ABSTRACT
Northern Africa stretches from the Spanish fishing grounds off the Western Sahara to the Italian colonies of the Eritrean highlands above the Red Sea. At the end of the Middle Ages northern Af rica maintained close contact with Portugal, Castile, Aragon, Genoa and the Byzantine empire, while in the sixteenth century most of the region fell under the Turkish influence of the Ottoman empire. In the the nineteenth century northern Africa was parcelled out into eight European-ruled territories. Unlike much of tropical Africa, northern Africa attracted significant numbers of foreign immigrants. Most of these came from the opposite shore of the Mediterranean and settled in farming and trading communities not dissimilar to the communities created in the region 2,000 years earlier by European immigrants from the Greek city-states and the Roman empire. The modern settler colonies, how ever, only lasted for about 100 years. In the second half of the twentieth century most immigrants returned to the northern shores of the Mediterranean, sometimes followed by significant numbers of North Africans who became gastarbeiter in the prospering new economic community founded by Europe in 1957, just when the colonizers were beginning to leave Africa. The first of the north African territories to regain its independence of action after the imposition of European domination was Egypt.
