In recent decades, historians have problematized nation-state territoriality as an evolving principle of control and belonging. Among others, Charles Maier has advocated thinking about this spatial dimension of statehood. Through the study of European nation-states, he points at borders and boundary making as an essential feature of modern territorial sovereignty. A new wave of empire studies, spearheaded by Lauren Benton, challenges some of Maier's assumptions and conclusions, including the nation-state model as a ruling paradigm.
Matthew Ellis’ Desert Borderland delivers a largely Maierian analysis with Bentonian updates about a crucial part of late Ottoman North Africa. The tension between descriptive concepts designed for the nation state and a plural imperial situation animates his superb book.
Ellis focuses on what today can be called the Egyptian–Libyan border, particularly on the oasis of Siwa. After Mostafa Minawi's problematization of Ottoman schemes in 1890s–1900s Africa, Ellis’ study brings a new perspective in the problem of territoriality by the exploration of competing Ottoman-British-Italian interests and the various local actors. Next to Maier, the author invokes theories of borderlands, especially Jeremy Adelman's on zones of rivalry and J.R.W. Prescott's on demarcation (pp. 117–18, 148). Source-wise, Desert Borderland joins the line of recent and forthcoming publications that rely (arguably too) heavily on the Abbas Hilmi II Papers at Durham University. The rarely used Italian state archive is a most useful addition to the usual suspects of the Prime Minister's Ottoman Archive, the British National Archives, and the Egyptian National Archives. There is, however, a notable absence of Libyan sources.
The six chapters concisely describe “the emergence of modern Egyptian territoriality from the margins,” which the author argues occurred “through a complex and multilayered process of negotiation with the region's predominantly bedouin and oasis-dwelling inhabitants” (p. 8). Ellis coins the concept of the “lived experience of territoriality” to describe this familiar interplay of mobility and feuds continually challenging the authorities to react (p. 173). With this argument, the author critiques Egyptian nationalist historiography and Nile-centered narratives (p. 54). The book concludes with the announcement that “Egypt is a desert country” and that Egyptian-ness is still a fluid question in the borderlands today (p. 188). Libya is, again, absent.
Siwa is a productive example. Indeed, its inhabitants’ intermarriages with peoples of the Jaghbub oasis (today in Libya) and their Siwi mother tongue make their belonging contested. Ellis begins the book by surveying problems in legal exceptionalism in Siwa (Chapter 1) and the struggle between the Sanusi brotherhood and the Egyptian authorities (Chapter 2). Chapters 3 and 4, the core of the book, examine the projects of Abbas Hilmi II (r. 1892–1914) to develop the coastal line, the port city of Marsa Matruh, Siwa, and in general the western borderlands. Ellis’ discussion of the tension in the 1890s–1900s between the British occupiers and the khedive is especially trenchant. The final two chapters explore the struggle among the Ottomans, the British, and the Italians to define, or rather postpone, the question of border. The Italians pushed for demarcation as a way to lay the groundwork for a possible colony before the Italian–Ottoman war in 1913, while the British and the Ottomans wanted to avoid this as both knew that a border would mean the recognition of an independent state in Egypt (p. 167). The conclusion quickly wraps up the story after the fall of the Ottomans with the 1925 Egyptian–Italian border agreement and the problems that remain unresolved to this day.
Ellis correctly recognizes that both British-occupied Egypt and the Italian-colony-in-the-making Benghazi were Ottoman provinces. The plural imperial and colonial interests clash with the non-state facts on the ground: the amorphous Sanusi organization, Bedouin mobility, and the desert itself. The surgically precise articulation of this complex situation makes Desert Borderland an exemplary work of historical scholarship.
One wonders whether a thorough engagement with the Ottoman angle, deeper research in the Egyptian National Archives, some attention to the Siwi language, and a more critical treatment of the idea of territoriality could have strengthened the argument. What the book lacks, first, is a more nuanced understanding of what an Ottoman province was. The author undermines his own observation that 19th-century Egypt was not a nation-state by, nonetheless, often using the word “state” to describe it—a problem that might be traced to an over-reliance on Maier's work. This could have been solved by using “local government” (hükümet-i mahalliye) which was how this administration referred to itself officially. Similarly, the assumption shared in Chapters 3 and 4 that Abbas Hilmi II's private estate management (Daʾira Khassa) was a “holdover” of the dynastic lands and that its use for his private purposes in developing the western lands was a new “rival channel for the projection of territorial sovereignty” (pp. 62–63) could have profited from more research. For instance, Khedive Ismail's Daʾira Khassa financed urbanization of Cairo and agricultural investments in the countryside in the 1860s. It is thus questionable whether “territorial sovereignty” is the right concept to describe similar extra-governmental dynastic business activity in the 1900s. Translating into “territoriality” every instance of investment hollows out this otherwise useful concept.
The author's succinct writing makes the book an easy read but brevity also results in the absence of crucial issues in a global view. These range from the total elision of the other borders (Sinai and the Sudan) to only brief engagement with the field of the Ottoman borderland historiography to inattention to European imperial agreements (this last is particularly painful since the 1904 Entente Cordial explains why Lord Cromer's attitude changed in that year, pp. 136–39).
Despite these shortcomings, this theoretically and empirically rich book is a perfect undergraduate and graduate reading in the history of modern Egypt, borderland studies, territoriality, sovereignty, and even environmentalism. It problematizes fundamental questions of modern boundary making, initiates a meaningful dialogue with nonspecialists, and offers an innovative application of American historical theories on late Ottoman North Africa.
