Ottoman History Podcast - Egypt, Libya, and the Desert Borderlands

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Episode 423 with Matthew Ellis hosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud When the Ottoman state granted the province of Egypt to the family of Mehmed Ali Pasha in the 19th century, neither party much cared where Egypt's western border lay. As Matthew Ellis argues in his book, Desert Borderland, sovereignty in the eastern Sahara, the expanse of desert spanning Egypt and Ottoman Libya, was not simply imposed by modern, centralized states. In this episode, we discuss the various groups and actors who complicated the question of borders and political identity in one of the least studied corners of Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. Conflict and negotiations between oasis dwellers, Ottoman bureaucrats, Egyptian royals, the Sanusi order, and colonial officials kept this territory unbounded until the border was ultimately drawn in 1925. How did modern states attempt to practice sovereignty and claim territory in this vast desert borderland? And how did local populations resist and assist in state-making in the decades surrounding the First World War? « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Zoe Griffith and we are recording today in New York City with our guest, Professor Matt Ellis, who is Professor of Modern Middle East History at Sarah Lawrence College. We're going to be discussing Matt's recent book, which offers a really fascinating narrative of territoriality, which is something we will explicate as we go on, but the negotiation of nation-state formation in, I have to say, one of the most remote borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, which is, you can correct me if this is a bad way of putting it, but, you know, the Egyptian Wild West, maybe, or the desert borderland between Egypt and Ottoman Libya. So Matt's first book, Desert Borderland, The Making of Modern Egypt and Libya,

came out with Stanford University Press in 2018. Congratulations. Thank you. And Matt, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be here. So I guess we should just start by introducing a space that probably very few of our listeners have ever visited or can really imagine in their minds. We'll be talking about how this quote-unquote empty space on a map comes to be delineated by

borders, comes to be sort of claimed by modern nation states. But let's just start by talking about how did imperial states or modernizing states in the 19th century envision this territory of the Eastern Sahara, the Western Egyptian desert, kind of leading up to this process of delineation? No, I mean, that's a great question. One of the central questions and themes that I'm exploring over the course of the book, which maps out about 75 years of history, is that this was a region that didn't actually matter all that much. And the way that I try to illustrate that at the beginning

is by showing what's often known as the first modern political map of Egypt, which was issued with the firman to Mehmed Ali in 1841 after the Ottoman Egyptian settlement. And it basically tried to lay out what the borders of Mehmed Ali's domain would be in Egypt. And a lot of the places that I write about in the book, like the Western Oases, like Siwa, the border town of Saloum, like the western oases, like Siwa, the border town of Solum, Marsa Matrug, are left clear off the map. And you can look at other maps of Egypt in the 19th century, and you realize that what I call the desert borderland

or the margins of the Egyptian state in this period aren't really, they're not represented, they're not seen as important. And from the ottoman standpoint too these aren't regions that matter all that much until the last decade or two of the 19th century and that's why i spend a lot of the time in the book focusing on those decades when something starts to transform and in the official minds of both the ottoman and egyptian states yeah i mean let's talk for a minute about this map itself, because there's a really sort of interesting mystery, almost, that happens in the book, where

the Ottomans give Mehmed Ali this map showing him the territories of his domain, and then the map is lost, right? Yeah, I mean, I love this story. It's one of the framing metaphors for the whole book. But I'm able to trace, actually actually through different archives, because there's sporadic mention of it that occasionally, and it really became an issue during the first Tawba dispute in 1892, the Egyptian residency, you know, under Lord Cromer starts to look for some sort of evidence that might help them in their case against the Ottomans about the eastern border. And they realize that there is this map that was issued by the Ottoman government, but no one can find it. And there's a point where Cromer thinks it burned down

in an archive and it was lost in a fire. And they allude to it pretty regularly, but no one seems to know where it is. And then they stop looking for it. So, I mean, I think that's a great way to think about the fact that there are other ways that space is talked about, imagines, and even dealt with politically beyond cartography, right?

That historians of borderlands and border formation have often been really centrally focused on maps, right? Maps as central tools of statecraft. And so the idea that the map that could do this work is missing and isn't even that important in the minds of the states involved, to me, forced me to start to imagine other ways that state space was conceived and imagined and negotiated in this period.

