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This chapter examines the continuity and the resilience of slavery and other modes of forced or compulsory labour in the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa from the late nineteenth century. Addressing the major transformations of the political and moral economy of the ‘new Brazil’, it demonstrates how longstanding racial ideologies were crucial to the formulation of the country's doctrine of a civilising mission and to the development of the successive native policies that governed colonial populations – especially the native labour policy that legalised forced labour until the 1960s.

With the establishment of the French protectorate in 1912 under Resident-General Hubert Lyautey, a phase of institutionalization began. Moroccan Islam was recast as the handmaiden of native policy planning. The Mission scientifique was rebaptized the Mission sociologique du Maroc and placed under the native affairs department. Additional periodicals were launched, among them Archives Berbères and Hesperis, as well as an important publication series, Villes et tribus du Maroc. In this phase, the previously neglected Berber regions where resistance persisted were given priority. Ethnography was put directly into the service of the colonial project, becoming directly involved in the conquest and policy planning. However, in an ironic twist, the protectorate government was based not upon the complex and historically grounded understandings of Moroccan society but upon the social binaries of French colonial Algeria that Lyautey claimed to have rejected. So successful was the French marketing of the idea of the protectorate, however, that few observers (French or Moroccan) were willing to criticize the gap between expressed ideals and actual practices.

This chapter explores patterns of cultural, social, and intellectual innovation that emerged in Algeria from the end of World War I through the Algerian revolution. Changes were stimulated by Algerians returning from abroad including Bashir Ibrahimi, who came back from Syria to promote a modern Islamic education system, the philosopher Malik Bennabi, who returned from France to call for dismantling the colonial mentality, and Ahmad Rida Huhu, who came back from Saudi Arabia to produce plays advocating women's rights. Urban Algeria was the scene of extensive change, but colonial authorities thwarted change in rural areas. During the revolution there was intense debate, among the French between those who sought to maintain colonial native policies, and those open to building a multi-cultural trans-Mediterranean society, and among Algerians abroad between supporters and critics of the FLN.

Fierce opposition to the Italian invasion of Libya in October 1911 demonstrated the fallacies of Insabato’s predictions that a positive Italo-Sanusi relationship would lead to an easy victory. Nevertheless, Italian colonial officials continued to pursue an alliance with the Sanusiyya as a central objective. During World War I Italian and British officials toyed with the idea of exacerbating divisions within the Sanusi family, descendants of the man credited with founding the Sufi order. Rather than negotiating with the recognized head of the Sanusiyya, Ahmed al-Sharif, officials promoted the leadership of his younger cousin, Idris al-Sanusi. In the context of prolonged war, Idris’s negotiations with European officials met with widespread approval among Sanusi elites. For Italian colonial officials, the development of a power-sharing relationship with Idris meant minimizing the Catholic identity of Italian colonial rule, much to the dismay of missionaries and Catholic political interests in Rome.