Algeria and the World Conflict: The Development of American Imperialism and the Preface to Algerian Revolution
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2015
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Haverford College. Department of History
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
On November 8, 1942 American and British troops poured onto the beaches of Morocco and Algeria. Representing the first joint military operation between the US and Great Britain during World War II, Operation Torch marked the opening of second fighting front against the European Axis members. Prior to Torch, President Franklin Roosevelt sent Robert D. Murphy, a career State Department official and former chargé d'affaires in Paris and Vichy, as his Special Envoy to French North Africa, to prime the French for an Allied invasion. His charge: to gauge the interest of the Colonial officials to challenge the Vichy collaborationists and form a separate French government in the colonies. Murphy and his American compatriots in North Africa set out to fulfill their goals, but in the process, they developed an American vision of colonial empire. The Americans found a colonial system in North Africa, where racism and oppression defined the life of the French colonizer and the North African colonized. Approaching this system, Americans developed a program and language that redefined the French colonial world in American terms. From 1940 to 1943, while Americans in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia defined their power along racial lines, Algerian nationalist movements began changing their arguments from critiques of the French laws in Algeria to the denial of the entirety of Western colonial ideology. Developed out of Robert Murphy's papers, this thesis outlines where the American presence in North Africa and the newly radicalizing Algerian nationalist movements came into contact with each other, moving away from an American-centric narrative of World War II in North Africa in order to give a new approach to a history of Algerian nationalism.