Libya: A Modern History

305 Pages·2022·39.677 MB·English

by  John Wright

Routledge Revivals
Libya
First published in 1981, Libya: A Modern History traces the history of Libya
from 1900 to 1980, showing how its first monarchic constitution was mod-
elled by the UN Commission, and survived precariously until the military
coup of 1969. The author traces both internal and foreign policy in detail,
devoting over half the book to the rule of Colonel Gadafi, in one of the few
independent accounts of the Jamahiriyah. He demonstrates the roots of
Gadafi’s ideology in ancient Libyan traditions while defining the unique
elements of his regime with its militarism and unorthodox diplomacy. He
analyses the roots of Jamahiriyah’s strength in the oil of the desert and pro-
vides statistics on population and economy. It is a comprehensive treatment
of a nation that is sui generis among the Arab countries. This is an impor-
tant read for students and scholars of international relations, African studies,
African history, and Geopolitics.

Libya
A Modern History
John Wright
Firstpublishedin1981
byCroomHelm
Thiseditionfirstpublishedin2022byRoutledge
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©1981JohnWright
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedorutilisedin
any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
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ALibraryofCongressrecordexistsunderISBN:0801827671
ISBN:978-1-032-32248-3(hbk)
ISBN:978-1-003-31359-5(ebk)
ISBN:978-1-032-32251-3(pbk)
BookDOI10.4324/9781003313595
LIBYA:
A MODERN HISTORY
JOHN WRIGHT
CROOM HELM
London & Canberra
© 1981 John Wright
Reprinted 1983
Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row,
Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT
ISBN 0-7099-2727-4
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn
PREFACE
Ending my first book on Libya just before the 1969 revolution, I
wrote that the kingdom was ready for more important things than in
the days when, like Shakespeare’s Bohemia, it was merely ‘a desert
country near the sea’. The remark seems to have been fully justified
by the events of the past twelve years. Moammar Gadafi’s Libyan
Arab Republic, and latterly the unique political, economic and
social experience of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyah,
together with the Libyan-initiated oil price and production revolu-
tion of the early 1970s, have made the country better known to a
wider audience than any other events in its history, including even its
role as the setting for the longest campaign of the Second World
War.
In preparing the following chapters I have fairly freely drawn on
my own written material on Libya in book, magazine-article and
radio-script form, although many of my earlier conclusions have
been modified by hindsight and changed circumstances. In my
account of Libyan oil affairs I make no apology for having consulted
many issues of the monthly Petroleum Press Service, or Petroleum
Economists it was renamed in 1974. For, having been a staff writer
on the journal under both titles, I know that it has kept a uniquely
succinct record of all important developments in the Libyan oil
industry over the past 25 years.
JW
Richmond

1 A BUFFER STATE OF SAND
Libya has been under at least nominal foreign rule for most of its
known history.1 Time and again, the area of modern Libya has
formed provinces of empires ruled from Asia, Europe or other parts
of Africa. But such rule was usually limited to the coastlands of Tri-
politania and Cyrenaica; in the interior, the long-established Berber
tribes remained largely independent, recognising only the authority
of their own leaders. Remarkably few effects of foreign rule have
endured: this is a country rich in the ruins of alien and discarded cul-
tures, whether Greek, Roman or Byzantine, Ottoman Turkish or
Fascist Italian. ‘In Libya you are made aware the whole time of the
abandonment of things, the material leftovers of receding cultures.’2
The exception to this tradition of resistance to foreign domination
and influence has been the slow but profound absorption of Muslim
Arab invaders, as well as the Islamic religion and Arabic language
they brought with them from Arabia in the seventh century a d , and
again with greater effect in the eleventh. As a result of this assimila-
tion, Libya is now wholly Islamised. Cyrenaica is probably the most
thoroughly Arabised country outside the Arabian peninsula, while
the Arabisation of the rest has been extensive, if not yet absolute.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the partly native
Karamanli dynasty ruled Tripoli, and nominally Libya as a whole, in
practical independence of the nominal overlords, the Turkish
Sultans at Constantinople.3 But when in 1835 the Turks deposed the
last of the Karamanli rulers and re-established the Sultan’s direct
rule, they broke the traditions of foreign domination by trying to
assert their authority over the hitherto largely independent peoples
of the interior. In doing so, they undertook the first of three foreign
campaigns of conquest — two of them lasting over 20 years each
— that Libya was to endure in the course of the following 100 years.
The Turks, already alarmed by Egypt’s achievement of near-inde-
pendence under Mohammad Ali, occupied Tripoli in 1835 largely to
forestall further French expansion in North Africa after the seizure
of nominally Turkish Algiers in 1830. Like the French in Algeria, the
Turks in Tripoli chose a dynamic and interventionist policy, rather
than a passive and defensive one. By the time the Turks had occupied
11