An Empire of Frontiers: Between Migrant and State in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1835-1911

This dissertation examines the Ottoman Empire's transregional role in global developments in the Mediterranean and Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emphasizes the importance of Ottoman Libya, its coastlines and hinterland, as a critical territory that connected Africa to the Middle East. Consulting primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese, it argues that Ottoman statesmen first targeted Tripolitania and Fezzan and then Cyrenaica to accomplish what I call Ottoman settlerism in North Africa. My dissertation contends that the goal of extending Ottoman sovereignty over these three North African provinces was the creation of the “Second Egypt”—a vast territory targeted to become a cultivated and profitable commercial center along the African hinterland and Mediterranean coast. These imperial efforts led to the creation of newly established settler colonies that laid the foundations for Ottoman expansionism, sovereignty, and security through refugees, migrants, and exiles. I demonstrate that Ottoman Libya was far from isolated, but was organically connected to the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Ottoman-Persian borderlands, the islands of the Mediterranean, and other regions of Africa. This investigation of Ottoman settlerism in the Second Egypt provides a crucial intervention in historiography of the Middle East and North Africa, and, more broadly, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trans-imperial rivalry over the Mediterranean Sea and Africa by focusing on the overlooked role of Ottoman imperial power in Africa