Italian Imperialism and Sanusi Authority at the Turn of the Century

Italian unification preceded a new era of European imperial expansion. Italian nationalists were eager to ensure Italy’s position as a European great power by claiming overseas territories. For many Italians, adventures in East Africa served only as a distraction from the goal of securing the Mediterranean. After the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881 and the Italian military disaster at Adwa in 1896, Italian imperialists turned their focus to the Ottoman districts of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in modern-day Libya. It was during these last decades of the nineteenth century that the Sanusiyya emerged as an undeniable political, social, and religious force in North Africa. Any central state authorities with an interest in securing the eastern Libyan district of Cyrenaica had to engage with the Sanusiyya. Sanusi elites developed patterns of engaging with centralized state authorities that would inform their reactions to the Italian occupation after 1911.