Algiers

Before it pumped oil, Algiers pumped fear — running a state-sponsored piracy economy so effective it forced the United States to create its navy. Founded as the Phoenician trading post of Icosium around 1200 BCE and refounded by Berber ruler Buluggin ibn Ziri in 972 CE, Algiers became the Mediterranean's most dangerous city when the Barbarossa brothers seized it in 1516 and established the Regency of Algiers under Ottoman protection. Unlike private piracy elsewhere, Algerian corsairs operated as a state monopoly with piracy revenue included in the national budget. Between 1530 and 1780, an estimated 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved. By 1800, tribute payments to Algiers consumed 20% of US government annual expenditure — prompting Congress to authorize construction of the first American naval vessels in 1794.

Britain and France quietly tolerated this parasitism because it eliminated smaller nations' merchant shipping, concentrating Mediterranean trade in Anglo-French hands. The corsair crews themselves were largely European 'renegades' — converts to Islam from across the continent. Cervantes spent five years as a prisoner here (1575-1580). In 1659, a janissary coup transformed Algiers into a sovereign military republic whose leaders were elected by council rather than appointed by Istanbul — a democratic pirate state 130 years before the French Revolution.

France invaded in 1830, ending three centuries of corsair rule and beginning 132 years of colonial occupation. The brutal War of Independence (1954-1962) — whose Battle of Algiers became the template studied by guerrilla movements worldwide — gave way to socialist command economy, then the catastrophic 'Black Decade' of civil war in the 1990s (approximately 200,000 killed). Each transition restructured the economy around a single extraction model: piracy, then colonial agriculture, then hydrocarbons.

Today 90% of Algeria's exports are oil and gas — one of the most lopsided resource dependencies in the world — though non-hydrocarbon exports have tripled since 2017 to $5.1 billion. Three submarine natural gas pipelines connect Algiers to Europe, and the city generates roughly 20% of national GDP. Algiers functions as a metabolic specialist: each era identifies one resource to extract (captives, wine, petroleum) while the underlying economic diversity atrophies. The question is whether the current push toward hydrogen exports through converted pipeline infrastructure represents genuine metabolic diversification or simply the next monoculture.