Introduction

Abstract

I first had the idea for this book in 1996 when a British historian asked me a question that shocked me. “Why are Libyans so paranoid about Italian colonialism?" he said, following a presentation I had given at the London School of Economics on the social origins of Libyan resistance to Italian colonialism. My questioner was a fellow panel member specializing in Libyan colonial history, and I asked him what he meant by “paranoid.” Somalians, Ethiopians, and Eritreans had a positive view of Italian colonialism, he claimed. The period of Italian colonialism represented a modernizing stage of Libyan history despite the fact that one half of the Libyan population perished and thousands were displaced and pushed into exile. I answered that the Libyan people, like other humans oppressed by brutal settlers, had every reason to hate colonialism. That encounter combined with my generation’s disillusionment with the nationalist regimes in the Maghrib led me to consider a critical examination of colonial and nationalist theories.