Table Of Content

Desert Borderland This page intentionally left blank Desert Borderland The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya Matthew H. Ellis Stanford University Press Stanford, California Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free, archival- quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Ellis, Matthew H., author. Title: Desert borderland : the making of modern Egypt and Libya / Matthew H. Ellis. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038486 (print) | LCCN 2017039912 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503605572 | ISBN 9781503605008 (cloth :alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Egypt—Boundaries—Libya—History. | Libya—Boundar- ies—Egypt—History. | Territory, National—Egypt—History. | Territory, National—Libya—History. | Borderlands—Egypt—History. | Egypt—Poli- tics and government—19th century. Classification: LCC DT82.5.L8 (ebook) | LCC DT82.5.L8 E44 2018 (print) | DDC 320.1/20620612—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038486 For my parents It was then that I began to realize how much success the partitioning of the past had achieved. . . . I had been caught straddling a border, unaware that the writing of History had predicated its own self- fulfilment. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land Contents Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration xiii Introduction: Rethinking Territorial Egypt 1 1 Legal Exceptionalism in Egypt’s Borderlands 13 2 Accommodating Egyptian Sovereignty in Siwa 40 3 ‘Abbas Hilmi II and the Anatomy of a Siwan Murder 61 4 Cultivating Territorial Sovereignty in the Western Desert 87 5 The Limits of Ottoman Sovereignty in the Eastern Sahara 116 6 The Emergence of Egypt’s Western Border Conflict 147 Conclusion: Unsettling the Egyptian- Libyan Border 175 Notes 189 Bibliography 235 Index 255 photo section follows page 142 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments The research for this book draws on a wide range of collections held in archives and libraries in Turkey, Egypt, Italy, and the United Kingdom. I am indebted, first of all, to the librarians, archivists, and staffs of the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives in Istanbul (particularly Fuat Recep); the Egyptian National Archives in Cairo (particularly Nadia Mustafa); the Egyptian Geographical Society in Cairo (particularly Dr. Muhammad Safi al- Din Abulezz); the Historical-D iplomatic Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome; the Middle East Centre Archive at St. Anto- ny’s College, University of Oxford (particularly Debbie Usher); the Foyle Reading Room of the Royal Geographic Society in London; the British National Archives in Kew Gardens; and the Special Collections Library at Durham University (particularly Jane Hogan, Michael Harkness, and Francis Gotto). This book would not have been possible without generous grants from the Social Science Research Council, as well as the American Re- search Council in Egypt. I also received financial support from Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Endeavor Foundation. The Mohamed Ali Foundation granted me permission to work with the ‘Abbas Hilmi II collection in Durham (all citations from that collection are reproduced by the kind permission of the Trustees of the Mohamed Ali Founda- tion and Durham University). I feel tremendous gratitude for having had the support of numerous mentors, colleagues, and friends over the years I spent researching and writing this book. I thank my mentor Molly Greene for her gentle guidance,