MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Tunisia

ONE LAND · 7 ATLASES

Tunisia, on the map of history

What was Tunisia before it was Tunisia? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Africa (mod. Tunisia) · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

Carthage — the rival. A Phoenician merchant thalassocracy older and richer than Rome, undone in three wars by the strait it shared with Italy (Chs. 1–2). Razed in 146 BC, cursed, and refounded a century later as Roman Africa: the empire’s breadbasket, so vital that its loss to the Vandals in 439 is the best single explanation for the fall of the West (Ch. 11). Few territories on this map decide the story twice.

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Ifriqiya (mod. Tunisia) · The Crusades, 1095–1291

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Tunisia · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

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Tunisia · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Tunisia · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

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Tunisia · The Cold War, 1945–1991

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Tunisia · The Decolonization of Africa, 1945–1994

Tunisia won independence from France in March 1956, led by Habib Bourguiba’s Neo-Destour party in a largely negotiated exit — France sacrificing its protectorates to hold Algeria. Bourguiba built a secular, modernizing one-party state and ruled for three decades. A comparatively peaceful decolonization, decided by the absence of a mass settler population.

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