Tag Archives: colonial era

كتاب: الفضائع السود الحمر من صفحات الاستعمار الايطالي

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In the 1930s, a “Commission for the Liberation of Libya” (هيئة تحرير ليبيا) headed by Bashir al-Sa‘dawi published a book entitled The Black-Red Atrocities from the Pages of Italian Colonization in Libya, or, Civilization by Iron and Fire (الفضائع السود الحمر من صفحات الاستعمار الايطالي في ليبيا او التمدين بالحديد والنار) documenting atrocities committed by the Italian colonial occupation in Libya and mocking claims that colonization would lead to modernization and progress for the colonized. It appears to be the case that this book is a revised version of al-Sa‘dawi’s Fadhā’i‘ made by a group of Libyan exiles in Syria. The second printing under this title, in 1948 in Cairo, added a section arguing for Libyan unity and independence after WWII. Together with the earlier edition of Sa‘dawi’s work and Shatwan & Sherif’s “Aspirations et idéal national” it is one of the few Libyan anti-colonial writings of the time.

مقال: فظائع الاستعمار الايطالي الفاشستي في طرابلس-برقة

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In the 1930s the Tripolitanian notable and politician Bashir al-Sa‘dawi, later to be viewed as one of the main figures in the movement for Libyan independence, published an essay entitled ‘The atrocities of fascist Italian colonialism in Tripolitania-Barqa’ (مقال: فظائع الاستعمار الايطالي الفاشستي في طرابلس-برقة). Published by the “Association for the defense of Tripolitania-Barqa”, about which I know little, this essay seems to be one of the earliest Libyan anti-fascist and anti-colonial writings.

Article: Reluctant Militants: Colonialism, Territory, and Sanusi Resistance on the Ottoman‐Saharan Frontier

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Jonathan Lohnes. 2021. Reluctant Militants: Colonialism, Territory, and Sanusi Resistance on the Ottoman‐Saharan Frontier. Journal of Historical Sociology 34(3), 466-478. [paywall]

Abstract: Libya's enigmatic Sanusi brotherhood has been the subject of perennial debate since its emergence in Ottoman Cyrenaica in the mid nineteenth century, becoming a screen upon which apologists and detractors could project their own political anxieties and desires. For European critics, the brotherhood embodied the irrationality and fanaticism of the Islamic East. Its networks in North and Central Africa constituted an obstacle to their expansionist designs, while Sanusi prestige throughout the Muslim world rendered the brotherhood a threat to the entire colonial order of things. Nationalist historiography has generally endorsed this view, albeit with a positive valence, characterizing the Sanusiyya as an anticolonial social movement. Meanwhile, modern critical scholarship has tried to impose order on the chaos of the turn-of-the-century Sahara by assigning to the fraternity the role of a “proto-state.” This article proposes a new framework for understanding the history and sociology of the Sanusi. Drawing on theorists of subaltern resistance such as James Scott and Michael Adas—alongside Ottoman, British, French, and Italian primary sources—I demonstrate that the brotherhood began its life as an inward-looking Islamic social justice movement with little evident interest in state building or the geopolitical controversies of the moment. I coin the term “reluctant militants” to describe its mercurial trajectory from frontier evangelism to armed struggle in response to French and Italian colonial encirclement. This process culminated in the Long War of 1911–1931, during which the Sanusiyya played a critical part in the struggles over post-Ottoman reconstruction, from the Maghreb to Anatolia.

Publications of the Instituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare on Colonial Libya

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Thanks to the generosity of our colleague (and fellow archive diver) Amalie for sharing the below resources.

The Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare (now part of the Agenzia italiana per la cooperazione allo sviluppo) in Florence, Italy—itself a fairly major actor in Italian colonial expansion in north and east Africa—compiled some interesting documentation on Italian settler colonial agriculture and land development efforts in Libya based on its own archives.

Libia 1902-1940: Agricoltura e storia nelle fotografie dell’Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare, a cura di Massimo Battaglia e Fabrizia Morandi (IAO, 2015)

Terre e lavori dalla Libia coloniale nelle fotografie dell’Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare, a cura di Nicola Labanca (IAO, 2015)

Article: Solidarity Among Colonial Subjects in Wartime Libya, 1940-1943

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Tagliacozzo, Livia. 2022. Solidarity Among Colonial Subjects in Wartime Libya, 1940-1943. Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History 22(2). 109–140. (open access)

Abstract: During World War II, Jews in Libya faced persecution and adversity. In response, Muslim individuals often became aides to the Jews, driven by economic reward, shared benefits, and genuine empathy. Examining the manner Jews and Muslims interacted in these circumstances sheds light on the complex relationship between the two communities, influenced by factors such as religious affiliation, connections to the regime, and personal interests. The fascist regime’s differential policies towards the two communities over two decades also played a role in shaping this relationship, sometimes causing conflict between the communities, but also leading to a shared sense of opposition to the Italians following common experiences of persecution.

