Présentation de Hannah-Louise Clark

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of collecting, presenting, analyzing, and acting on information about infectious diseases, as well as failures in this domain, have become hypervisible as part of global governance and public health. This paper seeks to encourage historians to consider (or reconsider) changing forms and meanings of bureaucratic writing about disease in the 20th century, using the example of Algeria under French colonial occupation: a key case for understanding the relationships that could exist among medicine, empire, and “race". It shows that records produced by Algerian officials from the early 20th century, such as disease outbreak notification forms in Arabic and narrative sanitary reports in French, can be read not only for the descriptive details which they contain—such how sanitary policing was carried out and individuals targeted by surveillance responded in different regional socioeconomic and environmental contexts. The records of hygienic surveillance can also be used to write the social history of the Algerian state and its officials, from uncovering traces of Ottoman administrative memory in the workings of French colonial bureaucracy to revealing how racialized religious categories and managerial processes formatted the delivery of public health.