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Article dans une revue Popolazione e Storia Année : 2021

A great colonial divergence in biological standard of living? the secular trend of stature among indigenous people and settlers in Algeria, 1880-1940

Résumé

The demographic transition of the 1940s and 1950s, when the fertility of the Algerian population was beating world records 1 , posed a conspicuous threat of a Malthusian crisis. This formed the leitmotif of the socioeconomic and political analyses performed by the French authorities at the end of the colonial period (Chevalier 1947; Boyer and Breil 1958) 2. Some French technocrats believed that, by overcoming this threat, France would maintain the trust of Algerians and so ensure a sustainable French presence in Algeria. Anthropometrically, following John Komlos (Komlos 1998; Haines 2000, 177), it is certain that there was no crisis as such, because this would have meant that the population grew taller during a period of demographic decline; now, while research is still underway to determine whether the population did gain height, demographers and historians have shown that no demographic decline occurred. But what were the consequences of the demographic explosion that accompanied the rise of Algerian nationalism in terms of net nutrition levels? In other words, how severe was the threat of a Malthusian crisis for the Algerian population between 1900 and 1962? Was the "beggaring of Algeria", as in Germaine Tillion's celebrated expression (clochardisation de l'Algérie, see Tillion 1957, 7 and 10), confirmed by the anthropometric index? Population censuses still suffered from imperfections in the twentieth century, but even so they were much more reliable than in the nineteenth century (Chevalier 1947, 19; Kateb 2001, 103-108 and 232): the strong indigenous 3 population growth, and the concomitant decline in food supply per capita in Algeria was not in doubt (Stora 2004, 44) 4. This declining per capita production was likely to reflect a decline in the per capita food ration for a population that was overwhelmingly rural and still largely engaged in self-sufficient farming (Kateb Melhani and Rebah 2018, 60) 5. even if rural wage-earning surged very significantly in the twentieth century. Emigration to the metropole, which became massive after 1945, testified to this "beggaring" of the indigenous population 6. But on the other hand, health and medical progress (Kateb 2001, 290-294) were likely to improve the net nutrition level of Algerians, as shown a contrario by the anthropometric malus of soldiers suffering from malaria, a disease then endemic in Algeria (Heyberger 2019a). Did

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halshs-04299898, version 1 (22-11-2023)

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Laurent Heyberger. A great colonial divergence in biological standard of living? the secular trend of stature among indigenous people and settlers in Algeria, 1880-1940. Popolazione e Storia, 2021, ⟨10.4424/ps2021-6⟩. ⟨halshs-04299898⟩
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