Yeah, absolutely. And so at least the beginning of the book is mostly focused on the Western Oasis and particularly Siwa, which I think is just a really fascinating, I mean, for Egyptian historians, most of my research has been in Egypt. You know, that's a really unusual sort of vantage point for thinking about Egyptian history at all. So tell us a little bit about like what is going on in Siwa leading up to the period when borders start to be really like defined or a topic of concern. You know, from the vantage point of the inhabitants of Siwa, what did the state look like to them or what were they busy

doing? Sure. But before I get into the history, i just want to sort of on a say on a personal note that this whole project was born on a trip to siwa when i um was living in egypt i fell in love with the western desert i took um two separate trips out to the wahat and camped out in the desert and just really fell in love with the space and it was in fact on a bus ride to siwa which is about 10 hours in total from cairo i just was staring out the window at the endless desert expanse and started to wonder well we don't hear about this space when we when we do the historiography of modern egypt and i became really interested in trying to understand how of this how all of this you know so-called empty

space that did become part of a modern nation state. And then when I got to Siwa, I was just blown away by the feel and vibe of the place. I mean, it was unlike anywhere else I had ever been, you know, in Egypt, but in the world. It's amazingly beautiful, you know, with these endless state palm groves and lots of hot springs and the colors of the place and the history you know the old Oracle and some of the ruins you can see Shali the old sacred inner city of course the people are fairly distinct they're an Amazigh people historically who didn't always speak Arabic people debate when the majority of C1's actually understood and were conversing in Arabic up until the 20th century. So when I landed there, I just thought this is a place apart and I just wonder what its history would look like if you started to look into it.

And so to get into the process of what it's like to do the history of Siwa, well, it was a frustrating process because when you go to the Egyptian archives, there's not a lot written about this place. So I was looking at a lot of scraps, I was pursuing a lot of about this place. So it was looking at a lot of scraps, there was pursuing a lot of dead ends. And of course, you know, I can't lose sight of the fact that for a lot of history, this was not a particularly important place. It wasn't even though it did have a lucrative date palm trade and was an important stop in the in certain caravan routes. The Egyptian government wasn't that interested in it mehmet ali made sporadic efforts to control it and tax it but these were just i mean you know it's still not entirely clear to me because sometimes he seems really intent on um exercising sovereignty and so far as he will at

least collect taxes and make sure that these people knew who was in charge and that um see what was now beholden to cairo but then there were long fits of absence, where after a military campaign where he would basically subjugate the oasis, they wouldn't come back for five years, 10 years, right? So going into the 1880s, 1890s, Siwa still enjoyed a lot of autonomy. And I guess that's kind of the main story of the 19th century is that Mehmed Ali did make some overtures to exert sovereignty there, but then it would sort of, it would lapse and Siwa would once again enjoy a lot of political autonomy and running its own affairs and really saw itself as a place of part and did not see itself as part of Egypt. And again, Egypt didn't even necessarily see it as part of Egypt. It was not on modern Egyptian maps for a

very long time. And I guess this brings us to the sort of the overarching or the underlying theme of the book or argument of the book, which is this process of territoriality or defining territoriality in a modern Egyptian context. And so you're using Siwa and this very kind of unusual place apart to define the limits of the reach of the state or people's understanding of themselves as part of the state. But maybe before we sort of talk about Siwa as a case study, just explain for us, what is territoriality? Why is Egyptian territoriality like a question in this period in the 19th century?

No, I mean, it's a great question. Again, I mean, there are different ways to think about territoriality as it appears in this book. Well, first, there's a kind of theoretical argument with other historians of territoriality, and central in this revisionist bent of the book is thinking about Charles Mayer's work, the Harvard historian, and his work is fantastic, but focused on Europe. And he has this idea that territoriality is basically tantamount to politically bounded space. And so like I was saying before, the process of mapping, central state mapping, and then

a border delimitation for him is sort of the endpoint of a historical process of territoriality. And my work on Egypt actually led me to challenge that. And I do think this was kind of a more organic bottom-up revision in that because there was the absence of real state attention or focus on this region and because the mapping process wasn't there, I mean, as I point out in the book, the mapping that did matter to the Egyptian state both before and after the British occupation was cadastral mapping over the fertile Nile Valley and Delta. So in the absence of all of that, I sought to think about other ways why this new political space started to matter in the eyes of the state. And so I hit upon this idea that territoriality isn't a sort of unilinear historical process of bounding political space, but it's actually a process of negotiation between different ways of conceiving and working in and moving through space. And so I talk a lot about

