The Ottoman empire’s westernmost provinces have frequently been detached from mainstream narratives of Ottoman history, and from discussions of the relationship between Ottoman and Arab histories in later historiography. The early development and longevity of a stable local dynasty in Tunis, and, conversely, the relative local instability of the ‘frontier’ regime in Algiers from the mid-seventeenth century and then its early loss to European invasion, have served to foreground the notion of significant autonomy and merely ‘nominal’ Ottoman sovereignty from well before the nineteenth century. In each case, too, the Ottoman period has held different meanings for later writers than would be the case after 1918 in the former Arab provinces further east. Nonetheless, as scholarship on the nineteenth century Tunisian state and the late Ottoman Algerian elite has suggested, the empire did remain symbolically important in the Maghrib. Indeed, it can be argued that in Maghribi Arabic historical writing, the Ottoman period retained an importance that is in quite striking contrast both to the physical and political distance separating these former provinces from the imperial centre, and to the ways in which the empire would more generally be thought of in the Arab Mashriq, and in wider Maghribi society. This paper will examine the role of the Ottoman state as an important focus for historical self-understanding and self-location in Maghribi historiography through two works from each of Algeria and Tunisia, and from two generations of historical writers; the ‘memoirs’ of Ahmad al-Sharif al-Zahhar (1781-1872), naqib al-ashraf of Algiers at the end of the Ottoman regency, and the Ithaf ahl al-zaman of Ibn Abi Diyaf (c.1804-1874) both of whom wrote out of conditions of ‘crisis’ in the 19th century, and the Khulasat ta’rikh Tunis of Hasan Husni Abd al-Wahhab (1884-1968) and Harb al-thalathami’at sana bayna ‘l-Jaza’ir wa Isbaniya by Ahmad Tawfiq al-Madani (1899-1983), seeking to ‘recover’ their countries’ histories in the 20th century. Comparisons and contrasts across these generations and in each country, with their different relationships to the memory of Ottoman rule and their different colonial experiences, illustrate the different ways in which the Ottoman period has been interpreted in the Maghrib: in historiography, the empire has been central to locating ideas of legitimate rule, narrating ‘greatness’ and ‘decline’, and explaining the onset of colonialism, while at the same time, and for different reasons in each case, remaining marginal to more widespread perceptions of history and national origins.