The difficulty with the study of Libyan history, certainly before the sixteenth century, is twofold: firstly the definition of Libya as a subject, secondly the lack of information. The definition of the subject starts from the modern political boundaries, which do not predate the Ottomans; the lack of information must be related to the fact that most of the territory is desert, and peripheral to the concerns of wealthier and more powerful neighbours — Egypt, Tunis, Kanem/Borno, and the maritime empires of western Europe. Instead of a positive entity of which the modern political limits are only the most recent expression, it is all too easy to see a hollow space between neighbours north, south, east and west. How to fill that space conceptually and evidentially is the problem explicit or implicit in all the literature over the years since the foundation of the Society for Libyan Studies. This essay does not aim to be exhaustive, simply to indicate the lines of thought and investigation, and offer some conclusions.

Research on Libya during the first Ottoman and Qaramanli periods has been handicapped by the lack of a theme. Much work on these periods has been done to a large extent as spin-off from other research contingent on Libya, and new publications in European languages have been few. Their effect has been to cast a bright light on some corners of the subject, but the rest has been left in deep shadow. What follows is a summary of what has been done, together with some suggestions about where concerned research might be directed.

A starting point for any research is bibliography. Bono (1982) provides a general guide to western sources on Libya which includes material on the period, while his earlier article (Bono 1979) concentrates on scarce published sources, some of which come from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Another problem facing researchers is access to contemporary material. There is an immense quantity of consular material in archives in Britian, France and in particular Italy, some of which has been used. Individual longer accounts have been published as well, particularly of manuscript sources.

Among the most interesting manuscripts are the longer, coherent accounts of people who stayed in Tripoli for extended periods. The journals of Thomas Baker, the English Consul in Tripoli between 1677 and 1685, fall into this category, and are discussed below. The guidebook written in 1767 by Anthony Knecht, British Vice-Consul, gives considerable information about the diplomatic, political and economic life of the city (Pennell 1982).

Another way of dealing with these extensive sources is to write commentaries on them. In the first issue of Libyan Studies the works of James Bruce, the Scottish eighteenth century traveller, were discussed (Cumming 1970). This is also the approach adopted by ‘Imad al-Din Ghanim (1982), in his article in Arabic about an anonymous French account, translated into German in 1708 (Allerneuster Zustand der Afrikanischen Konigreiche Tripoli, Tunis and Algier, von einem gelehrten Jesuiten bey verricheter Skavelosung, Hamburg 1708).

Libya at the beginning of this century had little to offer the would-be imperialist and coloniser. The true value of Turkey's last remaining African possessions was not — despite the insistence of the Italian nationalist lobby — as a settler-colony or as a gateway to the largely illusory wealth of central Africa, but as a strategic base on the central Mediterranean. The general poverty of Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica was reflected indeed in the poverty of the literature in any language on contemporary Libya.

But growing Italian interest in these territories, by 1900 almost the last parts of Africa unclaimed by any European power, generated a series of books and articles by an imperialist-nationalist lobby eager to prove the case that Italy's political, strategic, economic and social wellbeing depended on the immediate possession of Turkish North Africa. Such writings naturally generated a rather less voluminous counter-flow of material, mainly from socialist sources, putting the opposite and (as events were to prove) essentially more realistic case.

The outbreak of the Italo-Turkish war in September 1911 and the subsequent Italian occupation of bridgeheads at Tripoli, Horns, Benghazi, Derna and Tobruk first brought Libya to the notice of the international press. The British correspondents who reported one or other side of the conflict subsequently produced a number of surprisingly partisan books about the war and their own adventures in it, but had very much less to say about the little-understood country and its people. With the sudden end of the war in 1912 and the outbreak of more serious fighting in the Balkans, interest in Libya quickly waned. For the next 30 years nearly all the relevant literature was to be provided by Italians, in Italian and written from a purely Italian point of view — some of it later to be destroyed in the antifascist and anti-imperialist reaction from 1943 onwards.

Water is a familiar resource and one which is rarely properly valued, and worse, frequently treated as if it were a ‘free good’. In a country such as Libya, which has no perennial surface-runoff and where no permanently flowing stream reaches the Mediterranean Sea, the value of its available water is proportionately important. At the same time Libya has some deeply rooted attitudes to resources, often culturally based, which have militated against the optimum long term use of its none too abundant renewable and non-renewable water. In addition Libya has undergone some remarkable changes in economic circumstances in the past twenty years. These changes of circumstance have been of particular importance because they stimulated expectations and water demand much more effectively than they brought about changes of attitude at national and local levels to regulate water allocation and inform water utilisation policies. The changes have been especially powerful where they have resulted from the deployment of new technologies which have had significant environmental impacts.

