Desert Borderland investigates the historical processes that transformed political identity in the easternmost reaches of the Sahara Desert in the half century before World War I. Adopting a view from the margins―illuminating the little-known history of the Egyptian-Libyan borderland―the book challenges prevailing notions of how Egypt and Libya were constituted as modern territorial nation-states.

 

2009 Fellow Matthew H. Ellis draws on a wide array of archival sources to reconstruct the multiple layers and meanings of territoriality in this desert borderland. Throughout the decades, a heightened awareness of the existence of distinctive Egyptian and Ottoman Libyan territorial spheres began to develop despite any clear-cut boundary markers or cartographic evidence. National territoriality was not simply imposed on Egypt’s western―or Ottoman Libya’s eastern―domains by centralizing state power. Rather, it developed only through a complex and multilayered process of negotiation with local groups motivated by their own local conceptions of space, sovereignty, and political belonging. By the early twentieth century, distinctive “Egyptian” and “Libyan” territorial domains emerged―what would ultimately become the modern nation-states of Egypt and Libya. Buy it on Amazon

 

Publication Details

Title
Desert Borderland: The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya
Authors
Ellis, Matthew H.
Publisher
Stanford University / Stanford University Press
Publish Date
March 2018
ISBN
978-1503605008
Citation
Ellis, Matthew H., Desert Borderland: The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya (Stanford University / Stanford University Press, March 2018).
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