More than two millennia after Herodotus described the empty vastness of the Libyan desert, the German explorer Gustav Nachtigal set out in February 1869 from Tripoli toward Fazzan, and beyond, on a trip to the ruler of Bornu. His camel – burdened on one side with a “red velvety chair of state” and on the other side by a crate of “lifesize portraits of King William, Queen Augusta, and the Crown Prince” – followed a wide arc east of Tripoli across the desert to southern Murzuq and Qatrun. Throughout his travels, Nachtigal ably summarized much of what was known of the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fazzan at the time – the three immense pieces of territory that would eventually constitute modern-day Libya.

Nachtigal's presence was not entirely fortuitous. Germany and Italy were slowly developing an interest in what Britain and France at the time considered a combination of forbidding and economically uninteresting territories. Within little more than a decade after France's seizure of Tunisia in 1881, however, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fazzan became the only territories in North Africa left unclaimed by a European power. By that time, the scramble to delineate the borders of the remaining Ottoman possessions in North Africa had already started in earnest.

For most Europeans in the nineteenth century, the territories Nachtigal ventured across were – except for the exoticism the caravan trade conjured up in the popular mind – known primarily for their earlier, more illustrious history.

This book is the result of almost two decades of observing and writing about Libya. In the process, countless individuals in a number of countries have talked to me and corresponded with me about Libya. Many of them I have acknowledged earlier in my Libya Since Independence. Since then, however, I have incurred additional debts to a number of others who kindly provided additional help and insights since the late 1990s. In no particular order, they include Dr. Saleh Ibrahim and Milad Saad Milad at the Academy of Higher Education in Tripoli; Ms. Salma al-Gaeer of the Academy of Higher Education and the Green Book Center; Youssef Sawani of the Green Book Center; Zahi Mogherbi of Gar Yunis University; Muhammad Siala, Secretary for International Cooperation; Mehdi Emberish, Secretary of Culture; Ahmed Jalala of the Academy of Graduate Studies; Engineer Jadalla al-Talhi, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the Jamahiriyya; Abu Zayed Dorda, former Prime Minister and Minister of the Economy; Saif al-Islam al-Qadhafi; Salem al-Maiar and Tony Allan of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London; Ethan Chorin of the United States Liaison Office in Tripoli; Tarik Yousef of Georgetown University; David Mack at the Middle East Institute in Washington; Moncef Djaziri at the University of Geneva; and Saad al-Ghariani of the Academy of Higher Education in Tripoli.

The overthrow of the Libyan monarchy came not unexpectedly. Throughout the 1960s, a number of political incidents had revealed the low level of legitimacy the kingdom enjoyed outside Cyrenaica. They had also revealed the inability of King Idris to institute reform that could break up the highly corrupt patrimonial system that had grown up around him and the royal diwan. For months preceding the actual coup, there had been consistent rumors of plans for a military take-over, forcing the king to shift army units around the country's territory repeatedly in an ultimately vain attempt to prevent a coordinated effort against his rule.

The king's hesitancy to rule effectively, the wrenching social dislocations caused by the rapid inflows of oil money, the halting and incomplete transition from a traditional to a more modern society, the rampant corruption and cronyism that followed the rapid inflow of oil revenues, and the kingdom's conservative positions in inter-Arab politics within a region seething with Arab nationalism in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab–Israeli war: all these had hollowed out the monarchy to such a degree that few careful observers in the region, or beyond, were surprised when the actual coup took place. While the general expectation in the West and much of the Middle East had been that a number of senior military leaders would take over, the coup leaders turned out to be overwhelmingly young officers and captains with no links to the monarchy or to senior military figures.

On 24 December 1951, King Idris al-Sanusi announced the creation of the United Kingdom of Libya from al-Manar Palace in Benghazi – where Rodolfo Graziani had once resided. With this proclamation, a protracted process of multilevel negotiations between international, regional, and local actors came to a close. However, the country faced enormous political and economic challenges. King Idris needed to confront a number of interrelated difficulties: to create a sense of political loyalty, to develop a sense of national identity among the three provinces' citizens, and to build a state out of their multiple and contradictory interests. The title of King – an unknown political concept in Libya – had been conferred upon Idris al-Sanusi and, as heir to the Sanusiyya Order, he certainly provided a focus of identity within Cyrenaica. For Tripolitanians, however, history was seemingly repeating itself. Much like their offer in the 1920s to extend the Sanusi amirate into Tripolitania as a last resort against Italian encroachments, the kingdom represented an uneasy compromise they had accepted overwhelmingly in the negotiations leading up to independence to avoid further colonial oversight.

Libya had passed from colonialism to independence at the behest of the Great Powers, without a unifying ideology or a movement whose goals and aspirations were shared throughout the country. In neighboring countries, independence was the end result of a drawn-out ideological or physical struggle that was instrumental in creating a sense of national identity. In Libya, however, political independence was sudden and unexpected.

By the end of the twentieth century, after three decades of its leader's self-proclaimed revolution, Libya found itself at an important junction. The country was starting to emerge from its diplomatic and economic isolation. The multilateral sanctions were suspended in April 1999, and European and other foreign investors were slowly making their way back to Tripoli. It was clear, however, that only a complete lifting of the US sanctions could deliver the kind of economic resurgence and the necessary international diplomatic imprimatur that the regime sought. This could only be accomplished if the Jamahiriyya was taken off the State Department's list of sponsors of state terrorism. The country's economy, beyond the oil sector, remained unproductive and actively involved few of the country's citizens. The infrastructure of the oil sector itself was aging, and Libya needed substantial investment to update it – conservatively estimated from $10-$30 billion in the medium to long term in order to increase its oil production to 3 million barrels per day within a decade. Although the LNOC had attempted to establish itself as a capable manager of the oilfields it had taken over, its officials were the first to admit that the country required international technology and know-how that would enable it to expand production, in part by drilling for oil beyond the Sirt Basin, and offshore.

