User:Blossom Ozurumba/sandbox

The writing of African history is as old as the writing of history itself. The historians of the ancient Mediterranean world and those of the medieval Islamic civilization both took the whole known world as their frame of reference, and this included a considerable part of Africa. Africa north of the Sahara was an integral part of both civilizations, and its past was as much a concern of their historians as was that of southern Europe or the Near East. Indeed, North African history continued to be part of the mainstream of western historical studies until the advance of the Ottoman Turkish empire in the sixteenth century. Following Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798, North Africa became again a not inconsiderable field for investigation by historians. With the growth of European colonial power in North Africa following a French conquest of Algiers in 1830 and the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, a European, colonialist standpoint came to dominate the writing of North African history. However, by the 1930s the modernist movement in Islam, the growth of European-style education in the North African colonies, and the rise of North African nationalist movements were all combining to produce indigenous schools of historians, writing in French and English as well as in Arabic, to restore a proper balance to North African historical studies.