil and most were the children of parents born there. Inconveniently, some