The Maghrib, which in Arabic means the place of the sunset, is not a precise geographical term. It has been construed at its narrowest as Morocco alone and at its broadest as all of northern Africa west of Egypt, including Mauritania, where Arabic is the national language. The present chapter excludes both Libya and Mauritania and focusses upon the political and economic development of the core countries, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, in a comparative perspective suggested by their similar colonial experiences. The French presence decisively reshaped all three societies, though in different ways, reflecting the particular colonial situations. In Algeria, where occupation by the French began in 1830, the indigenous economic and political order was most affected, whereas Morocco, the last to lose its independence, was least affected, especially in the northern zone, which in 1912 fell under Spanish rather than French control. In all three societies French education (and Hispano-Arabic education in Spanish Morocco) formed new élites imbued with nationalism and eager to take over the modern economic and political structures largely dominated by European settlers. Pre-colonial traditions influenced the independent regimes, established in Morocco and Tunisia in 1956, and in Algeria in 1962, only insofar as they were refracted through the prism of anti-colonial struggle.

The major influence upon these regimes was the struggle itself, which was more protracted and violent in the Maghrib than in most of colonial Africa because of the more extensive French and settler interests conditioning it. It generated political elites whose organisations and social followings in turn helped to define the new regimes and their respective strategies of development.