“They Do Not Know How to Deal with Native Unrest”: British intervention and unintended consequences in French North Africa, 1940–1946

As the Second World War raged, Allied forces moved across North Africa, expelling Axis armies and winning territory in Algeria and Tunisia. As Free French leaders struggled to regain control over their former colonial territories, British officials stepped into the breach, in the process providing an important opening for African and Arab national leaders to exploit in pushing for independence. Far from an isolated outbreak of violence, the Algerian revolution that emerged in the 1950s grew in large part from a complicated international environment that included transnational anti-colonial currents and old imperial rivalries.