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John Wright is a British journalist and historian who has published five books on modern Libyan history and the Sahara. The book under review covers Libyan history between 1767 and 2007. It is a collection of chapters and articles previously published over the last thirty years (1978-2007) in various journals such as Africa, The Maghreb Review, Encounter, Slavery and Abolition, and Libyan Studies. Wright has chosen to organize his 21 chapters into six themes: 'Historical background', 'Foreigners in Libya', 'The slave trade', 'Italy and Libya', 'The Second World War and after', and 'Revolutionary Libya'. The choice of the six themes appears to be subjective, and the last chapter on revolutionary Libya is out of place and has no linkage to the post-1969 republican system in the country. The book has no central thesis and relies on uncritical readings of European travelers' papers and impressions, and the reports of activist British representatives in Tripoli and Benghazi. More importantly, Wright approaches Libyan and Saharan history not from its own dynamics but from the outside, through colonial and orientalist concepts and categories. His advocacy of a positive and idealistic role of European explorations and colonialism in Libya and the Sahara is unusual if compared with the large critical historical scholarship in African studies.
This reviewer encountered major difficulties in the sources and language used to interpret the historical material in the book. The author claims to know Arabic, but cites only two Arabic sources: a book by Abdulkareem Taweel (p. 92); and a reference to the Arab papers Al-Ahram, Filistine, and Al-Balagh (p. 314). This is not an omission but a choice for a journalist who worked for the BBC Arabic section. Can one study the history of England without researching various sources in English? Perhaps a journalist can get away with this, but not a scholar on African history. The consequences of this uncritical use of only state colonial sources are either dated interpretations of...