what I call the lived experience of territoriality. Yeah, that's a great phrase. And I'm really interested in that in part because the native population of thisity. Yeah, that's a great phrase. And I'm really interested in that in part because the native population of this desert borderland is largely Bedouin nomads. And they have very different ways of thinking about desert space than the Egyptian or the Ottoman or British or Italian states ultimately will. And so what I try to chart throughout this book

is a story of how this region that was left clear off the maps and wasn't that lucrative and wasn't really that important becomes important in the eyes of all of these different states. And it's a fluid and dynamic process. So it's, again, by sort of getting into the nitty gritty of that history that I hit upon this more dynamic and fluid model of territoriality that it's again it's not a unilateral process in which the state seeks to regularize or normalize or rationalize marginal space but it's actually more of an interchange and has a lot to do with how a very tentative central state goes out and negotiates with local actors in the marginal

domains of or the outer reaches of its sovereignty yeah and so in the context of siwa and it's really fascinating kind of the different groups that you are dealing with and particularly um the the sanosia movement which seems like it spans a lot of different kind of social categories um but which i have never thought of in the context of Egyptian history or sort of so I mean I think if we could talk a little bit about you know you make this really amazing argument about how the senesia winds up performing a lot of the or doing a lot of the work almost of the function of the state during the second half of the 19th century. How do they sort of take on

this role in the process of Egyptian state making or borderland sort of governance in this period? I mean, you hit on it exactly when you said that you don't usually think about the Sunni in the context of Egypt, because neither had I. I feel like when we're trained as graduate students, we might, you know, read Evans Pritchard, and that's their introduction into the Senussi movement. Obviously, there's a lot more work done now, but it's really treated as a Libyan phenomenon, and it's almost a product of how nationalism compartmentalizes the history of border regions. But what I found in my research was that the Senussis were actually very important in Western Egypt. There was a special lodge and school in Siwa Oasis run by the Sunnis. The large majority of Siwans seem to be adherents to the Sunnusi order.

Can you just even back up and like, who are they? You know, what is this movement? I mean, in the context of Libyan history, even for those who might not know. Sure. So the Sunnusiyah was a sort of mystical Islamic brotherhood. It was actually founded by a scholar who had been trained in different places in North Africa and then in Mecca and then ended up retreating to Jabal al-Akhtar in this border region on the Libyan side of today's border. And it started as a small movement,

but actually, I mean, the history is still a little bit fuzzy in the 19th century. And he did set up shop in this region in the mid-19th century, but by the end of the century, it seemed like it expanded a lot and galvanized a lot of the Bedouin tribes to follow it, at least in some way. And the research that I did showed that it's useful to think of the Sunnis as a kind of quasi-state or proto-state, that they had communication networks, they had an economy, they had ways of organizing space and the way people move through this eastern Saharan region. Saharan region. And what's interesting is that the story of territoriality I want to show transforms how the Senussis seem to think about themselves. Is that, again, it's not a typical story that the central states encroach on this region and then they retreat or fight back and then they're crushed. Right? Kind of the James Scott way of thinking about margins or marginal

populations. It's actually that territoriality in this period and the kind of competition and dynamic interchange that it fosters is seen by the Sunnis as an opportunity. And they start to see themselves, I think, more and more state-like. Obviously, they're never an officially recognized territorial nation state, but they start to act more state-like in how they interact with the British and the Ottomans especially. Was there a big difference in how the British and the Ottomans interacted with them? I mean, did those two entities deal with them very differently?

Absolutely. You know, there's been some really good recent work about the Ottoman relationship to the Sunni Siyah, and it's still a debate. mean to be honest again the history of the Sunni Siyah is a little bit fuzzy and the Ottoman sources are useful but of course tell one side of the story and I'm not alone in wrestling with this fraught relationship between the Ottomans and the Sunni Siyah which is it's a sort of a historical debate that has been raging kind of in fits and starts ever since Evans Pritchard, Michel Legault wrote about it, Mustafa Manawi writes about it in his book. And basically I see it as one of the two sides feeling each other out.

