| Summary: | On the Archives of Ottoman Algeria. Archival documentation of Ottoman Algeria is, in general, somewhat scarce, which leads one to reflect upon historians’ practice in such conditions – not by seeking elsewhere what is not supplied in these archives, but rather by examining more closely the sense and social uses of that which does exist. It is henceforth a question of understanding production conditions with regard to their contents and to interpellate them as so many isolated contexts and articulations from which actions unfurl and are declared. Questions emerge from behind this approach regarding the exact reasons for wanting to produce and archive these documents - so many operations from which historians work - but which, however, are not obvious from the outset. By analysing the archival configuration of Ottoman Algeria, I shall be exploring these questions and presenting two lines of research which motivated me; one by examining the effects of the (colonial) history of these archives on the meaning of their contents, and the other by presenting the results of collective research into the production conditions of a classic type of source for Ottomanists – Islamic judicial records.
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