In 1905 the Maghrib was sharply divided. Although Algeria had been French since its conquest in the 1830s and 1840s, Morocco was still an independent state, and Libya still a province of the Ottoman empire. They had not yet been overtaken by the European partition of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, which began with the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881. Both Morocco and Libya, however, were under threat: Libya from the Italians, who had secured international recognition of their claim to the territory as compensation for their acquiescence in the French protectorate in Tunisia; and Morocco from the French, who had obtained British acknowledgement of their special interest in the country with the conclusion of the Entente Cordiale in 1904. By 1914 Morocco had become a second French protectorate, at the price of territorial concessions to Spain in the north and south. Libya had been invaded by Italy, whose troops occupied the coast.

The subjugation of Morocco and Libya was not complete until the 1930s. The length of the conquest, combined with the interruption of European colonialism by the First World War, delayed the large-scale settlement and economic development of these countries by the European states concerned. Almost throughout the period, therefore, there continued to be big differences between Morocco and Libya and the well-established colony of Algeria, officially part of metropolitan France. These differences appeared in a less pronounced form between Algeria and Tunisia. They were offset by a policy of colonisation which the French extended from Algeria into Tunisia and Morocco, and which was copied by the Italians in Libya and by the Spanish to a lesser extent in their Moroccan zones.