Writing Ottoman and Italian Colonial Libya: intelligence Gathering and the Production of Colonial Knowledge

• Autores: Nicco A. La Mattina
• Localización: Hesperis Tamuda, ISSN 0018-1005, Nº. 55, 2, 2020, págs. 123-153
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • By mid-nineteenth-century, European powers became interested in Libya as a valuable asset to their colonial expansion into North Africa. In the context of fascist Italy, explorers such as Emilio Scarin gathered geographic, demographic, and ethnographic knowledge central to the establishment of colonial settlements. However, Italian knowledge of Libya bore within it the sedimentation of decades of descriptive accounts that developed in response to pre-1911 colonial projects in Libya, such as finding a route to the Niger (Lyon-Ritchie), opening trade relations with colonial possessions in Central Africa (Duveyrier), and determining the autochthony of Libyan and North African Jewry (Slouschz). These discursive antecedents were important to Italyʼs “Libyan colonial archive” and its colonial interests, military and economic. The knowledge produced as part of the Italian colonial occupation of Libya can be shown to have contributed to British ethnological knowledge, especially as advanced by Edward Evans-Pritchard. Focusing on Fascist rule of Libya, this article highlights how intelligence gathering imperatives drove and influenced military reports and writings about Libya and its inhabitants from the early-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. I argue that while motivated by colonial economic interests, this ethnological archive emerged in relation to and in conversation with other European colonial projects in the larger Maghrib.