# North Africa in a pan-African world historical perspective  
Although Iberian city-States were able to dislodge Al-Andalus from southern Europe, the ancient African civilization to which it was connected continued to persist and generally flourish, even in the face of belligerent new northern neighbours (Carew, 1995). So too did the worldwide network of nations and civilizations of which it was an integral part, to a large extent at least: until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the bulk of the African continent, when the tripod-mounted machine gun was deployed, and the early to mid-twentieth century for most of the so-called Middle East and much of Asia during the late colonial inter-war years (with exceptions that included the much longer colonization of the Indian subcontinent). While the Mediterranean, Atlantic and American worlds experienced a colonial rupture of immense epistemic and politico-economic proportions in the late fifteenth  
and sixteenth centuries, in most of Africa and Asia this rupture was more episodic, indirect or ephemeral for the first 300 years of modernity (despite the devastating disruptions of chattel slavery on the continent) and only began to take fuller hold in the past century or two in the Middle East, East and Central Africa, and the Indian Ocean/Asian worlds (Rodney, 1972). Northern Africa represents a zone of confluence between these two broad patterns in which elements of both may be discerned, but where the general tendency is more in line with the latter than the former, albeit with the key exception of Algeria.