Colonial and Early Post-Colonial Libya

Libya at the beginning of this century had little to offer the would-be imperialist and coloniser. The true value of Turkey's last remaining African possessions was not — despite the insistence of the Italian nationalist lobby — as a settler-colony or as a gateway to the largely illusory wealth of central Africa, but as a strategic base on the central Mediterranean. The general poverty of Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was reflected indeed in the poverty of the literature in any language on contemporary Libya.

But growing Italian interest in these territories, by 1900 almost the last parts of Africa unclaimed by any European power, generated a series of books and articles by an imperialist-nationalist lobby eager to prove the case that Italy's political, strategic, economic and social wellbeing depended on the immediate possession of Turkish North Africa. Such writings naturally generated a rather less voluminous counter-flow of material, mainly from socialist sources, putting the opposite and (as events were to prove) essentially more realistic case.

The outbreak of the Italo-Turkish war in September 1911 and the subsequent Italian occupation of bridgeheads at Tripoli, Horns, Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk first brought Libya to the notice of the international press. The British correspondents who reported one or other side of the conflict subsequently produced a number of surprisingly partisan books about the war and their own adventures in it, but had very much less to say about the little-understood country and its people. With the sudden end of the war in 1912 and the outbreak of more serious fighting in the Balkans, interest in Libya quickly waned. For the next 30 years nearly all the relevant literature was to be provided by Italians, in Italian and written from a purely Italian point of view — some of it later to be destroyed in the antifascist and anti-imperialist reaction from 1943 onwards.