Tripolitanien und Bengasi um 1900

This study examines the production of knowledge on Tripolitania, Benghazi and Fezzan by the late Ottoman state, the ways in which local subjects and imperial officials communicated and what kind of agency they had. They operated in a continuum between a discourse of civilisation and complete political integration, between ambitious aspirations and prosaic practice. Ongoing processes of state building at the same time increasingly necessitated the employment of intermediaries that the Italian colonial regime after 1911 would lack. By looking at knowledge, communication and micropolitics in these remote parts of the realm, the study contributes to the history of both Libya and the Ottoman Empire as a whole.