In 1978, the eminent Africanist and oral historian Jan Vansina spearheaded a project in Tripoli, Libya to record oral testimonies from former mujahedeen, those who took up arms against Italian occupation of the Libyan territories before the Second World War. Dozens of historians trained under Vansina in Tripoli on the techniques of oral history before they embarked on a collection of stories throughout the Libyan interior. Collected from various regions, these oral histories tend to reflect the nationalist identity of Qaddafi’s Libya, but they also provide a rare perspective on the social history of community and resistance on the battleground of the Italian colonial hinterland. This paper will present a reading of a portion of the oral histories with an eye to uncovering other layers of identity. In reading the accounts of individual decisions to take up arms against a European aggressor state, can we escape the tendency to find a proto-nationalist discourse? How do the accounts collected in the Oral History Project of Libya reveal layers of identity in the Libyan interior that defy national categories? Establishing pre-national identities carries particular weight today given the difficulties of finding a unified Libyan identity in the aftermath of the recent political upheavals. This presentation highlights the multiple layers of identity embedded in the postcolonial memory of resistance and collaboration.

This research examines the ways in which the CUP (Young Turks) attempted to extend their influence in the hinterland of Libya i.e. Chad and Niger. The moves by the CUP in this hinterland region were a form of defensive imperialism, but they can also be viewed as a form of peripheral incorporation. This peripheral incorporation process was being pursued in other parts of the Ottoman Empire at the same time that it was being pursued in Libya. One route that the CUP pursued, which was also utilized under the Hamidian period, was utilizing international agreements and conferences to argue their claims over the Saharan hinterland of Libya. This fit well into the CUP’s view of itself as a modernist and reforming regime. But, the CUP also simultaneously pursued the Hamidian policy of promoting Ottoman Caliphal prestige and pursuing an Islamist agenda among the populations of the hinterland. This dichotomous policy deviated from the way in which the CUP pursued peripheral incorporation in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. Interestingly, the CUP’s alliance with the Sanusiyya, was something that was generally avoided elsewhere and, in fact, elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire in the same period the CUP worked against organizations like the Sanusiyya. Nonetheless, this partnership worked to expand Ottoman sovereignty in the Libya hinterland. This paper will highlight some of the details of the uneasy partnership between the CUP and Sanusiyya. Further, it will show that this bid by the CUP was part of an empire-wide project of peripheral incorporation that attempted to solidify the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire. This regularization of practice and assertion of sovereignty was one of the most important parts of the CUP’s reform program and had a special significance in Libya due to close proximity to the protectorates and colonies of the British and the French.

This paper focuses on the impact of World War I on the political activism of the Mzabi community in the Algerian desert. With the French annexation of the Mzab Valley in 1882 and the military draft imposed in 1912, Mzabis, who are Berbers and of the minority Muslim sect of Ibadism, felt more and more threatened by French designs in the region and more particularly by French policies towards the Mzab and its inhabitants. This paper shows how the events of WWI and the prospect of a French defeat and an Ottoman victory provided Mzabis with the opportunity to link to trans-border anti-colonial movements, especially in Tripolitania and Tunisia, and to press their case for Mzab's independence from French Algeria. Those movements tied to Istanbul had emerged earlier during the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and were reinvigorated by the War and the Ottoman efforts of mass mobilization. Mzabis had financially supported resistance groups in Tripolitania and thus were able to easily integrate themselves during the War into cross-border anti-colonial movements. They perceived themselves as part of a pro-Ottoman North African movement opposed to European colonial projects and not part of an Algeria they considered to be 'French'. In particular, given their strong connections to Tripolitanian activists who were also Berbers and Ibadis and linked to Istanbul, they believed that they were better positioned to negotiate their independence from France than the Arab majority of Algeria. Their activism during WWI and struggle for their own independence as 'Mzabis', distinguishing themselves from the rest of Algerians, highlights three important themes. The first one is the significance and continuous relevance of the Ottoman context for the North African and Saharan communities in the definition of their political allegiances during the War. The second is the need to create one uninterrupted narrative linking the Italian invasion of Tripolitania in 1911 to WWI in terms of shaping cross-border alliances and strategies in North Africa towards the Allies. Third, and more important, is the alternative political imaginations Mzabi activism during WWI presents us. Rather than the usual perception of WWI as being the catalyst for nationalist stirrings in the region, the case of the Mzabis provides a counter-narrative to nationalist historiographies. The paper is based on archival material from Aix-en-Provence and Nantes in France, Arabic newspapers, and primary sources in Arabic.

My research examines the expansionist policies adopted by the Ottoman state in Africa between 1882 and 1902. During this period of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s rule, the Ottoman state utilized new multi-layered techniques of imperialism to assert it claim to new territories in central Africa. One of these techniques was the development of new alliances with power brokers in the region. In this paper, I will focus on this aspect of the Ottoman government’s approach to the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’ from 1885 onwards. For after the Conference of Berlin of 1885, in which the Ottoman Empire was a participant and a signatory to the resulting Act of Berlin, Sultan Abdülhamid II’s government publically claimed the right of ‘possession’ of the territories stretching from the Libyan coast to the Lake Chad basin. In addition to the launch of a diplomatic campaign to argue for Ottoman ‘right’ to this region, the Ottoman government embarked on a mission to solidify its ties with the local power broker; the leader of the Sanusi Sufi Order. By 1885, he Sanusi Order’s leadership had established itself as the legitimate local economic, political and spiritual power, which the vast majority of the local Bedouin inhabitants of the region recognized. I will present a revisionist history of the traditional knowledge about the Ottoman relationship to the Sanusi Order and the Bedouin tribes of the Libyan interior as being one marked by an antagonistic ‘imperial state’ vs. ‘locals’ relationship. I argue that he opposite was in fact the case, as I will present evidence from the British and Ottoman archives that point to a strategic partnership forged between the Ottoman imperial government and the Sanusi order in an effort to fend off competing British and French colonial expansionist attempts into the eastern Sahara; a relationship which lasted in different forms until the beginning of the Franco-Libyan War of 1900-1902.

This paper investigates the emergence of modern discourses and practices concerning national territoriality and bordered political space in the eastern Sahara in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Its primary concern will be to track the mechanisms through which the particular swath of the Sahara that linked the two Ottoman provinces of Egypt and Benghazi was transformed into an active and contested borderland. How did an amorphous, economically marginal desert region that was notoriously difficult to rule become, over the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a hotbed of political and diplomatic wrangling between the Egyptian and Ottoman states, both of which were caught up in similar processes of modernization and centralization? Fundamental to the analysis is the process by which Bedouin actors operating in this internal borderland of the Ottoman Empire experienced, and challenged, the onset of new discourses and practices of bordered political space in this period. The local Ottoman rulers in Benghazi, in particular, were preoccupied with forging a new Bedouin policy that would foster enhanced security and stability in this region. And yet, just as both the Ottoman and Egyptian governments sought to find new ways to administer and control this frontier, the various Bedouin tribes who inhabited demonstrated a keen understanding of the new political stakes that had been introduced by Ottoman and Egyptian encroachment. As such, the paper will pay particular attention to previously untapped Ottoman archival sources that document the ongoing struggles of the Ottoman government in Benghazi to respond to Bedouin mobility across the putative Egypt/Benghazi border, which I argue was done by the tribes strategically and self-consciously as a tool of resistance. Through this analysis of the broader political meaning of Bedouin mobility in the eastern Sahara at this crucial juncture in Ottoman and Egyptian state formation, I hope to complicate the prevailing historiography of marginal spaces of the Ottoman Empire by highlighting the salience of its internal borderlands.