Italian Libya

Libya, 1934–1943. Draft, not yet reviewed

Libya was a colony of the Kingdom of Italy, located in North Africa, between 1934 and 1943. It was formed from the unification of the colonies of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, which had been Italian possessions since 1911. In 1934, the colonies were unified by governor Italo Balbo, with Tripoli as the capital. Although the Italians were defeated there by the Allies in 1943, many of the Italian settlers still remained in Libya.

Seat of power: Tripoli

Rulers

Culture

• In 1923, indigenous rebels associated with the Senussi Order organized the Libyan resistance movement against Italian settlement in Libya, mainly in Cyrenaica.
• The rebellion was put down by Italian forces in 1932, after the pacification campaign, which resulted in the deaths of a quarter of Cyrenaica's population. From 1930 to 1931, 12,000 Cyrenaicans were executed and all the nomadic peoples of northern Cyrenaica were forcibly removed from the region and relocated to huge concentration camps in the Cyrenaican lowlands.
• Various infrastructure projects, most notably roads, railways and villages, were set up, as well as archeology. It had a population of around 150,000 Italians.

Picture

Leptis Magna was a prominent city of the Carthaginian Empire and Roman Libya, unearthed in the 1920s by Italian archaeologists during Italy's occupation of Libya.

Image: joepyrek from Richmond, Va, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, file

Sources

• Italian Libya (Wikipedia)
• Italian Libya (Wikidata)
• About the picture (Wikipedia)

Text adapted from the Wikipedia articles listed as sources, CC BY-SA 4.0.