The history of Libya in the twentieth century represents, even by Middle Eastern standards, an extraordinary odyssey: from Ottoman backwater to Italian colony; from conservative monarchy to revolutionary regime; from rags to riches; and from brinkmanship to a grudging and still unfolding statesmanship. For most of the century, the inhabitants of the three provinces that became incorporated into the United Kingdom of Libya in 1951 – Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fazzan – stood on the sidelines as a succession of foreign and local rulers and interests shaped their country. Excluded from involvement with the colonial machinery during the Italian occupation (1911–1942), marginalized politically during the monarchy (1951–1969), and subject to a homegrown version of socialism after the military coup in 1969, Libyans share a tumultuous history of state-building that continues to leave them perplexed even today.

Perhaps it is more accurate to observe that the people of Libya became witnesses to a political and economic phenomenon that has often been observed in oil exporters throughout the Middle East: the attempt by their rulers, with the aid of extensive oil revenues, to avoid the process of state-building that normally includes the steady expansion of the administrative reach of the state, as well as a growing incorporation of local citizens in that process. Indeed, in Libya even today, it remains problematic to consider its people truly as citizens.

In the wake of the US bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986, the Libyan regime faced a number of internal and international challenges that gradually reduced Qadhafi's ability to pursue his activist policies abroad and at home. They limited his ability to use continuous waves of political mobilization within Libya, and, by the end of the century, brought a halt to the waves of unpredictable political and economic directives at home. His revolutionary harangues throughout the period continued unabated – at a pitch temporarily heightened by the US military operation that killed Hanna al-Qadhafi, one of his adopted children – but there was an increasingly desperate tone and hackneyed quality to his rhetoric. Caged in by a combination of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, the Libyan regime responded with one of the few tools still at its disposal: a deepening involvement with international terrorism that would reach its most notorious climax in 1988 and 1989. But these, in more ways than one, were measures of last resort.

The international sanctions in 1992, and particularly the Arab countries' initially neutral response to them, also prompted an important re-alignment of the county's foreign relations. After years of pursuing unity schemes with various Arab regimes, Qadhafi announced that he could no longer tolerate their leaders' lackluster responses to the Arab–Israeli conflict, or their passivity and their acquiescence in a political status quo throughout the region dominated by the US presence and its policies.

After four years of stocktaking and its first tentative attempts at mobilizing Libya's population, the Qadhafi government in 1973 stood poised to embark upon a number of breathtaking economic and political initiatives. These would form the foundation of its long revolutionary decade from 1973 until 1986. These experiments were fueled by an estimated $95 billion of oil revenues, propelling Libyan per capita income from $2,216 in 1969 to almost $10,000 a decade later. Some of the characteristics that had already emerged during the new regime's first four years – the impatience with bureaucratic and political mechanisms that in Qadhafi's mind prevented the Libyan population from participating directly in the country's revolution, and the distrust of the lingering impact of traditional forces in the country – now became central features of what the Libyan leader referred to as his Third Universal Theory. Codified in Qadhafi's Green Book, the Third Universal Theory was, according to its author, an alternative to capitalism and Marxism. Its directives, reflecting a profound distrust of political parties and bureaucratic institutions as obstacles to popular participation, provided the theme for a number of increasingly dramatic economic, social, and political initiatives. These culminated in the creation of a Jamahiriyya – a country directly governed by its citizens, without the intervention of intermediaries.

The massive inflows of revenues after 1973, and during the second oil crisis of 1979, presented Qadhafi with an economic windfall it would systematically use to pursue his vision of a just, egalitarian, and participatory society – and to adopt an increasingly activist confrontation with the West.

When it invaded the remaining Ottoman North African possessions in 1911, unified Italy had existed for exactly fifty years. Since the 1870s, its politicians had slowly prepared local and international opinion for its eventual colonial oversight of Tripolitxania, Cyrenaica, and Fazzan. In doing so, it had been aided by a persuasive imperialist lobby that had touted Italy's progress into Somalia, Eritrea – and now potentially Libia – as Italy's version of manifest destiny, providing commercial opportunities, trade, and an outlet for the nation's industrial goods and its perennial surplus population. In addition, the failure to annex Ethiopia in 1896 had strengthened the country's resolve to claim Libya as a necessary bulwark – the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio's lyrical Fourth Shore – to protect its strategic security in the Mediterranean and its growing shipping trade, and to project its Great Power aspirations.

THE ITALIAN OCCUPATION, 1911–1923

Italy seized upon alleged Ottoman hostility to its economic activities in Libya as a casus belli, sending an ultimatum to the sultan on 26 September 1911 that included its intention to occupy Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. A seaborne invasion the following month allowed Italy to occupy the major coastal cities – Tripoli, Benghazi, Darna, Homs, and Tubruq – where they were met by a number of small but determined Ottoman garrisons. These had been augmented by the local population who, while not favorable to the sultan, still considered him as their “commander of the faithful.”