Sir Hugh Roberts, Surveyor Emeritus of The Queen's Works of Art, was Director of The Royal Collection, the art collection of the British Royal Family, from 1996 until 2010, having joined the Royal Household in 1988. From 1970 to 1987 he worked at Christie's, where he was a main board director from 1976. He has written extensively on English and French furniture and decorative arts in Royal Collection exhibition catalogues and major journals, and is the author of For The King's Pleasure (2001) and The Queen's Diamonds (2012).

The political organisation of pre-colonial Kabylia, from which these traditions originate, was well described by nineteenth-century French authors. But their inability to explain it encouraged later theorists of Berber society, such as Ernest Gellner and Pierre Bourdieu, to dismiss Kabylia's political institutions, notably the jema'a (assembly or council), and to reduce Berber politics to a function of social structure and shared religion. In Berber Government, Hugh Roberts, a renowned expert on North Africa, explores the remarkable logics of Kabyle political organisation and the unusual degree of autonomy it possessed in relation to both kinship divisions and the religious field. This book further offers a pioneering account of the social and political history of Kabylia during the Ottoman period and establishes a radically new way to understand the complex place of the Kabyles in Algerian politics.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Considering Kabylia
Chapter 2: Perspectives on Berber politics
Chapter 3: The Kabyle Economy: Leqbaiel and Igawawen
Chapter 4: Pre-Colonial Kabylia: Forms of Settlement
Chapter 5: Kabyle Law
Chapter 6: The Kabyle Polity
Chapter 7: Pre-Colonial Kabylia and the Regency: Religion and Political Development, 1510-1624
Chapter 8: The Rise and Fall of the Lords of Koukou
Chapter 9: The Reconstitution of Greater Kabylia after 1630