Thesis: Insurgent Geographies: The Production of Territorial Libya, 1835–1935

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Lohnes, Jonathan M. 2022. Insurgent Geographies: The Production of Territorial Libya, 1835–1935. PhD Dissertation, Cornell University. (open access)

Abstract: This dissertation offers a panoramic reinterpretation of Libyan state-formation in light of Ottoman archival evidence and recent advances in critical geography, particularly revisionist approaches to the history of territory. Echoing Henri Lefebvre’s description of space as the “ultimate locus and medium of struggle,” I argue that the dynamic, frequently violent interaction of a diverse cast of networked social forces—local, transregional, Ottoman imperial, and European colonial— across a vast Saharan-Mediterranean theater produced the entity we now recognize as territorial Libya from approximately 1835 to 1935. Territorial spatialization along the rural frontiers of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan is not reducible in theory to the enclosure of land or conquest of terrain— though both featured prominently within it—but also encompassed legal, diplomatic, technical-scientific, and ideological dimensions. The process unfolded in two phases: Ottoman provincialization, which transformed these areas into a “pilot province” for Istanbul’s ambitious development agenda, and Italian fascist colonization, which unified the country in the form of a colonial state after a twenty-year “pacification” campaign. Both phases unfolded at the expense of rural indigenous communities, who were targeted for disarmament, dispossession, displacement, and culminating in the ethnic cleansing of Cyrenaica in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Indigenous efforts to preserve local understandings of sovereign autonomy—up to and including “nomadic strategies” of guerrilla war—were the most historically and geographically significant factor in the production of Libyan territorial space. Modern Libya’s unique experience of territorial spatialization dislocated the country from the conceptual maps that guide us through transnational, regional, and local pathways of Global South history. Its ambivalent and fragmentary “geo-historical identity”—exemplified by the fact that Fezzan remains synonymous with “the middle of nowhere” in modern Turkish—is among the most enduring legacies of this process. Yet this inherited sense of Libya’s rural interior as the Periphery of Peripheries belies the fact that upland Tripolitania, Fezzan, and inner Cyrenaica often took center stage in the high drama of late and post-Ottoman politics. More than a microcosm of transformations underway across the Empire in its final century, this region was a critical frontline of global struggles over resources, sovereign legitimacy, geographic knowledge, and the fate of mobile and nomadic populations. All of which is to say, the middle of nowhere is the heart of the world.

Article: The Life Cycle of the Libyan Coastal Highway

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Distretti, Emilio. 2021. The Life Cycle of the Libyan Coastal Highway: Italian Colonialism, Coloniality, and the Future of Reparative Justice in the Mediterranean. Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 53(5). 1421–1441.

Abstract: This paper explores the role of the Libyan Coastal Highway across history: originally built by fascist Italy during colonisation, in the postcolonial era Libya demanded Italy commit to the construction of a new motorway as part of the reparation process for its crimes. Only in 2008 was an agreement reached. Through it, Italy used the promise to build a new road as a bargaining-chip to secure Qaddafi’s cooperation in containing migrant mobility across the Mediterranean. This paper explores the different ways in which the Libyan road has endured as a space and a tool of power by tracing historical and political continuities across time, from colonisation to demands for postcolonial reparations and migration governance. Drawing inspiration from the notion of “coloniality”, the paper investigates the colonial continuum expressed by the Italian/Libyan reparation process, and seeks to posit alternative pathways towards the unresolved question of postcolonial justice around the Mediterranean.

North African Audio Archives (1)

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As libraries, museums, and other institutions catalog and digitize holdings from 19th and 20th century European explorers, scholar, or colonial administrators in the Middle East or north Africa, a number of audio archives have come to light. These include recordings made on the older media of wax cylinders or shellac discs, or the slightly newer media of vinyl records or even magnetic tape. Some recordings were made on site while others were made in Europe. In this post and and a few subsequent posts, my goal is draw to attention to some of these recently-available audio archives.

Berliner Lautarchiv

The Lautarchiv (“sound archive”) at the Humboldt University in Berlin contains several thousand recordings on wax cylinders and shellac discs dating to the early 1900s. Among these are recordings made in a prison camp set up near Berlin during World War 1 for prisoners from the French and British armies who originated in the north African and south Asian colonies. A commission was set up to take advantage of the internment of speakers of many different languages, and hundreds of recordings on shellac discs were made for the purpose of linguistic study. Within this group of recordings from the prison camp are about 120 recordings of northern African speakers of Arabic and Berber varieties. The contents range from improvised narratives, poems, or songs, to the repetition of words and phrases from a dialectological questionnaire. Dating from 1916 to 1918, they are probably the oldest recordings of these languages; certainly the oldest known recordings made for linguistic purposes. Although all the holdings of the Lautarchiv have been digitized, they are not freely available online due to the sensitive circumstances of the internment and recording, but can be consulted in-person in Berlin by appointment.