Sometimes, I mean, they're almost like frenemies. Sometimes the Ottomans really resented the power and the local authority that the Sunnis exercised. And other times they were really leaning on them to help do some of the police work and to help manage populations. And there's still debates that I'm not sure will ever be resolved about the extent to which the Sunnis were actually helping the Ottomans collect taxes. But there were certainly moments in which the relationship seemed symbiotic. The British, on the other hand, saw the Sunnis like they saw a lot of Islamic movements in this period as fanatical.

Right. And they're very afraid of the Sunnis. And it actually governs their policy insofar as there is one towards the West. Of course, the British are occupying Egypt after 1882. And insofar as they think about this region at all, and they do increasingly, and as I say in the book, by the first decade of the 20th century, they have to forge some kind of policy towards the Italian government

and the Ottoman government in the region. But insofar as they think about the Sunnis at all, they're afraid of them. They don't want to deal with them. They want a sort of laissez-faire policy where they think that the Sunnis have the power to mobilize a kind of irrational pan-Islamic sentiment that might threaten British interests in Egypt.

Okay. I mean, the other kind of side of this coin, now that we're into a period where the British are in play and sort of calling official shots from Cairo, you offer this really fascinating, and I just found it like sort of humorous somehow, view view of Khedive Abbas Hilmi's interest in this region as well, which he takes a sort of personal interest in the Western desert, tries to present himself as the kind of representative to this outpost of Egyptian sovereignty to undercut, in a way, like British interests in Cairo.

And so I loved the observation that Abbas Hilmi goes to Siwa in 1906, and this may be the first time that any ruler has gone there since Alexander the Great. And so, yeah, maybe you could just talk a little bit about you know what was uh you know the khedive's interest in the western desert and how was he received when he got there what was his agenda great no i'm glad you you picked up

on that and to me this is one of the most exciting parts of the research it's to bring this character abbas hilmi the, who's a little bit of a laughingstock in Egyptian history, or certainly isn't treated often that critically, as a major force or player with his own interests and his own sovereign capabilities in Egypt, even after, well, he only reigned during the British occupation. And what I tried to show, and, you know, what I think, and I do think this is one of the book's major contributions to Egyptian historiography, is that when you get outside Cairo,

Abbas Hilmi and the personal networks that he worked so hard to cultivate, and I could say a little bit more about that, start to loom a lot larger in the story. And that just because Abbas Hilmi is getting squeezed out of some of the political debates that are central to british and nationalist politics in cairo in the late in the last decade and of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th century doesn't mean that he's not active elsewhere and that that you know the personal papers of abbas hilmi at durham

university actually tell a wildly different story about certain aspects of Egyptian history that haven't really been talked about. Although I know in the last few years, there's been a sort of turn of Egyptian historians to look at Abbas Homi again. So what I noticed is that Abbas Homi is very resentful of Lord Cromer, basically pushing him around,

but at the whole time he's buying properties's buying properties around egypt you know i really focused on the west the northwest coast and into siwa obviously but there are other scholars doing other work on his properties but he's he's buying up all of these estates he's salvaged can i just ask really quickly when he's buying them who's he buying them from on one hand he's building up um new agricultural experiments on properties that were probably left over from the great expanse of land holdings of the royal family as far back as Mesmet Ali. But then I also show evidence that he's buying up new properties, for example, in Siwa and some other locales on the northwest coast and then introducing agricultural experiments on them. Right. Yeah, that's a really we can come back to back to that as a very interesting part of the book as well, but I'm sorry I interrupted you.

You were saying Abbas Hilmi has these various, he's buying up estates in different parts of Egypt and you're focusing on the Western desert. Right. I mean, the British were incredibly dismissive of Abbas Hilmi and the way he spent his money. They just thought he was basically a fool and, you know, Egyptian historiography, at least, you know, in the

United States, hasn't really taken his deal, his political dealings or his financial dealings that seriously. But I really tried hard to show that in the context of the Egyptian West, some of the projects that he introduced, especially in the first decade of the 20th century, were taken very seriously by local inhabitants. There's still, I mean, if we accept some

of the ethnographic evidence from anthropologists who have worked in the Western Desert, his projects are still remembered as bringing the Amar and development in the region. Also,

the railroad project that I spent a lot of time talking about, you know, it did last, right? I mean, if you take the bus to Marsa Matruh,

you're going alongside a lot of the railroad tracks that go back to the Marriott Railway project that he was building in the first decade of the 20th century. So what was he up to? I mean, it's still, it's hard to know for certainty, but my interpretation of it is that squeezed out of politics in Cairo,

