The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz
240
The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz
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Overview
The Ottoman Scramble for Africa is the first book to tell the story of the Ottoman Empire's expansionist efforts during the age of high imperialism. Following key representatives of the sultan on their travels across Europe, Africa, and Arabia at the close of the nineteenth century, it takes the reader from Istanbul to Berlin, from Benghazi to Lake Chad Basin to the Hijaz, and then back to Istanbul. It turns the spotlight on the Ottoman Empire's expansionist strategies in Africa and its increasingly vulnerable African and Arabian frontiers.
Drawing on previously untapped Ottoman archival evidence, Mostafa Minawi examines how the Ottoman participation in the Conference of Berlin and involvement in an aggressive competition for colonial possessions in Africa were part of a self-reimagining of this once powerful global empire. In so doing, Minawi redefines the parameters of agency in late-nineteenth-century colonialism to include the Ottoman Empire and turns the typical framework of a European colonizer and a non-European colonized on its head. Most importantly, Minawi offers a radical revision of nineteenth-century Middle East history by providing a counternarrative to the "Sick Man of Europe" trope, challenging the idea that the Ottomans were passive observers of the great European powers' negotiations over solutions to the so-called Eastern Question.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804799294 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Ottoman Scramble for Africa
Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz
By Mostafa Minawi
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9929-4
CHAPTER 1
OTTOMAN LIBYA, THE EASTERN SAHARA, AND THE CENTRAL AFRICAN KINGDOMS
It is now that travel in the real Sahara starts. ... Crossing this part of the Sahara Desert, if it weren't for the color difference, one would think that one is on the open seas. No matter how far you move towards the horizon, there it is, the horizon, unchanging. An empty, deep, horizon on fire! No discernible structure, not even a single tree to distract your eye from the fatigue caused by this emptiness.
Sadik al-Mouayad Azmzade, outside of Jalu in the Sahara, October 26, 1895
WHAT AN OUTSIDER LIKE Sadik Pasha al-Mouayad Azmzade saw as an ocean of sand dunes and undistinguishable shadows blending earth with horizon was in fact a complex landscape encompassing a multitude of interconnected cultural, political, and religious formations. The perception of the Sahara as a place of exotic "emptiness," literally an unreadable landscape as Azmzade described it, is reflected in much of the scholarship that has treated Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa as spaces separate and isolated from North Africa and the Middle East. This false perception is reinforced by the institutional area studies model, which sets academic inquiry in separate silos to match funding packages that prioritize Western imperial interests in the twentieth century. The result has been an artificial severance of the historical ties that leaves transregional connections between the Mediterranean, the Middle East, North Africa, Saharan/ sub-Saharan Africa, and central Africa greatly under-researched.
The mental separations between the so-called Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Mediterranean, and Saharan/sub-Saharan Africa are not new, however. They run deep through the historiography of the Mediterranean world from the late nineteenth century, where "Mediterranean Africa (as part of the Mediterranean, or Arab, and hence non-African world) has often been excised from conceptions of the continent 'proper' ... and the way the Sahara has correspondingly been seen — or rather unseen — as an empty space in between." Azmzade's description of the Sahara as exotic and unfamiliar, for example, is but a continuation of a nineteenth-century tradition of exoticizing the southern reaches of the empire beyond the Mediterranean.
In this chapter, I offer an introduction to this complex geopolitical, economic, and cultural region (Figure 3), stretching from the Mediterranean to sub-Saharan Africa, in an attempt to de-exoticize it for readers who are not familiar with its history. I begin with a brief overview of the political history of the coastal towns of Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, starting with the first Ottoman period of rule in the sixteenth century through the years of nominal Ottoman rule by the Karmanli Dynasty (1711–1835) and ending in the 1840s, when direct Ottoman rule was reestablished and the Sanusi Order began to put down roots in the Libyan interior. Turning the spotlight to the southern reaches of the area under study, I cross the frontiers of the Sahara into the Sudanic belt and the southern reaches of the long-distance trade routes from the Mediterranean Sea, ending along the shores of Lake Chad. There, in the geographic center of the Sudan and the southern African frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, two competing kingdoms had for centuries engaged in productive political, cultural, and economic exchange with the Mediterranean coast. Of course, by "the Sudan" I am not referring to the Republic of Sudan or the Republic of South Sudan. The Sudan in the nineteenth century was what Arab geographers often termed "Bilad al-Sudan," literally "Land of the Blacks"; this is the area that lies south of mostly Arabic-speaking North Africa, stretching horizontally across the continent.
