Moad mosabi

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Piracy as Method West of the Nile and the Fiction of 'Empty Space'

‘Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognised by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognised by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is in that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed.’1 PPiracy as Method

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I. Hostile environments, Un-inhabitable regions, arid landscapes. Deserts.

fig.1 Previous page: A Tebu tribesman patrolling the Libya Niger border.

The few words used to describe a surface of the earth, that in its single largest extent measures 9.2 million square kilometres. An area that is more than 2.3 times the size of Europe. The Sahara.

1. Frantz Omar Fanon, Black Skin White Mask (1952), Trans.

C. Markmann (Pluto Press, 2008), 168–69.

2. S. Michaelides et al., “Precipitation: Measurement, Remote Sensing, Climatology and Modeling,” Atmospheric Research 94, no. 4 (2009): 515. It is important to also consider the methodology of this process, ‘The rainfall measured by a pair of side by side cylinders will not necessarily perfectly agree, simply because of the statistics of the discrete nature of the accumulation summation. Wind effects which may also be very spatially dependent can lead to differences in side by side accumulation gauge measurements.’

3. C. Kidd, “Satellite Rainfall Climatology: A Review,” International Journal of Climatology 21, no. 9 (2001): 1041–66.

4. Stefano Biagetti and Jasper M. Chalcraft, “Imagining Aridity: Human-Environment Interactions in the Acacus Mountains, South-West Libya,” in Imagining Landscapes, ed. Tim Ingold and Monica Janowski (Ashgate, 2012), 80.

fig.2 Location plot of global GTS reporting stations. In Kidd, “Satellite Rainfall Climatology: A Review.”. fig.3 An early satellite image captured by the TIROS-1 satellite over the Sahara and overlain with weather features.



5. Ibid., 83. Further shown in this observation, ‘Despite this, permanent plant cover can actually be recorded all year round, allowing of the presence of both humans and animals. even when no rain has occurred throughout the twelve months, residual waters stored at shallow depths allow vegetation to survive in serve conditions.’ And personhood is made exceptionally prevalent today in a time which refugees are constantly found.

This stretch of land crosses borders and reaches from its furthest reaches in the east the Nile river and to the west the Atlantic Ocean, between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Sahel to the south.

It is defined by modern science within a climatic formulation. It is the area of land that receives little or no rainfall. Little rainfall is defined precisely as that which is below an upper limit of 250 millimetres of rainfall per annum.

This area of land is called an isohyet, a region bounded by lines drawn between points where the recording stations are based.2 It is based on an understanding that agricultural cultivation without artificial irrigation cannot be sustained at a rate of precipitation lower than this.

Aridity as a value judgement

Aridity then is a concept that is not only defined by a lack, but also by statistical averages, and models from remote sensing data that is gathered from looking down at cloud formations that rise to 2,000m above that surface. i.e. It is explicitly not from the perspective of its inhabitants. This designation is to inform and give colour to the area at-a-distance.3 This seemingly objective scientific term cannot be taken for granted, and this conception of aridity, a concept that has been shown in contemporary and historical times, to be not perceived or even imagined as such by those who call the Sahara their home. Rather the method in which these peoples have inhabited this land, made it viable and amenable for different forms of habitation defies the definition of what is technically ‘hyperarid’. To put forward that cultural specificities are not present in narratives of environmental determinism, is to show that: ‘The adaptive strategies of contemporary pastoralists are underwritten not so much by a sense of the ‘harshness’ of the environment (as it appears to western eyes) as by a culturally inflected mode of perception that is attuned to local variations and to the possibilities they afford.’4 Of course, water matters, but this homogenous, and undifferentiated concept applied across vast tracts of land does not account for local topography, hydrography, and unique cultural forms and their respective adaptations. Forms and adaptations which show in the simplest means that it matters differently, heterogeneously and is varied across place and according to personhood.5

PPiracy as Method

Towards a social view of space through local considerations

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6. Wolfgang Schenkel, “Color Terms in Ancient Egyptian and Coptic,” in Anthropology of Color: Interdisciplinary Multilevel Modeling, ed. Robert E. MacLaury, Galina V. Paramei, and Don Dedrick (John Benjamins Publishing, 2007), 225.

‘Related to Semitic shr ‘to be reddish’: Arabic (verb, stem XI) shr ‘to be white-red, yellowish,’ (adj.) ‘ashar ‘to make yellowishred, desert-coloured’ (sahra’ ‘desert,’ ‘Sahara’), Syrian ashar ‘to blush’.’

