Algeria and the Rise of Global History

Algeria, the largest country in both Africa and the Arab world, is probably best-known to English speakers as the birthplace of Albert Camus, novelist, philosopher, goalkeeper and, alongside Raymond Aron and Léon Blum, one of the trio of French progressives celebrated by the late Tony Judt for seeing through the false promises of the Soviet Union. Our picture of Algeria is slowly expanding though, thanks in part to the work of scholars such as Martin Evans – whose article on the embattled Jews of French Algeria is in the July issue of History Today – and the circle of young academics he has assembled at the University of Portsmouth. This renewed interest is to be welcomed, for Algeria is the source of two of the most dynamic areas of modern historical inquiry: the study of Late Antiquity and the rise of global history.

St Augustine, arguably the single most important figure in Christian thought, was born in 354 in the north-east of what became Algeria, in Hippo Regius, now the modern industrial city of Annaba. After a famously dissolute youth (‘Lord, make me pure, but not yet’), he benefited from the early form of globalisation that was the Roman Empire. Pioneering an intellectual revolution made possible by the swift transmission of ideas, he defined the concepts of original sin and just war. Augustine’s autobiography, Confessions, was the first of its kind and it is Peter Brown’s biography of Augustine, first published in 1967, that established the reputation of the foremost scholar of what has come to be known as Late Antiquity, the crucial period between the fall of Rome and the rise of medieval Europe. Brown’s forthcoming book, The Eye of the Needle, vast in scope and ambition, will trace the challenges posed to Christian thinkers such as Jerome and Ambrose, as well as Augustine, by the vast wealth the Church accrued as Rome’s western empire slipped away.

The kind of sweeping intellectual history of which Brown is a master was, surprisingly, pioneered in French Algeria. Fernand Braudel, widely considered to be the greatest historian of the 20th century, spent almost a decade teaching in Algeria before the outbreak of the Second World War. In France, as a young postgraduate, he had begun writing a study of Philip II of Spain’s Mediterranean policy, at first a fairly conventional diplomatic history. But Braudel’s ambitions were transformed in Algeria, where he began to conceive a ‘total history’ of the Mediterranean beyond national borders, emphasising in particular the long, slow changes effected by man’s relationship with the environment. Braudel completed the work as a prisoner of war of the Germans and it finally saw the light of day in 1949. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II became the foundation stone avant la lettre of global history, influencing the likes of William McNeill, Christopher Bayly, Felipe Fernández-Armesto and many more pioneers of what is one of the most challenging and promising fields of history, not least because it reasserts the importance of regions, eras and peoples neglected for too long.

Paul Lay is the editor of History Today