Hello, you're very welcome to Long Reeds, a Jacoven podcast where we look in depth of political topics and thinkers.

My name is Daniel Finn, and the features editor here at Jacobin, and I'll be presenting the show.

We're listening to Ennio Morricone's soundtrack from the Battle of Algiers, one of the great works of political cinema.

It's closely related to the subject matter of today's episode.

On January 1st this year, Mohammed Harby died at the age of 92.

Harby was one of the leading historians of modern Algeria and the movement that led it towards independence.

Harby began writing about the Algerian Revolution after taking part in it himself.

Born under French colonial rule,

Harby became a member of the National Liberation Front in the 1950s.

He was an advisor to Algeria's first president,

Ahmed Ben Bela.

But Harby was sent to prison after Ben Bela was removed from power

in a military coup.

He later escaped from house arrest and went into exile.

Harby remained deeply engaged with political events inside the country,

from the Civil War of the 1990s to the Hiraq protest movement of the last decade.

Our guest today for a discussion of his life and work is Muriam Davis.

Muriam is a professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz.

She's the author of Markets of Civilization, Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria. I began by asking her about the social and political

context into which Harby was born. For those who perhaps don't know, Algeria, unlike other

colonial territories, was a settler colony. And so by the time that Muhammad Harbi was born, he's born in 1933,

you had over a century of settler colonial destruction of Algerian culture, language, and the economy.

...