American Imperialism in Conversation with Other Empires
My book explores how Algeria played an important role in French-American relations from 1830, when France first occupied Algeria, through the early 1970s, in the first years of Algerian independence from French colonial authority.[1] The book studies American imperialism in a novel way by placing the origins and evolution of American imperialism in conversation with another empire. In doing so it extends the historiographical push to locate American history on a global spectrum, showing the relationship of historical phenomena among Americans to patterns and regimes elsewhere, and giving space to how actors in European empires perceived and interacted with their American counterparts, as well as vice versa. Thus, the book’s study of American imperialism in relationship with France makes a new contribution to studies of connective and comparative imperialisms, which have tended to focus on Anglo-American, German-American, or, outside American historiography, Anglo-French imperial regimes and exchanges.[2]
The book presents six roughly chronological episodes in French-Algerian-American imperial and antimperial exchanges. Chapter 1 shows how the first French invasion and military occupation of Algeria in 1830 affected Americans’ notions of territorial expansion in areas occupied by Indigenous Americans and the Mexican republic. Chapter 2 interprets the American Civil War as a razzia, the French term and doctrine of irregular warfare honed in Algeria, which the US military embraced. Chapter 3 compares American and French practices of citizenship in the post-Civil War South and Algeria during the French Second Empire and Third Republic. Chapter 4 shows how French policy-makers interpreted and sought to apply the US Homestead Act to encourage Algeria’s development as a settler colony. Chapter 5 traces how American jurists embraced French treatment of Algeria as an integral part of France as an analogy for US imperial incorporation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Chapter 6 traces exchanges between Algerian nationalists and pan-African Americans to develop a connected anticolonial movement from World War I through Algeria’s independence in 1962. An epilogue concludes the book by showing the kinship of Lost Cause ideology in recent France and the United States, particularly in its fueling ethnonationalist support for the French National Rally party and the American Republican party.
A Shared Republican Heritage
In some important ways, particularly constructions of racialized identity-making, legal institutions, and settler colonialism, French-American imperialism resembled other empires’ practices. On the other hand, the fact that the United States and France were republics, or at least shared a heritage of republican equality and citizenship, originating in revolutions, particularly shaped the nature of their imperial circulations and the meanings of Algeria that those circulations exposed, among both actors who erected and maintained imperial conditions and those who resisted those conditions.
Mimicking the focuses in American transnational history generally on the colonial era through the 18th century and again on the period of decolonization after World War II, previous work on Americans’ encounters with Algeria comes across as a set of temporal bookends. One end of the scholarship has focused on Algeria’s impact on Americans as a notorious Barbary state, Algiers, a regency nominally ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Algerian corsairs in service of the regency’s deys, misnamed ‘pirates’ by Westerners, shaped negative opinion of Algerians and, broadly, Muslims in the early American republic.
On the other end, American historians pick up the thread of North African history again only with World War II, when US military forces landed in North Africa in 1943. Work has focused on the strategies of Operation Torch and other Allied and Axis campaigns, without real emphasis on the conflicted status of Algerians. And historians have illuminated Algerian nationalists’ cultivation of foreign support in the years around the Algerian War of Independence 1954–62. Thus, historians have not explored Americans’ attitudes towards and interactions with indigenous Algerians and European settlers and administrators, and vice versa, happening over a century of French occupation and settlement of Algeria from the 1830s to the 1960s, particularly for what those interactions say about American imperialism and anti-imperialism.
Algeria as a Fissured, Dynamic Transimperial Space
Likewise, traditional historians of French Algeria, perhaps because of France’s republican heritage, or the rapid exodus of the pied noirs, the European Algerians who would flee Algeria to southern France during and after the Algerian War of Independence, have not considered how Algeria resembled other episodes in franchise and settler colonialism.[3] Like traditional scholarship on American imperialism, until the last few decades French scholarship focused on how administrators in Paris affected people in Algeria and the French colonies. Only recently have scholars emphasized imperial legacies in modern France, particularly dual attitudes about Muslim immigrants in the metropole as they relate to conflicting memories of Algeria as a racialized or egalitarian society.[4] My book connects these two traditionally different fields of history and is a potential model for other such cases in transimperial scholarship.
Different from traditional diplomatic history, After Barbary emphasizes that French, Algerian, and American politicians, soldiers, writers, and reformers acted across political and cultural boundaries to produce Algeria as a fissured, dynamic transimperial space, even as it was established and exploited by France as its sovereign territory. Algeria functioned as an imperial analogy, a lesson, a laboratory, and a remedy for state and non-state actors to appropriate, misappropriate, and reformulate elements of a foreign empire for how they could help enable accomplishment of a domestic political objective. French Algeria, taking on characteristics of both the French and American empires, connected and helped make them.
[1] Timothy Mason Roberts: After Barbary: Algeria’s Roles in the French and American Empires, Ithaca 2025, https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501784736/after-barbary/.
[2] Julian Go: Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present, New York 2011; Saliha Belmessous: Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954, Oxford, 2013; Jens-Uwe Guettel: German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945, Cambridge, 2012. In contrast, Gavin Murray-Miller: Empire Unbound: France and the Muslim Mediterranean, 1880-1918, Oxford 2022 emphasizes France’s multilateral imperial exchanges during the height of the French Third Republic.
[3] Ian Lustick: Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-Gaza, Ithaca 1995 is unusual in this regard.
[4] For example, Claire Eldridge: From Empire to Exile: History and Memory Within the Pied-Noir and Harki Communities, 1962–2012, Manchester 2016.
Tim Roberts is a history professor at Western Illinois University, USA. He studies American history in a global context. He has written about Americans’ exchanges with Europeans about revolution, civil war, exceptionalism, and empire from 1848 to the 1960s, particularly concerning French-American constructions of liberal or 'republican' imperial regimes He is more generally interested in trans-Atlantic transfers of liberal reforms and military practices, and in assessing how and why those reforms and practices could manifest similarly or differently at their destination from their origin. He is also interested in early American relations in the Mediterranean region, including North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, focusing on the transnational or transimperial roles of missionaries, traders, and nationalist rebels, and in the tension between discourses of orientalism and anti-colonialism in Americans' thinking about those peoples and places.
Select publications:
-After Barbary: Algeria's Roles in the French and American Empires (Cornell University Press, 2025) https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501784736/
-“A Genealogy and Check-in on American ‘Empire-Talk’,” Ab Imperio 1 (2025), pp. 90-105 https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/178/article/960613/pdf
-“Lajos Kossuth and the Permeable American Orient of the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Diplomatic History 39 (2015), pp. 793-818 https://academic.oup.com/dh/article-abstract/39/5/793/334506
-Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2009) https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/3821/
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