Istwa Nou

Early in the nineteenth century Britain backed Yusuf Karamanli, pasha of Tripoli, who pushed his authority into the Fezzan and built working relations with the sultanates of Bornu and Sokoto far to the south. British patronage did not disturb the business. Tripoli stood at the end of the trans-Saharan caravan roads and was one of the largest slave markets on the Mediterranean coast. Karamanli died in 1830, civil war followed, and Ottoman authority was restored by the early 1840s. Real order across Cyrenaica, the Fezzan and the central desert came instead from Muhammad al-Sanusi and the religious order he founded, which preached a purified Islam and reconciled feuding clans so effectively that Ottoman governors had to stay on good terms with it. Sanusi merchants traded slaves with equal determination. Here the traffic proved almost impossible to suppress and survived into the twentieth century, ending with the Italian conquest of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica around 1911 and French advances further south. The Sanusiyya went on fighting the Italians into the 1930s.

Morocco was the one Maghreb state the Ottomans never governed, and it spent the nineteenth century holding Europeans at arm's length. Under Sultan Mawlai Sulaiman early in the century the isolation was near total and European merchants worked under tight restriction. Then the region reached in. Moroccan help for Abd al-Qadir's resistance in Algeria brought a French incursion in 1845. Spain sent an army that inflicted heavy defeats, and in 1860 the sultan agreed to a large indemnity. He borrowed from Britain to pay it, and the loan carried British influence over Moroccan commerce with it. That was the hinge. Between 1873 and 1894 Mawlai al-Hasan extended the state into the Atlas and northern Mauritania and held a striking degree of autonomy, but the debt had already opened the door. In 1912 Morocco passed under European control and was divided between France and Spain. Across the Sahara the answer to a Europeanised Mediterranean was a harder and more militant Islam, which supplied the nationalist movements of the century that followed.