Italian Libya

Italian Libya. Italian Libya (1911-1943) was born of invasion. In 1911 Italy, hungry for empire, declared war on the Ottoman Empire and landed troops in Tripoli, claiming the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The conquest was far harder than Rome expected: Libyan resistance, led above all by the Sanusi religious order and later by the guerrilla leader Omar Mukhtar, tied down Italian armies for two decades, and Italy's effective control long extended little beyond the coast.

Under Fascism the conquest turned brutal. Mussolini's regime resolved to pacify Libya completely, and from 1923 Italian forces reconquered the interior region by region. In Cyrenaica the war against Omar Mukhtar's guerrillas was waged with aerial bombing, poison gas, and the deportation of the Bedouin population into concentration camps, where tens of thousands died of hunger and disease. Mukhtar was captured and hanged in 1931, and with his death organized resistance collapsed. The human cost of the pacification was catastrophic: a large share of Cyrenaica's people perished or was displaced.

In 1934 Italy united Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and the Fezzan into the colony of Libya, and in 1939 declared it part of metropolitan Italy, the so-called Fourth Shore. The regime poured money into roads, ports, and farms and settled tens of thousands of Italian colonists on confiscated land, especially in the fertile Gebel and along the coast, intending Libya as a permanent Italian province.

The colony died in the Second World War. Libya became a major battlefield, and by 1943 British forces had driven the Italians and Germans out. After the war the United Nations decided Libya's fate, and in 1951 the country became independent under King Idris. The Italian period left Libya transformed: its cities reshaped, a settler community that soon departed, and a population scarred by a conquest remembered as a national tragedy.

To read more about this topic:

World History Encyclopedia: Italian Colonialism in Libya Wikipedia: Italian Colonization of Libya Settler Colonial Studies: Terra Promessa: Migration and Settler Colonialism in Libya Cambridge University Press: Italy's Fourth Shore and Decolonization, 1911-1950