Uprooting: The Crisis of Traditional Algriculture in Algeria

Between 1954 and 1960, in the midst of the Algerian War, more than two million Algerian peasants – a quarter of the population – were forcibly resettled. They were removed from their homes and villages and relocated in camps controlled by the French military in what was one of the largest and most brutal displacements of a rural population in history.

It was in this context of colonial violence that Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad set out to examine transformations in the fundamental st...