Book Reviews

Oasi di italianit: La Libia della colonizzazione agraria tra fascismo, guerra e

indipendenza (1935-1956) by FEDERICO CRESTI. Turin, Italy: Societ Editrice
Internazionale, 1996. Pp. xxxvi + 298, 3 maps. 31000 Italian Lire (cloth). ISBN 88-
05-05419-4.

Cresti's monograph ('Oases of Italianness: Agrarian Colonisation in Libya Between

Fascism, War, and Independence, 1935-1956') is a landmark contribution to the study
of the Italian agricultural settlements that were created in Libya during the later years of
colonial occupation. Italian colonialism everywhere (in East and North Africa, and the
Eastern Mediterranean) was unusual by the standards of modern European expansion, in
that it was shaped by both a scarcity of capital that could be invested in the colonies and
an eexcessi of population in the metropole. The most persistent item on the Italian
colonialist agenda was therefore the export of Italians to the colonies described by its
proponents as demographic colonisation in hopes of retaining Italian manpower (which
was emigrating rapidly) while increasing national agricultural production. Programmes
to settle Italians on new farms were carried out in the 1930s in Italy itself, and in Libya,
Ethiopia, and the Dodecanese Islands. But Libya, which is closest to Italy and is in parts
sufficiently fertile, was targeted on a much larger scale than the other colonies. By 1940,
close to 30 rural settlements had been built there, and they had been filled with roughly
3000 families. This was meant to be merely a beginning: the government expected to
settle over half a million Italians in rural Libya by mid-century.
Following Italy's initial occupation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in 1911-12, the
government made efforts to lure private capital to the colony by offering inexpensive
land concessions. But after the Fascist takeover in 1922, the state moved toward
shaping the colonies directly, by committing more and more state funds and by
exercising greater control over what took place there. Thus most of the agricultural
settlements that were completed were developed by two organisations that were
government-funded but administratively autonomous (that is to say, parastatali): the
Ente per la Colonizzazione della Libia, or ECL (Agency for the Colonisation of
Libya), which ran stations in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica; and the Istituto Nazionale
Fascista per la Previdenza Sociale, or INFPS (National Fascist Institute for Social
Insurance), all of whose holdings were in Tripolitania. Third in order of importance
was the Azienda Tabacchi Italiani (Italian Tobacco Company), also based in
Tripolitania.
Cresti's book concerns the INFPS's Libyan activities. Before it developed Libyan
settlements, the INFPS was already an important branch of the state's growing welfare
system. The ECL, on the other hand, had begun in 1932 as an organisation strictly
devoted to Italian settlement in Cyrenaica (the Ente per la Colonizzazione della
Cirenaica, or ECC, that is to say the Agency for the Colonisation of Cyrenaica),
immediately after the region's 'pacification'. In 1934, when the Italian state brought
together Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and the Fezzan under the name 'Libya', the ECC
became the ECL and began to create settlements in Tripolitania as well. Even though
the INFPS's first settlements were built in the same general period, the governor, the
famous Fascist aviator Italo Balbo, accorded privileges to the ECL over the INFPS.
The latter competed unsuccessfully with the ECL for the more fertile areas, and its
achievements were always on a smaller scale than the ECL's. The ECL has therefore
94 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES

