Desert Borderland

Desert Borderland is an investigation of the historical processes that transformed the local experience of place and political identity in the easternmost reaches of the Sahara Desert over the half century before World War I. Lying at the intersection of social and political history, the book shifts perspectives between an array of state and non-state actors to chart the region’s gradual evolution as a contested borderland between two distinct territorial domains—what would ultimately become the modern nation-states of Egypt and Libya. Desert Borderland challenges powerful nationalist assumptions about Egypt’s historical fixity as a bounded political space—assumptions that have been perpetuated in the standard historiography of modern Egypt, due to its overwhelmingly Cairo-centric nature. The book seeks to subvert this prevailing wisdom of Egypt’s timeless geographical unity by adopting, instead, the view from the margins—taking the reader on a tour of key sites throughout the country’s Libyan borderland, such as the oasis of Siwa, where a range of state- and nation-making projects were unfolding throughout the period in question. It argues that national territoriality was not simply imposed on Egypt’s western (or Ottoman Libya’s eastern) domains by centralizing state powers, but rather emerged through a complex and multilayered process of negotiation with the region’s predominantly bedouin and oasis-dwelling inhabitants, who were animated by their own local conceptions of space, sovereignty, and political belonging.