North Africa
On The Shores of Tripoli
In my seventh grade music class, we regularly sang the anthems of the various branches of the United States’ armed services.* Three days a week, the caissons rolled, bones sank to Davy Jones, planes sailed into the wild blue yonder, and the Marines fought from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. It…
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The End of French Algeria
The Algerian Revolution, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, was one of the bloodiest of the anti-colonial wars that broke out in Asia and Africa after the end of World War II. * Algerian resistance against colonial rule in Algeria was nothing new. Abd al-Qadir fought against French expansion in North Africa for fifteen years…
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Abandoning the Algerian Model
Tunisia and Morocco came under French control much later than Algeria, in 1883 and 1912 respectively, as part of the great “scramble for Africa” at the end of the nineteenth century.* From the French perspective, the imperial experience in Tunisia and Morocco was very different than that in Algeria.** In both states, French investors became…
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