The two kingdoms — often referred to as sultanates because of the adoption of Islam as the official religion of the ruling dynasties — were the Kingdom of Kanem-Borno (often simply Borno or Bornu) and the Kingdom of Wadai (Wadi 'Ulay in some Arabic and Ottoman sources). A third, politically and economically weaker kingdom that survived at different times as a tributary state to either Borno or Wadai or both was the Kingdom of Bagirmi. Together Kanem-Borno, Wadai, and Bagirmi, often referred to as the Central Sudanic Kingdoms, are the focus here, but it is important to note that they were not the only central African polities to influence the extent and nature of foreign imperial presence in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. There were other kingdoms, sultanates, and caliphates, such as Darfur to the east and Sokoto and Adamawa to the west, but they played marginal roles during the period of focus for this book and therefore do not receive any detailed attention.
The relationship between the Central Sudanic Kingdoms and Cyrenaica was often mediated through the nomadic populations crisscrossing the eastern Sahara. These were the Bedouins of the Libyan Desert who lived in nomadic and seminomadic tribes that controlled most of the main trade routes across the eastern Sahara and served as human conduits between the Mediterranean coast and the Sudanic belt, tying the two regions together on economic, social, cultural, and political levels.
First, let us turn to the provincial center of power in Ottoman Libya, Tripoli, where the story of Ottoman influence in the region goes back to the early modern period, a time of corsairs, pirates, and the so-called golden age of Kanuni Süleyman (Suleiman the Law Giver), better known in the West as Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566).
The Karamanli Dynasty and the Central African Kingdoms
Ottoman involvement in the Barbary Coast, which roughly corresponds to the coasts of modern Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria, began in the early sixteenth century. An emerging world power at the time, the Ottoman Empire threw its support behind the coast's corsair commanders, reis in Ottoman-Turkish, who were at war with Charles V, the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, in the name of the Ottoman sultan. The most famous of these commanders — or infamous depending on which point of view one chooses — was the legendary Hayreddin (Reis) Barbarossa (d. 1546), to whom the sultan awarded the honorific Beylerbeyi Pasha in recognition of his role in fighting alongside the Ottoman navy. In 1533 he was appointed commander of the navy with the title Kapudan Pasa (Captain Pasha), starting a trend of official cooperation between the navy and former corsairs that would last through the seventeenth century.
In 1551 the Ottoman navy, under the command of Grand Vizier Sinanüdin Yusuf Pasha (d. 1553) and with the expert advice of the corsair and former governor of Djerba Turgut Reis (d. 1565), routed the crusading Knights of St. John from Tripoli. Interestingly, Turgut Reis was not appointed the first governor-general of Tripolitania. That appointment went instead to Murad Aga, the former commander of a nearby post. Locals would later sanctify Murad Aga, who became a revered Sufi figure. The mosque he built in Tajura on the outskirts of today's Tripoli is also his place of burial and has become a Sufi "shrine" (mezar/mazar).
For close to seventy-five years, the waters off the Barbary Coast were the borderlands between the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires in the battle for control of the Mediterranean. Initially, with the help of the Barbary corsairs, Istanbul gained the upper hand in the western Mediterranean Sea, prompting some historians to call the sixteenth-century Mediterranean an "Ottoman lake." This status did not last long, however, for as early as the 1570s the empire's hold had begun to weaken, mirrored by the loosening hold on power of a series of Istanbul-appointed governors of Tripolitania.
