A History of Libya

by John Wright

John Wright begins his history of Libya as far back as prehistoric times and concludes with the fortieth anniversary of the Gadafi revolution. He briefly surveys the territory's early hunter-gatherers and the activities of its mid-desert Garamantian civilization. Then he travels briskly through the land's successive the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Muslim Arabs, Genoans, Normans, Spaniards, Knights of Malta, Ottoman Turks, and semi-independent Karamanlis. Wright traces the routes of the ancient trans-Saharan black slave trade, which involved ports in Tripoli, Benghazi, the eastern Mediterranean, the Balkans, the Aegean Sea, and the Levant, and he highlights Tripoli's nineteenth-century role in enabling European exploration of the desert. Wright's modern history centers on the Italian era (1911--1943), addressing the harshness of Italy's long conquest yet giving credit to the material achievements of Air Marshal Italo Balbo. Three chapters recast Libya's largely passive role in the Second World War; 1951's fairly smooth transition to an internationally brokered independence; the Sanussi monarchy, which reigned for eighteen years; the discovery and exploitation of oil in the 1950s and 1960s; and the post-1969 Colonel Gadafi phenomenon. This revised edition adds a new chapter on the events surrounding Gadafi's fall and the early developments taking shape in post-liberation Libya. Wright has also revised his text to reflect recent research.

Genres: History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published July 6, 2010

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. ^1

John Wright is the author of the River Cottage Handbooks Mushrooms, Edible Seashore, Hedgerow and Booze and also The Naming of the Shrew, a book which explores the infuriating but fascinating topic of how and why plants, animals and fungi earn their Latin names. As well as writing for national publications, he often appears on the River Cottage series for Channel 4. He gives lectures on natural history and every year he takes around fifty 'forays', many at River Cottage HQ, showing people how to collect food - plants from the hedgerow, seaweeds and shellfish from the shore and mushrooms from pasture and wood. Over a period of nearly twenty-five years he has taken around six hundred such forays. Fungi are his greatest passion and he has thirty-five years' experience in studying them.

John Wright is a member of the British Mycological Society and a Fellow of the Linnaean Society.

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid political history of Libya, more positive on the Qaddafi years than most, though realistic about the failure to build any durable institutions. Harrowing descriptions of the genocidal policies of the Italian occupation.

[Richard Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good concise history of Libya, perhaps the chapters on Gadafi and the revolution lacked a little depth, but nevertheless a interesting read.

[Matthew Griffiths · Rating 3 out of 5]

an interesting accounting of the history of Libya, going from the relative high points of the roman period right the way through to the decline of the ottoman period. offers a fairly well structured approach to recounting the history of the various developments in the history of Libya and engages particularly well with the history of the divisions between the two regions of the Libyan state in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. only shame was that the edition I read was not up to date with current affairs in Libya.