also been better known to scholars. Cresti's contribution is all the more welcome:
having catalogued all the INFPS documents, which no scholar had studied previously,
he has produced from them a painstaking, rich narrative of the INFPS's Libyan
venture. Its linear, chronological structure provides clarity, yet the book is also smartly
contextualised and nuanced, showing the roles of all the participants involved in much
greater detail than any previous accounts have.
The book unfolds in two distinct movements: first, the establishment and growth
of the settlement programmes, and second, their gradual dwindling through war, the
British Military Administration, Libyan independence, protracted negotiations over
the settlements' status, and finally, the dissolution in 1956 of the INPS's Libyan branch
(the word 'Fascist' was dropped by then, and with it the initial 'F'; the INPS still
exists).
After an introduction that deftly lays out the complex background for
understanding the ECL and INFPS programmes, the book starts off with the INFPS's
first venture, a plan for 120 houses at Bir Terrina, and the various stages of the
organisation's land acquisitions (Chapters 1-3). The first 27 families arrived there in
May 1936. Cresti touches on the major themes that normally dominate accounts of
such Italian agricultural settlements: how it was argued that settlers would be brought
in from the deeply impoverished Italian South, but they usually came from the (also
struggling) North; the criteria for selecting families, which included membership of
the head of household in the Fascist party, good 'morals', and a high number of able-
bodied adults; the frequent disagreements between administrators and settlers over
what constituted good 'morals'; and the length of the contract at the end of which
settlers would fully own their plots and their houses (25 or 30 years). When families
arrived, they moved into new houses fitted out with pots and pans, livestock and grain,
and other necessities, all sitting on land that had been expropriated by the colonial
government in the 1920s. The preparations, such as building the new houses, paving
roads, and building bridges, had been made by 'native' labourers. The contributions of
these labourers were essential to the entire enterprise, although they were never
publicly acknowledged as such.
Chapters 4, 5, and 6 describe the maximum growth that was achieved by the
settlements in 1938 and 1939, thanks to Balbo's spectacular project of shipping 20,000
settlers from Italy to Libya in 1938. In the same period, Balbo encouraged the ECL to
build settlements for 'Muslim Libyans'. Cresti departs from analyses that have
regarded this programme of Balbo's as liberal-minded, instead taking the position that
the governor's purpose was not to treat Libyans equally, but to implement the
government's new segregationist laws. Balbo himself wrote that the settler villages
must be 'ethnic islands of [Italians]' above all (p. 75). Half a dozen 'Muslim villages'
were planned, on inferior land; the two that were completed were hard to fill, and they
were only in use for a short time.
During the war (covered in Chapter 7), the Cyrenaican settlements were all
abandoned, never to be re-occupied by Italians; but the Tripolitanian ones did not fare
as badly. Nonetheless, in 1940 the INFPS started considering ways to recover its
Tripolitanian investment and abandon the whole business. At the same time, the
British Military Administration, or BMA (described in Chapter 8), began to question
the legality of the 1920s expropriations, an issue that would be debated until the
INPS's Libyan ties were severed altogether in 1956. The organisation's response was
to speed up the transfer of property titles to individual farmers: individual property was
protected, but lands held by institutions might be confiscated. Meanwhile, Libyans
occupied some of the farms that Italians had abandoned, with the BMA's approval.
BOOK REVIEWS 95

Chapters 9 to 14 carry the book's narrative through the vicissitudes of

decolonisation, independence, and the redistribution of Italian-held lands. When Libya
became independent in 1951, the ECL and the INPS regained their original status as
autonomous institutions, but they faced numerous obstacles. The Libyan government
tried to oppose the return of the Italian farmers who had departed temporarily. The
Italian state, for its part, blocked the settlers' repatriation to Italy as long as it possibly
could; but it also left the organisations financially high and dry, effectively casting the
settlers (whose arms were confiscated in 1953) adrift without supplies, support, or
protection. At the same time, it wanted to protect the land holdings, and it vigorously
refused to acknowledge the Libyan position. Indeed, it imagined that the Italian
migration to Libya would resume(!). Despite the creation of a Libyan-Italian
commission to govern the new role of the Italian organisations, tensions continued to
grow. The Libyan government wanted to claim any land that was held by the Italian
organisations but had not been developed; in other words, it aimed to obtain rights to
empty farmhouses, unused plots, and even any houses that were occupied, but in
visible disrepair. In addition, by 1953, Libya was demanding war reparations from
Italy, which Italy refused to pay (as it continues to do).
In 1955, the United Nations authorised Libya to challenge all of the original Italian
expropriations. Shortly thereafter, some of the lands were seized, and (most
discouraging for the Italian farmers) the settlements were given new Arabic names.
Libyan nationals were entitled by decree to any land to which no individual held the
title. Finally, in the 1956 accords between the two governments (examined in Chapter
15), all the non-individually owned land that was controlled by the organisations went
to the Libyan state. Afterwards, some Italians stayed behind, and over the years, a few
of them sold their properties. In 1964, only 120 Italian families were left.
This is not a book that is driven by a new thesis, or a great revelation that will upset
the relevant scholarship. It is, though, a book that establishes a new level of thoroughness
and authority in this area, and it has raised the standard for understanding the complexities
of these agricultural programmes. Particularly commendable is Cresti's use of British
archives to document the BMA period, which gives an additional perspective on the
Italian documents. It is a shame, on the other hand, that he did not incorporate any Arabic
sources to complement the Italian, French, English, and German ones he not only cites,
but sorts into a useful bibliographic appendix. I am not thinking of publications (I know
of no Libyan studies on the Italian settlements) nor even of documents (Libyan
administrators generated ample paperwork in Italian), but of the sort of oral-historical
material that has been collected by the Markaz Jihad al-Libiyyin li-al-Dirasat al-Tarikhiya
in Tripoli (which calls itself the Libyan Studies Centre in English). An important
dimension will be added to this field when a scholar studies the Institute's tapes and
incorporates the local experience of the Italian settlements, giving us ground-level insight
into the simultaneous invasions and innovations brought by these programmes. In a
different vein, the book would also have been improved by the inclusion of more detailed
maps, to do justice to the meticulous descriptions of land holdings. Also, although Cresti
gives census numbers (of farms, houses, and families) for various years, an appendix or
chart comparing these would have been especially valuable.
In any case, Oasi is a significant step forward from earlier studies, the most
important of these being Claudio G. Segre's Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonisation of
Libya (University of Chicago Press, 1974), which relied on colonial propaganda and
other published materials; and the Ph.D. dissertation by Gary L. Fowler, 'Italian
Agricultural Colonisation in Tripolitania, Libya' (Syracuse University, 1969), which
was based on lengthy fieldwork in Libya at a time when a remnant of Italian settlers
96 THE JOURNAL OF NORTH AFRICAN STUDIES