By the early years of the seventeenth century, Istanbul's tenuous control of the Barbary Coast had been considerably compromised, opening the way for a series of local deys, renegades, who took over rule of the area and heavily relied for their economic survival on the slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa and the famous Barbary piracy against European and American ships. This situation continued until 1711, when Karamanli Ahmed — named in reference to Karaman, a provincial district in central Anatolia and the site of the ancient Emirate of Karaman — led an armed insurgency against the local dey, Muhammad Khalil ibn al-Ginn, occupying Tripoli and dismissing the Istanbul-appointed governor-general. Karamanli Ahmed — also known by his Arabized name, Ahmad al-Qaramanli — was a kuloglu (literally, "son of a slave"). Kuloglu usually meant a janissary who was a son of a janissary, but in the Maghreb it meant the son of a janissary officer and a local woman.
Through a combination of material incentives and deadly force, Karamanli Ahmed established himself as the paramount ruler of Tripolitania, in the process founding the dynastic rule of the Karamanli family. He maintained official ties to Istanbul, symbolized by the title Beylerbeyi Pasha bestowed on him by Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1673–1736). Locally, he ensured his monopolistic hold over this autonomous regency (pasalik) by massacring most of the influential janissaries in Tripoli who posed potential challenges to his rule. This was a foreshadowing of what would take place in Cairo when Mehmed Ali Pasha followed the Karamanli example to solidify his rule in the formerly Mamluk-controlled Ottoman province of Egypt.
Despite Karamanli Ahmed Pasha's major accomplishments, the heyday of Karamanli rule was actually during the reign of his successor, Karamanli Yusuf Pasha (r. 1796–1832), who in 1796, following a violent struggle with local rivals, successfully established his dominance in Tripoli. After consolidating his power, he took advantage of the European preoccupation with the Napoleonic Wars to reassert Tripoli's influence in the Mediterranean by intensifying his support for the corsair raids on European and American ships. In the process, he engaged the newly established US Navy along the coast of Tripoli in a battle that ended with the signing of a peace treaty with the Americans in 1812. Yusuf Pasha's ambitions were not limited to the Mediterranean. In the 1820s his financial goals led him south to the Lake Chad basin, where he established a military alliance with the powerful Kingdom of Kanem-Borno.
Borno is the name of a state in the northeast of today's Nigeria southwest of Lake Chad. It was also the name of the ancient kingdom of the Kanuri people of central Africa. Until the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Saifawa Dynasty ruled Borno, whose location at the geographical center of central Sudan made it not only the beneficiary of a multitude of cultural influences but also the trading hub of North Africa, the Nile Valley, and the sub-Saharan region as well as the gateway to the lucrative slave trade. This strategic location also made Borno the object of attacks by aspiring neighbors from both east and west, however. For example, in 1804 repeated raids by the aggressively expansionist Fulani fighters aiming to expand the rule of the Sokoto Caliphate forced the ruling Saifawa family to seek help from a popular Muslim scholar from Kanem, northeast of Lake Chad, named Shehu (Sheikh) al-Hajj Muhammad Lamino (al-Amin) bin Muhammad al-Kanemi. Al-Kanemi came to the aid of Borno on more than one occasion, eventually subduing the Fulani threat.
The long-term consequence of al-Kanemi's success, however, was the weakened legitimacy of the Saifawa mai (king) and the eventual takeover of Borno by the al-Kanemi Dynasty. The last of the Saifawa mais was executed in 1846. With the al-Kanemi family controlling Borno, the two kingdoms were brought under the same rule, becoming the Kingdom of Kanem-Borno.