The Lautarchiv has made available a sample recording of a poem critical of the war from a prisoner originating in Monastir, Tunisia. For a linguistic study of the recordings from a prisoner originating in Medenine, Tunisia, which I recently collaborated on with a colleague, see here. Otherwise, the north African records have not been the subject of much research until now.

Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie

In the Collection Mission Henri Lhote held in the CREM are 511 (!) almost entirely unpublished magnetic tape recordings made during the 1948 expedition of Henri Lhote (1903-1991), a French explorer and hunter of primitive art, in the Hoggar region of Algeria. The recordings made during that trip contain a wide selection of materials, from found sounds to songs, poetry, lullabies, narratives, and conversations, mostly in the local Tuareg variety with some in Arabic as well. All of the recordings are digitized and can be listened to online.

Research Roundup June 2022

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A variety of recent research on Libyan topics.

Paul Love, Libraries of the Nafusa. A pilot project to document and digitize material heritage in the Jebel Nafusa, Libya, part of the excellent LibMed project focusing on medieval Libya

The Libraries of Nafusa is a pilot project to document and to digitize written material culture in the Jebel Nafusa region of Libya. It is led by the Ibadica Centre for Research and Studies on Ibadism in France and the Fassato Foundation in Libya, with financial support from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung’s “Patrimonies” funding program in Germany. The administrative team reflects the international nature of the project, with members in Morocco, Algeria, France, and the United States.

Igor Cherstich, Martin Holbraad, Nico Tassi, Anthropologies of Revolution: Forging Time, People, and Worlds (University of California Press, 2020). *Open Access*

What can anthropological thinking contribute to the study of revolutions? The first book-length attempt to develop an anthropological approach to revolutions, Anthropologies of Revolution proposes that revolutions should be seen as concerted attempts to radically reconstitute the worlds people inhabit. Viewing revolutions as all-embracing, world-creating projects, the authors ask readers to move beyond the idea of revolutions as acts of violent political rupture, and instead view them as processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people’s lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence.

Nir Arielli, “Colonial Soldiers in Italian Counter-Insurgency Operations in Libya, 1922-32”, British Journal for Military History 1/2 (2015), 47–66. *Open Access*

The vast majority of the force employed by the Italians to crush local resistance in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was composed of Libyans, Eritreans and Ethiopians. The article examines why the Italians came to rely so heavily on colonial soldiers. It highlights two key predicaments the Italians faced: how to contend with the social, economic and political repercussions that military recruitment for the counter-insurgency created in East Africa; and the extent to which they could depend on forces raised in Libya itself. Finally, the article offers an initial assessment of how the counter-insurgency exacerbated tensions between Libyans and East Africans.

Klaus Braun & Jacqueline Passon (editors), Across the Desert: Tracks, Trade and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Libya (Springer, 2020). *Open Access*

This open access book provides a multi-perspective approach to the caravan trade in the Sahara during the 19th century. Based on travelogues from European travelers, recently found Arab sources, historical maps and results from several expeditions, the book gives an overview of the historical periods of the caravan trade as well as detailed information about the infrastructure which was necessary to establish those trade networks.
Included are a variety of unique historical and recent maps as well as remote sensing images of the important trade routes and the corresponding historic oases. To give a deeper understanding of how those trading networks work, aspects such as culturally influenced concepts of spatial orientation are discussed.
The book aims to be a useful reference for the caravan trade in the Sahara, that can be recommended both to students and to specialists and researchers in the field of Geography, History and African Studies.

Jérôme Lentin, selections of early modern written Libyan Arabic, in A Handbook and Reader of Ottoman Arabic, edited by Esther-Miriam Wagner (Open Book Publishers, 2021). *Open Access*

Libya 1: Ḥasan al-Faqīh Ḥasan’s Chronicle Al-Yawmiyyāt al-Lībiyya (early 19th century)

Libya 2: Letter from Ġūma al-Maḥmūdī (1795–1858) to ʿAzmī Bēk, Daftardār of the ʾIyāla (Province) of Tripoli (undated)

A Call for Independence from Tripoli and Benghazi, 1917

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I recently stumbled upon an extremely interesting pamphlet from 1917 entitled “Aspirations and National Ideals of the Population of Tripoli of Africa and Benghazi” (“Aspirations et idéal national de la population de Tripoli d’Afrique et de Benghazie”). Written by Youssouf Chetvan and Mouhammed Salih Chérif, it was published in French, in Stockholm, Sweden. It is the earliest text I know of that was written by Libyans calling for independence in a European venue. More generally, the text connects the aspirations of people in Tripoli and Benghazi with the struggle of colonized Muslims the world over, framing itself as an “appeal in the name of the oppressed Muslims populations”. I wonder how widely it circulated…

I do not know anything about the authors, except that Youssouf Chetvan (يوسف بن شتوان؟) was likely a Benghazi notable, as that family has been prominent there for a long time. The other author, Mouhammed Salih Chérif (محمد صالح الشريف؟), credited as “one of the Senussi sheikhs”, could plausibly have been a member of the Senussi family or a ranking member of the Senussi order.