he's really trying hard to build up elaborate personal networks through the properties, through his cultivation of local notables who are working for him, benefiting from the relationship with him. He's trying to establish himself as the bona fide sovereign of Egypt in the eyes of local populations far and wide, hoping, I guess, that he can sell himself as the authentically Egyptian sovereign in a way that the British-led interior ministry, for example, couldn't be. And so what I'm trying to chart in these middle chapters of the book that focus on the Khedive is that he's building a kind of shadow government that he's um he really thinks that in time maybe the shadow government can replace you know what's still seen as the official state

apparatus right so it's an interesting paradox where you have the so-called sovereign of egypt actually personally sponsoring you know the cultivation of these political networks and property networks in a bid to exercise a very different kind of sovereignty over different parts of Egypt. In addition to the railroad project, the one that stood out to me was this kind of impressive mosque project. Is it still standing? Is it still... Yeah, absolutely.

The mosque of Sidi Suleiman in Siwa is still the main central mosque. He didn't finish it. The project was not done when he was deposed in 1914 when World War I broke out. But actually King Fuad finished the project and then was the second Egyptian sovereign after Alexander the Great to visit Siwa when the mosque was finished. I think there's pictures of this in the book as well. Yeah, actually in one of the archives in Durham, I was able to find some photos from the decade before World War I, and there's a fantastic one of this mosque in construction.

There's also a funny story in the book about a case of stolen cements and how personally the Khedive and his minions in Siwa seemed to take it. And, you know, I mean, throughout the book, I'm trying to come up with what I think are important implications to what might seem as trivial or frivolous stories. And this is a good example of that, where I think the fact that there's a paper trail at all that survives, the fact that so much ink was spilled

over the question of how people were perceiving medieval sovereignty, and of course, building. I mean, look at Trump today, right? This kind of, I mean, I don't want to, I sound like, you know, some grand ethnographer. But, you know, the kind of wusta or authority that can be constructed around the idea

that you're a builder, right? And I think this is something that Abbas Hilmi was very interested in. He was also putting a lot of people to work and we can't forget that. So why was he so remembered? Why are his public works remembered so positively by Aulad Ali Berouin, for example?

And well, he put a lot of them to work. There are a lot of Aulad Ali working on his agricultural projects and a lot of them were working on the Marriott Railway. And in Siwa, there are a lot of them to work. There are a lot of Ali working on his agricultural projects and a lot of them were working on the Maruyut railway. And in Siwa, there are a lot of people who are working on his, on the properties that he had bought up there. So there's a sense that he was

a mover and shaker, that he was making things happen and doing a lot of what the British said they were doing in terms of developments and bringing Egypt into a kind of financial maturity and a kind of modernity. But he was doing it in a way that he was trying to sell as more authentic. Yeah, that was one of my favorite sort of connections that you drew in that part of the book is,

I mean, although you do tell, you know, in very, like the stories are very lively. like the stories are very lively and you know i really really appreciate this this kind of history where you're taking kind of i mean forgotten places or like trivial trivial seeming anecdotes like stolen cement but tying them into like much larger processes and you make this great point about um how abbas hilmi is kind of trying to outplay the British at their own game of economism and, and like, yeah, legitimating rule through increasing material prosperity or sort of creating economic prosperity. So I think that's really, it's, it's fascinating. I mean, in this context.

Well, thank you. And I guess I just want to emphasize that. That's another way to think about territoriality in this book is that again it's not a static meaning as some historians have have suggested but that it's it's evolving and that i think abbas hilmi is actually a shrewd political player he understands the language that cromer is speaking he understands what seems to be the sort of prevailing discourse of um territoriality at least least in so far as it's related to financial reforms, economic development, and the kind of economic discourse of the day. And so he sort of takes that and runs with it.

And I think the Mario Real way and the way that it connected up territory and sort of tied political territoriality with questions of economic development was absolutely in keeping with what he perceived the British doing and the way that they were legitimating their rule right yeah and i mean so maybe to kind of bring this around um you know back to the theme of territoriality and to start to uh bring the story to its less porous and more like delineated less porous and more like delineated conclusion.