Libya is by most definitions an oil-based economy. Yet academic study of the national oil industry is at best fragmentary. The reasons for the poor showing of the Libyan oil industry in the literature stem partly from the relative decline in its international importance since the mid-1970s and partly from the ambiguity over acknowledgement of the role of the oil industry within Libya.

The growth of the Libyan oil industry dates from 1951 and the coming of national independence. There had been surveys of a small scale and technologically limited kind in Libya in the Italian period. Some shows of oil had been discovered in Tripolitania as early as 1914 when water wells were drilled to supply Tripoli city (Waddams 1980, 27). Other oil was discovered in Tripolitania in the 1930s and a full scale exploration programme was prepared in the years 1937–1940 by the Italian national oil corporation under the geological guidance of Professor Ardito Desio, but never fully implemented due to the onset of war. Indeed, Desio was to return as a consultant to the oil companies working in Libya in the 1950s.

In 1953 a mineral law was issued which paved the way for the grant of concessions to foreign oil companies to explore and develop oil resources. A petroleum law was promulgated in 1955 which offered rather more favourable terms on fees, rents, royalties and expensing to the oil companies than were available in other longer established oil producing states of North Africa and the Middle East (cf. Waddams, 1980, 57–70). At the same time, the assets of the oil companies in Libya were given far reaching protection under amendments of the petroleum law. The consequence of the generous operating terms of this and subsequent revisions of the law (1961 and 1965) was a rapid growth in the number of concessionaries exploring for oil within the country. The open-door policy pursued by the government was much criticised at a later period. Undoubtedly, however, it did succeed in attracting a wide spectrum of oil companies into Libya, including the major ones, such as Esso, Royal Dutch/Shell, Texaco, Gulf, BP and Mobil, together with many small independent interests. The best international techniques for exploration and development were put to work in Libya within a very short space of time, bringing the country rapidly into the ranks of the main oil-exporting states. Oil exports began on a commercial scale in September 1961 from Esso's Zelten fields in the Sirtican area, concession No. 6.

Oil wealth has transformed Libya, a desertic and sparsely populated country, bringing dramatic demographic changes (Zoghlami 1979). El Mehdawi and Clarke (1982) and Lawless and Kezeiri (1983) describe and analyse the growing polarisation of the population in the north-west and north-east coastal regions which contain the two largest cities, Tripoli and Benghazi. They show that in recent years spatial duality has been sharply intensified by strong rural to urban migration and also by an increase in interregional migration. The concentration of new development programmes in certain urban centres has been the main cause of the development differential among the regions. As a result the regions which include the most important urban centres have become the most prosperous and the others have become less developed or even depressed. This has been the main cause of the rapid increase in both rural to urban migration and interregional migration. The inhabitants of the less developed regions have continued to move in increasing numbers to those which are more developed. The large majority of migrants who moved from these less developed regions are represented by rural people who have changed their place of residence and their occupation. They have left their work in the rural sector to seek employment in the industrial and service sector. As a result agricultural production has declined. The agrarian sector now employs less than a quarter of the Libyan workforce and the percentage of nomads and semi-nomads has declined to under 10% of the population. Albergani and Vignet-Zunz (1982) have shown that colonial invasion and occupation followed by the Second World War threatened the Bedouin of the Jebel Akhdar with extinction, not through sedentarisation but through the mass migration of a devastated rural population. The advent of oil and the high salary levels available in urban centres further encouraged this tendency. Gannous (1979) studied the movement of Bedouin from rural areas to the town of Al Abiyar and the erosion of Bedouin culture by urban values.

Political geography can be taken to include the geographical analysis of formal political territories of all kinds, and an interest in political spheres of influence. Thus defined, Libya must have provided an almost unparalleled range of topics for study in the past 20 years. Internal administrative districts have been changed three times. The international boundaries of the state have been the subject of debate and dispute. In 1975 Libya occupied a large tract of northern Chad and became heavily involved in the Chadian civil war in 1980. Maritime boundary delimitation began in the 1980s and Libyan claims to historic water status for the Gulf of Sirte were disputed by the United States. At least eight attempts at political mergers with other states have been made by Colonel Qadhafi, while other Libyan foreign policy adventures have been widespread, especially in Africa. In the face of this plethora of geopolitical activity it is disappointing to report that the political geography of Libya has not received the attention it deserves from scholars in Britain or elsewhere. Only in one area of study — international boundaries — is the literature reasonably plentiful, and of a high calibre (detailed bibliographies in Alawar 1983; Lawless 1987). While this emphasis may be justified on the grounds that Libya's boundaries are major potential ‘flashpoints’ (Copson 1982) it leaves a great deal of potentially useful geopolitical insights as yet unexplored. No publications have been traced for example on the implications of the changing location of Libya's designated capital city, from Tripoli to Benghazi — Tripoli to Beida to Tripoli and now — conceivably — to Sirte.