<p>As one of France's leading historians of Algeria, and more broadly of French decolonization, Stora is well equipped to tell the story of these two terrible conflicts and of the thirty-year period that separates them, when the country was a one-party state struggling to create a post-colonial identity.</p>
- Roger Hardy, International Affairs
A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 million, 80,000 people have been reported killed, and the actual total is almost certainly higher. This terrible war overshadows Algeria's long and complex history and its prominence on the world economic stage—second in size among African nations, Algeria has the longest Mediterranean coastline and contains the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves. Algeria, 1830-2000 is a comprehensive narrative history of the country. Benjamin Stora, widely recognized as the leading expert on Algeria, presents the story of this turbulent area from the start of formal French colonialism in the early nineteenth century, through the prolonged war for independence in the latter 1950s, to the internal strife of the present day. This book adapts and updates three short volumes published originally in French by La Découverte. For this English edition, Stora has written a new introductory chapter on Algeria's colonial period (1830-1954) and has revised the final section to bring the volume up to date.
A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 million, 80,000 people have been reported killed, and the actual total is almost certainly higher.
Benjamin Stora has based his lean-bodied analysis of Algerian history... on a lifetime of engaged scholarship... Stora has written an unusually compelling book... He has passionately sought an undeluded understanding of the past. He notes that the proliferation of Algerian newspapers and publishers in the early 1990s led to Algerians becoming 'subjects of history and not just subjects of a regime'. His book, while destined to be contentious, largely succeeds in vindicating this honorable definition of the historian's enterprise.
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Benjamin Stora is Professor of History at the University of Paris, Saint Denis. He is the author of a dozen books on North Africa and the Arab communities of France, including La Gangrène et l'oubli, la mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie. Jane Marie Todd lives in Portland, Oregon. William B. Quandt is Edward R. Stettinius Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs and Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Virginia.