Desert Borderland

Desert Borderland investigates the historical processes that transformed political identity in the easternmost reaches of the Sahara Desert in the half century before World War I. Adopting a view from the margins-illuminating the little-known history of the Egyptian-Libyan borderland-the book challenges prevailing notions of how Egypt and Libya were constituted as modern territorial nation-states.Matthew H. Ellis draws on a wide array of archival sources to reconstruct the multiple layers and meanings of territoriality in this desert borderland. Throughout the decades, a heightened awareness of the existence of distinctive Egyptian and Ottoman Libyan territorial spheres began to develop despite any clear-cut boundary markers or cartographic evidence. National territoriality was not simply imposed on Egypt's western-or Ottoman Libya's eastern-domains by centralizing state power. Rather, it developed only through a complex and multilayered process of negotiation with local groups motivated by their own local conceptions of space, sovereignty, and political belonging. By the early twentieth century, distinctive "e;Egyptian"e; and "e;Libyan"e; territorial domains emerged-what would ultimately become the modern nation-states of Egypt and Libya.