The challenge to Kanem-Borno's sovereignty did not end with the takeover by the al-Kanemi family. It continued for the next century, requiring the assistance of allies in Fezzan, Tripoli, and later Benghazi. As early as 1806, while Kanem-Borno was fending off Fulani attacks, Wadai, under the rule of 'Abd al-Karim Sabun (r. 1803–1813), invaded the Borno tributary state of Bagirmi, using the excuse of the religious laxity of its ruler 'Abd al-Rahman Qarun, and took over the capital, Massina. Control of Bagirmi, which for decades had been the main reason for the wars between Borno and neighboring Wadai, would continue to be a security and economic issue until 1817, when al-Kanemi finally accepted the aid of his ally to the north, Karamanli Yusuf Pasha. Yusuf Pasha sent a military expedition under the command of Muhammad al-Mekani, governor of Fezzan, to assist Borno in its fight against the Fulani rebels that year and again in 1821, when Shehu Muhammad Lamino al-Kanemi (r. 1811–1835) requested aid in subduing Bagirmi, which was once again rebellious.
Karamanli Yusuf Pasha saw the strategic benefit in aligning himself with Kanem-Borno to solidify his economic ties with the most powerful Sudanic kingdom at the time. This alliance helped him reinforce his hold on the lucrative sub-Saharan–North African slave trade, which was the main export business of Kanem-Borno and a large source of revenue for the Karamanli Dynasty. Economic and political relations with the regency's southern neighbors acquired special importance after European and American powers forced Yusuf Pasha to sign agreements to abandon his support of corsair raids, one of his largest revenue sources. The Kingdom of Wadai, Kanem-Borno's main competitor for trade and political domination of central Sudan, continued to agitate for war, at times with great success, eventually reaching and partially destroying the capital of Borno, Kukawa, in 1846.
In addition to the Tripoli-based Karamanli Dynasty and the Central Sudanic Kingdoms, there was another power to contend with along the eastern trade routes of the Sahara: the "Arab" Bedouins, the masters of the Libyan Desert. Like the tribes that inhabited the Arabian Desert, the Ottoman Empire's other southern frontier, the Bedouins who inhabited the vast expanses of land between the Libyan interior and the Central Sudanic Kingdoms maintained their autonomy under Karamanli rule and later under direct Ottoman rule. Control of the trade routes was shared with the other masters of trans-Saharan trade, the Tuareg (Tawariq) of the western Sahara. However, because my focus is on the eastern trade route of the desert, I limit my observations to the Bedouin tribes and their role in maintaining the cultural and economic connections between the Mediterranean coast and central Africa during in the second half of the nineteenth century.
One of the strongest of the tribal communities was the Awlad Sulaiman tribal confederation, whose members claimed descent from Banu Sulaim of Arabia, whose origins can be traced back to Khaibar near Najd in central Arabia and later to the Hijaz. Around 978 the Fatimid Caliph al-'Aziz Billah (r. 955–996) forced Banu Sulaim to migrate to Upper Egypt. In the eleventh century, their descendants, Awlad Suleiman, made their way west through the Libyan Desert to the Mediterranean coastal towns stretching from Tripoli to Benghazi, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century they had established themselves as the main power controlling the flow of goods along the eastern trans-Saharan caravan routes from the Central Sudanic Kingdoms in the south to the Mediterranean coast of the Libyan provinces in the north. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the historic relationship between the Bedouins of the Libyan Desert and the kingdoms of central Sudan helped to facilitate a political alliance between the Ottoman-controlled north and the sub-Saharan interior until the Italian occupation of Libya in 1911. The assertion of direct Ottoman rule in the Libyan provinces in 1835 inadvertently served to solidify these ties when the Ottomans forced the migration of the majority of Awlad Suleiman south to the Lake Chad basin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ottoman Scramble for Africa by Mostafa Minawi. Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Old Empire, New Empire1. Ottoman Libya, the Eastern Sahara, and the Central African Kingdoms
2. The Legal Production of Ottoman Colonial Africa
3. The Diplomatic Fight for Ottoman Africa
4. Resistance and Fortification, 1894–1899
5. Transimperial Strategies for an Intercontinental Empire
6. The Local Meets the Global on an Imperial Frontier
Conclusion: The Blinding Teleology of Failure