In his doctoral thesis Emrys Peters (1951) studied the Bedouin of Cyrenaica on the eve of national independence under Sanusi rule. His teacher, Sir E. E. Evans-Pritchard, had two years earlier published The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949), a historical account of the political ascent of the Sanusi sect, that relied mainly on books and documents. As an officer of the Military Administration of Cyrenaica, Evans-Pritchard had, of course, been in touch with the Bedouin population but, as he himself admitted, ‘could not conduct any serious anthropological research’ among them (Evans-Pritchard 1973: 21). His long-standing intention to study the Bedouin population of Cyrenaica was never to be realised. This task devolved on his student. Peters was well aware of the message of The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, that the so-called ‘simple’ societies, just like Western ones, are shaped by powerful historical forces and must therefore be studied in the widest political and economic context. Yet in his thesis the contextual analysis is incidental to the detailed description of Bedouin society. The thesis does not deal explicitly with the impact of Italian occupation and colonisation, the relations between the Bedouin and the British military administration, the growing influence of the Sanusi religious brotherhood which was just one year later to lead the new state of Libya, or with the market forces that were affecting pastoralism. It was devoted to another, though related, theoretical issue. It challenged the view that the Bedouin were a tribal society, an acephalous segmentary political system.