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Pirates of the…Mediterranean?
In response to my recent post on nineteenth century Chinese pirate Cheng I Sao, Margins reader Davide reminded me of another highly successful pirate* and then made the provocative comment that the...
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The Incident of the Flyswatter
Yesterday I received an e-mail from a friend and regular reader of History in the Margins suggesting I write a post about the long, complex, and often difficult relationship between France and its...
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Abd al-Qadir Fights Back
Abd al-Qadir by Rudolf Ernst If the French hadn’t invaded Algeria in 1830, Algerian emir Abd al-Qadir would probably have been content to follow his grandfather and father as the spiritual leader of...
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By Sword and Plow: French Settlement in Algeria
1880 map of French Algeria The conquest of Algeria in 1830 was the beginning of France’s second period of imperial expansion. * Like many colonial wars, the conquest became a sinkhole, eating armed...
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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...
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The End of French Algeria
Barricades in Algiers, 1960 Photograph courtesy of Christophe Marcheux under Creative Commons license The Algerian Revolution, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, was one of the bloodiest of the...
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On The Shores of Tripoli
Decatur boarding the Tripolitan gunboat during the bombardment of Tripoli, 1804. by Dennis Malone Carter In my seventh grade music class, we regularly sang the anthems of the various branches of the...
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How the Trans-Saharan Trade Routes Work
In the eighth century CE, after camels were introduced into North Africa, Muslim merchants of North Africa began to organize regular camel caravans across the western Sahara. North African merchants...
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The Storied City
In 2013, Charlie English, then international news editor of The Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city’s religious monuments because they...
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Edith Wharton’s Morocco, A Literary Pilgrimage, a guest post by Stacy Holden
Today I’m going to give you a little break from the Great River Road. We’re still going to be on the road, just further afield. Morocco in fact, courtesy of writer, historian and traveler Stacy E....
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