I think the really another great contribution of the book is the way that you show how the process of delineating borders and the process of defining Egyptian, you know, territorial sovereignty comes to be a process, you know, that involves these very marginal actors or like the last sort of groups that you would expect to be a process you know that involves these very marginal actors or like the last sort of groups that you would expect to be um you know at the heart of drawing lines on a map um and so another of these these kind of you know historically quote-unquote trivial stories that i think you tell so well is of this uh official is an ottoman official who

gets kind of um sent on a on a fateful mission out into the into the desert thank you for for bringing that up one thing that's really important to me in this book is to to bring out actors and individuals and voices that are just typically completely obscured in egyptian historiography and to make sure that we're hearing from from people that we don't normally get to hear from sometimes that's a low-level officials like this this coast guard officer Shalabi Mustafa who becomes kind of a hero of the Egyptian state and you know just people that that are not usually talked about and and down to local bigwigs in a place like Siwa population of about 5 5 000 in 1890s but that they actually

became very you know very central in some of the debates some of the discussions that were happening in cairo in in this period so you can tell us about shelaby mustafa first and then we can so the last part of the book i'm just just to back up a little bit talks about so after these sort of disparate attempts to achieve territorial sovereignty or to at least shore up this desert borderland as, you know, as sovereign territory for the Egyptian state, that doesn't really progress too far. There starts to emerge a kind of nascent imperial rivalry between the Ottomans and the Egyptian state, which is, of course, still technically a province of the Ottoman government.

So it's an interesting rivalry insofar as it's a suzerain power vying for sovereign legitimacy with part of its own imperial domains. So, I mean, that I think is a fascinating story in itself. Shalabi Mustafa represents an arm of the Egyptian state bureaucracy, the Egyptian Coast Guard, which to my knowledge has never really been written about in much Egyptian scholarship, that starts to exercise, it really comes into its own in the first decade of the 20th century.

And the catalyst here, again, is local actors, very local disputes. There's a lot of Bedouin unrest between different tribes, subsections of the Alar Ali, but also tribes that are more associated with what's now on the Libyan side, a lot of internecine fighting and raiding. And it's really the Egyptian Coast Guard that starts to step in and settle some of these disputes. And it turns out they're much better at it than the ottoman officials are who are coming over from bin ghazi or from derna to deal with it and so it's actually um these bedouin feuds and raids that keep going on in the last few years of the 20th century but really ramp up around 1903 1904 then again two years three years later that the ottomans and e and Egyptians are forced to start thinking about the bounds of their sovereign control in this amorphous region.

Now, what's interesting about that, though, is that even though they're very nervous about each other's claims, another power comes in, and that's the Italian government that actually wants them to delimit a border. that actually wants them to delimit a border. And both the Ottomans and the British Egyptian government decide that it's not in their interest to do so because they don't actually want to raise a kind of political nightmare like Taba had turned into, a sort of legal political dispute that might actually challenge the Ottoman-Egyptian relationship.

They'd rather keep this ambiguous. So it's another way of thinking about territoriality, that it's kind of dynamic and fluid and you've got actors who are much more present in this region they're policing it they're governing populations but they don't want to delimit it they don't want to map it out they'd rather leave it ambiguous because they know how to resolve disputes among each other right and the italians come in and they're sort of the odd man out and that they want a kind of more you know cartesian linear um hard and fast solution

to territorial sovereignty in this region. And the Ottomans and the British consistently refuse right up until the Italians invade Libya in 1911. That's the sort of larger background to the incident that you alluded to. There are these ongoing Bedouin disputes. And again, the Egyptians and Ottomans don't want it to come to a head

to the point that they actually have to draw a map so instead they organize a series of Bedouin summits where basically the Ottomans are going to bring so-called Ottoman Bedouins together with so-called Egyptian Bedouins and this is terminology that I show has an interesting provenance like that Cromer starts to pick up language

that's actually translated by Shalabi Mustafa from local notables who are appealing to the Egyptian government through the Coast Guard. But anyway, there's supposed to be this Bedouin summit and this poor Kaimakam from Derna which is a sort of a casa of the Ottoman administration on the Libyan side, part of the Benghazi province, is waiting for a week,

and his guys can't make their Bedouins show up. And the Egyptians, and there's this wonderful phrase that Kaim al-Khamim Darinah uses in his correspondence, marked by the customs of British punctuality. They show up on time, and they have a beautiful coast guard ship and they look professional and they look really efficient and authoritative