was still in place, combined with published Italian materials. Of its many strengths, the
aspect of this monograph most worth underscoring is that even without the benefit of
direct 'voices' of either the colonised or the colonisers, it gives us a believable glimpse
of the experiences of the Italians and Arabs who made these settlements, and were at
the mercy of institutions at every turn. From detailed layerings of the negotiations that
shaped their daily lives, we derive an almost haunting picture of Italians clinging to
their plots, while they pined to return to a homeland which denied them entry until the
last possible minute; the two states argued over the land; the INPS worried about its
bottom line; and the mirage of Italian 'oases' faded as Libyans moved in. As though
these were not enough difficulties, they also had to contend with bad weather,
inadequate water supplies and equipment, and yes, war and locusts into the bargain.
We also see in this study something its predecessors did not show as clearly: that
regardless of the Italian notion that these settlements would foster unfettered
Italianness in a Libyan-free desert, Libyans were in fact crucial members of these
settlements, from beginning to end. Not only did they build them, but when Italians
couldn't muster enough manpower on their own, or they preferred to work for wages
in nearby towns (as they often did), Libyans carried on the work of development, as
sharecroppers, tenants, and employees in the village infirmaries and schools. All of
Balbo's schemes for segregation could not prevent Italians and Libyans from marrying
each other, nor could the Libyan government stop Libyans from warning Italian
settlers when they might be in danger. In this respect, Cresti has begun the hard work
of returning the very participants who are usually invisible in these studies to their
rightful place. He has also provided us with the most comprehensive and far-reaching
account to date of Italian colonial agricultural settlements anywhere.

MIA FULLER
University of California, Berkeley

Timbuctu and the Songhay Empire, Al-Sa'di's Tarikh al-Sudan down to 1613 and
other contemporary documents. JOHN O. HUNWICK (transl.). Leiden, Boston and
Cologne: Brill, 1999. Pp. lxv + 412. $140.75 (cloth). ISBN90-04-11207-3.

This remarkably polished volume is the first translation into English of Tarikh al-
Sudan, a seventeenth century history of the Middle Niger region by a historian of
Timbuctu, 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di. For John Hunwick, author of the translation, this
book represents the culmination of 40 years of investigation into the history of the
Songhay empire, the Islamic civilisation of Timbuctu and the Sahelian Islamic texts.
Indeed, Hunwick's predilection for the exploration of the Arabo-Islamic literature of
Africa dates back to the 1960s and to his doctoral thesis published in 1985 under the
title 'Shari'a in Songhay: The Replies of al-Maghili to the Questions of Askia al-Hajj
Muhammad', (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy).
Al-S'adi's Tarikh al-Sudan is a basic reference work on the history of the Songhay
empire. It is also one of the major and earliest Arabic sources for the history of modern
West Africa written by a West African scholar. Because of its importance, Tarikh al-
Sudan is 'one of the few historical texts from the region to have been published in its
original Arabic and to have a complete translation into a European.. .language' (p. xv).
Al-Sa'di's Tarikh had until now been known to scholars mostly through a printed
Arabic text edited and translated into French by Octave Houdas a century ago.
Houdas's edition and translation of Tarikh al-Sudan has served as the handbook for