Numidia, Rome, and an African saint
Before Rome there was Numidia, a Berber kingdom whose king Masinissa helped destroy Carthage and whose grandson Jugurtha fought Rome to a standstill before being betrayed. Under Rome the region was rich enough to leave whole cities behind — Timgad and Djémila still stand, grid-planned and colonnaded, in the eastern highlands.
It also produced Augustine of Hippo, born in 354 in what is now Souk Ahras, a Berber who became the most influential theologian in Western Christianity. That Algeria was a centre of the Christian and classical Mediterranean is the part its later Arab and French rulers both had reason to forget.
The Regency of Algiers
Islam arrived in the seventh century and, after a series of Berber dynasties, the coast came under the Ottomans in the sixteenth. The Regency of Algiers was nominally Ottoman but effectively independent, and it lived in large part off the sea: the corsairs of Algiers raided shipping and coasts across the Mediterranean and beyond, taking captives for ransom or sale. European states paid tribute to be left alone. It was a pretext for the raid on those corsairs — and a diplomatic insult, the famous "fly-whisk incident" — that France used to justify invasion in 1830.
The settler colony and the war
France did not merely rule Algeria; it declared it part of France and settled it. By the twentieth century around a million European colonists — the pieds-noirs — held the best land, while the Muslim majority had few rights in a country legally their own. The conquest itself had been ferocious: Emir Abdelkader's resistance held out until 1847, and French columns used mass killing and the destruction of villages to break it.
On 1 November 1954 the National Liberation Front launched the war of independence. It was fought with bombings, torture and reprisal on both sides — the Battle of Algiers made both the tactics and the film famous — and it brought down the French Fourth Republic. Independence came on 5 July 1962. The Algerian dead are usually given as hundreds of thousands; Algeria says a million and a half, and the true figure is contested. The pieds-noirs and the harkis, Algerians who had fought for France, fled or were killed.
The state the war built
Independent Algeria became a one-party socialist republic, its politics dominated by the FLN and the army, its economy floated on the oil and gas of the Sahara. When austerity hit in the 1980s, riots in 1988 forced a brief opening. An Islamist party looked set to win the 1991 elections; the army cancelled them, and the country fell into a civil war through the 1990s — the "black decade" — that killed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people, a figure still argued over.
Abdelaziz Bouteflika presided over the recovery and then over his own decline, ruling on into visible incapacity until 2019, when the peaceful mass protests of the Hirak movement forced him out. His successor Abdelmadjid Tebboune governs a country where power still runs through the army and the hydrocarbon revenue, and where the Hirak's demand for a genuinely civilian state remains unmet.