and the Kaimakan of Derna had been forced to get there on foot and he's just waiting around and no one's showing up and he's really worried that this is turning into a public relations disaster for the Ottoman Empire that, again, Egypt is supposed to be subservient to Istanbul but instead Egypt is just kicking its butt Egypt just looks you know looks and feels like a nascent modern nation-state and that's sort of

where where I leave off the story is that on the eve of the Italian occupation in 1911 the Ottomans are still around they're still they've got this kind of gentleman's agreement about not delineating a border, but at the same time, they're very, very anxious that their own province is outpacing them and acting more and more

like a sovereign nation state, exercising authority through new institutions that have come into their own in this very period as a response to these Bedouin disputes like the Coast Guard, right?

That the Ottomans feel like the coast guard right that um the ottomans feel like they're losing um that they're losing a public relations battle but that they might ultimately lose territory and of course as we know from a lot of ottoman diplomatic history they're terrified about losing more and more territory throughout the last quarter of the 19th century right i mean who like in terms of a a public relations debacle, who are they worried about losing face in front of in this particular instance? Like, who would have been watching this event unfold? of the Egyptian state, but also the Italians have been closely watching this region for two decades. And the French are around too, right? So the Ottomans, you know, I talked more about how places like Siwa had started to become increasingly important in the eyes of the Egyptian state and especially Abbas Hilmi. But the Ottomans, again, in this context of fearing territorial law, start to shore up their

own control. They're worried about the French in Central Africa. They're worried about the Italians. They know that the Italians have designs on the Libyan provinces. They're under no illusions about that. And so I talk a lot about their exercise of sovereignty starting around 1902 when they set up a garrison in Saloum, the border town. Again, no one really knows for certain if it's Egyptian or Ottoman territory. There's a lot of sort of diplomatic exchange about it, but no one moves to settle it. But yeah, the Ottomans are very concerned about losing face, I would say, to all of these different state powers. And so what we see in these 14 years or so before World War I is lots of imperial powers

coming up and sort of jostling against each other and trying not to upset the status quo too much while all fumbling towards their own territorial claims. And so you have this kind of relational, interactional conception of territoriality that is still really functional despite any bounded territorial space, any demarcated boundary line,

or any authoritative cartography. That would only happen in the 1920s. 1925 is when the Egyptian-Libyan border would be drawn. So during this whole period, there's a lot of disputing and arguing and exchanging, but there's no settlement. And again, the Ottomans and the Egyptians don't want a settlement. Only the Italian government does. So maybe the logical concluding point then is how did that line get drawn? And if I recall correctly, you say that the lost map also resurfaces in 1925 or somewhere

around there. This is sort of where I actually leave the book off. The epilogue talks about the border settlement of 1925. So around 1920, so World War I is recent history. The Italians are now in control of what becomes the nation of Libya. The Egyptian government will become independent in 1922. And there start to be border negotiations. Basically, in this period, the Italian conception of territoriality as bounded space

that can be neatly mapped cartographically wins out. And there is a series of border commissions. So the Egyptian military will commission some officers to go out and look at and to map out some space and the italians are doing the same and actually there are some photographs of border commissions in the egyptian press in the 1920s but it doesn't go completely smoothly the egyptians will change their minds a lot there are disputes over whether saloom is going to be egyptian versus libyan where to draw the border around Sallum

because the geography there, the landscape is quite striking. It's on the cliffs and there's actually a period that goes a little bit north before it curves west. And so they don't know where the line's going to start.

There's also disputes about the oasis of Jakhbub, which was a Sunni stronghold. And that will end up on the Libyan side. But the Egyptians are suddenly concerned that they're going to lose a major Sunni stronghold, and so they're upset about that. And so there's a lot of disputing in the few years before 1925, but they finally come to an agreement,

and a sign was called a demarcation commission to go out and draw the line. So we will put the image of this sort of, you know, the first modern political map of Egypt on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, and we encourage our listeners to go look at that and sort of, you know, try to imagine how much things have changed. And Matt, this has been a really wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you. This is a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. This is a lot of fun. And so to all of our listeners, again, we will, along with the image of these maps and a couple of other images, Abbas Homi's mosque and other things that we've discussed on today's episode, you can find a short bibliography of kind of relevant literature references that we made in the episode today and thank you for tuning in we hope to see you next time Thank you.