ABSTRACT
World history is an exercise in contextualization. Against the grain of professional training, it asserts the importance of locating national histories in their larger regional and global contexts to better understand what is specific and what is general about them. As a historian of colonialism, I have long been dissatisfied with the ways in which colonial histories have been told. One way to identify the problem is to ask the question: Whose history is colonial history? Does it belong to the colonizer or the colonized? As I hope to explain more fully in my conclusion, this question goes to the heart of what I regard as the failure of historians to conceptualize adequately the place of non-European histories in the larger narrative of world history. I have elsewhere discussed what appear to me to be some of the epistemological and conceptual issues involved in writing colonial and nationalist histories from our current postcolonial vantage point. 1 Here I’d like to confine myself to some issues that arose for me as I thought recently about the history of one colonial society, Algeria.
