Algeria is the biggest country in Africa and is located on the continent's northeastern coast, bordering the Mediterranean Sea. The country shares its borders with Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Western Sahara, and Morocco. Algeria's population is around 42 million, with Arab and Berber ethnicities making up the majority of the population. The official languages of Algeria are Arabic and Berber, and French is widely spoken. Algeria is a country rich in history and culture, with influences from its diverse past, including Berber, Islamic, Ottoman, and French colonization. It gained independence from France on July 5, 1962, after a long and brutal war that lasted eight years. Today, Algeria is an upper-middle-income country with a mixed economy that relies heavily on its vast oil and natural gas reserves, making it the largest exporter of natural gas to Europe. Despite its economic strength, Algeria faces several challenges, including high unemployment, insufficient housing, and political instability.

Covering a period of five hundred years, from the arrival of the Ottomans to the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, James McDougall presents an expansive new account of the modern history of Africa's largest country. Drawing on substantial new scholarship and over a decade of research, McDougall places Algerian society at the centre of the story, tracing the continuities and the resilience of Algeria's people and their cultures through the dramatic changes and crises that have marked the country. Whether examining the emergence of the Ottoman viceroyalty in the early modern Mediterranean, the 130 years of French colonial rule and the revolutionary war of independence, the Third World nation-building of the 1960s and 1970s, or the terrible violence of the 1990s, this book will appeal to a wide variety of readers in African and Middle Eastern history and politics, as well as those concerned with the wider affairs of the Mediterranean.

In 1962 when Algeria finally obtained its independence from France after an eight-year guerilla war, it immediately embarked upon a second revolution aimed at destroying the colonial economic and social order. While the nationalist leaders struggled for power in the first hours of independence, peasants seized French farms and workers the factories, thus setting Algeria on the road toward a new socialist order. This book is a study of the Algerian socialist revolution, of those who made it and those who gained by it. The primary focus is on political behavior, on those aspects of the struggle among Algerian leader which vitally affected the character of the new order. The authors find that even though Algeria acquired all the trappings of a socialist state and economy, politics remained almost exclusively a question of personal relations, alliances, and rivalries among a small group of leaders--what the authors call, borrowing a concept from the fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, the politics of assabiya. Algeria's first President, Ahmed Ben Bella, tried to integrate the new and old political groups into a modern political system, but he failed. His overthrow by the army opened a second phase in the process of building stable political institutions and of overcoming the tradition of "palace conspiracies and rebellions of feudal lords." The authors trace in details this cyclical process during the first six years of Alergian independence. The work benefits from a wealth of first-hand information gathered during the authors' three-year stay in the country. The resulting picture is that of a new nation embarked upon a socialist "revolution" which owes little to Soviet or Chinese influences or, in some respects, even to the intentions of its leaders. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

For decades the superimposition of languages in Algeria has had growing cultural and political consequences. The relations between identity and language, already complicated before independence, became all the more entangled after 1962 when the new state imposed standard Arabic as the sole national language. The vernacular brand of Arabic spoken by the majority of the population--as well as Berber, spoken by an important minority--were denied legitimacy. Moreover, French, the colonial language, continued to be important all the while that its position changed. The violence that ensued in the late 1980s cannot be fully understood without considering the politics of language. This timely book is devoted to Algeria's linguistic predicament and the underlying disagreements over notions of identity, power, and belonging.What problems arise when a new national language is adopted by a postcolonial state? How does the status of the former colonial language change? What becomes of the original "mother tongue(s)" of the populace? The authors of Algeria in Others' Languages address these questions as they explore the historical, cultural, and philosophical significance of language in Algeria, and its relation to issues of politics and gender. Their topics range from analyses of political violence to the status of the principal of evidence in the legal system to the place of "Francophonie" in the 1990s.The authors represent the fields of literature, history, sociology, sociolinguistics, and postcolonial and gender studies; some are also historical players in Algeria's linguistic debates.

Algeria is the biggest country in Africa and is located on the continent's northeastern coast, bordering the Mediterranean Sea. The country shares its borders with Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Western Sahara, and Morocco. Algeria's population is around 42 million, with Arab and Berber ethnicities making up the majority of the population. The official languages of Algeria are Arabic and Berber, and French is widely spoken. Algeria is a country rich in history and culture, with influences from its diverse past, including Berber, Islamic, Ottoman, and French colonization. It gained independence from France on July 5, 1962, after a long and brutal war that lasted eight years. Today, Algeria is an upper-middle-income country with a mixed economy that relies heavily on its vast oil and natural gas reserves, making it the largest exporter of natural gas to Europe. Despite its economic strength, Algeria faces several challenges, including high unemployment, insufficient housing, and political instability. In this book we discuss topics such as: Introduction: Geography and Climate of Algeria History of Algeria: Pre-Colonial Era, French Colonization, Independence Struggle, Modern Era Culture and Society of Algeria: Religion, Language, Food and Cuisine, Festivals, Sports and Recreation Politics and Economics of Algeria: Government System, Economy and Industries, International Relations Tourism in Algeria: Attractions, Accommodation, Safety Conclusion: Summary and Future Prospects for Algeria. Quizzes are provided at the end of each section.

The history of Algeria from the beginning of the French conquest in 1830 to the present day.