| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The story of the Oran-based Jewish merchant Jacob Lasry (1793-1869) illustrates how preexisting North African business practices survived and adapted to the radical dislocations of the French conquest of Algeria. In the 1830s, French political turmoil and indecision helped foster a chaotic situation where French generals with nebulous goals "outsourced" financing and even military campaigns to local experts in Algeria. Lasry's business success in the economy of the early conquest invested him with a degree of power vis-à-vis the French administration, whose other proxies sometimes ended up in severe debt to him. With the rise of a "civilizing mission" discourse in the 1840s and 1850s, aspects of this mission, too, were outsourced to local experts. Despite his Moroccan birth, Gibraltarian family, and British subjecthood, Lasry used his stature to secure the official position of president of the province's consistoire israélite, charged with advancing French civilization among Oran's indigenous Jews.
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