7. Marcus T. Cicero, De Officiis (On Obligations, 44BC), ed. Patrick G. Walsh, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 2000). It is made implicit by Cicero in the following passage, “Nothing is private by nature, but rather by long occupation [occupatio] (as when men moved into some empty lands in the past), or by victory (when they acquired it in war), or by law [lex], by settlement, by agreement, or by lot [sors]. The result is that the land of Arpinum is said to belong to the Arpinates, and that of Tusculum to the Tusculani. The distribution of private possessions [possessiones] is of a similar kind.” Quoted in B. Kingsbury and B. Straumann, The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010), 113.

8. Yan Thomas, “Res Religiosae on the Categories of Religion and Commerce in Roman Law,” in Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, ed.

Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 40–72.

fig.4 Carta agrarian della Tripolitania, (1934). In Piccioli, ‘La nuova Italia d’oltremare.’ fig.5 Libia Occidentale.

Medie Precipazioni Annue, (1939). In Biblioteca Attilio Mori, Florence, IT.



9. Res nullius is the formulation of the law of the first taker, what before Justinian was referred to as the law of wild beasts, (Ferae Bestiae) in A Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society: New Series (American Philosophical Society, 1968), 326.

10. Alain Pottage, “Law after Anthropology: Object and Technique in Roman Law,” Theory,

Aridity is a modern concept to define the desert, yet the word desert itself employs a similar logic, it’s a label for a void space on a planetary scale. Its Latin root derives from the very act of ‘leaving to waste’. This is in stark contrast to its Arabic counterpart, the Sahara, which derives from the verb ‘to make yellowishred’ or ‘to blush’.6 This conception of a desert, an empty space, as a thing has existed since Ancient Rome and has entered its legal convention.7 First explicitly described in the Institutes of Gaius (161CE) and then in the Digest of Justinian (530-533CE).

Within this latter work, land as property was categorised as patrimonial or extrapatrimonial. The former contained private property in all its respective forms, while the later contains res communes, res publicae, res universitatis and res nullius. This latter version, res nullius, is addressed in the Digest, as to the forms of property relating to divini or humani iuris. The divini (divine) are broken down further into res sacrae, res religiosae and res sanctae.8 While the humani iuris (human rights) is divided into res derelictae and finally an undifferentiated form of res nullius that does not belong to the above categories.9 It is important to draw out the reification process of the Roman legal tradition, in which the thing, res, is made an object of law.10 This necessary need for its recognition, and specifically its bounded nature, is a paradox, as for something to be understood, but then in turn understood as no one’s thing11 would mean that it is first; recognisable within the legal convention’s repertoire of signs, and secondly known in its fullest extent to which will then become the thing subject to ownership, dominium or conveyancing.12 Though this may seem obvious in relation to animals to be hunted, but with respect to land, this was limited by exploration, specific interaction and prior knowledge of its inhabitants. A limit horizon. Buckland, with reference to Justinian, highlights this aporia at the core of the formulation of res nullius, ‘If I picked up an article which had been abandoned but which I supposed to have been accidentally dropped, and decided to keep it, had I acquired it? The difficulty is that I could hardly be said to intend to acquire what I did not think to be susceptible of acquisition.’13 The sea was the first land as 'property' that Ancient Rome confronted outside of its immediate territory. At this time, there were two sets of governing systems, laws, one which related to the citizens of the Empire and a second which related to non-citizens. The law that governed the sea was the latter category, in which it was deemed common to all. This was the basis, since the fifteenth century, that land not under dominium of European nation-states has been formalised within the parameters of what was then called Imperial Law. The work of Alberico Gentili and Grotius14 both put forward an argument in which the largest non-state territory, the high seas, are to be considered ‘res communes’.15 What this meant was that by putting forward an understanding of the seas as an open PPiracy as Method

Towards the convention and reification of 'empty space'

From Ancient Greece, the word horizon means, ‘to cut or to divide’. While the Arabic counterpart, Ufuq, derives from the word, ‘to reconcile, to bring together’.

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space , common to all nations, for free passage and trade, was that it required an institution for it to be maintained as such. Though this imperial law at the time in which the two earlier jurists were writing did not have a specific incorporeal body from which it could police this inter-space, it constructed a system in which it could be governed by all nation-states, enforcing their bond as a community. And to bind them further together, it constructed ‘others’, the non-state actors, as a ‘consensual enemy’. This enemy–hostis humani generis–was given the Ancient Roman designation of Pirata.16

Culture & Society 31, no. 2–3 (2014): 147–66.

11. It is important to note here the discrepancy in the French une chose sans maître and English nobody’s thing translations of res nullius.

12. Yan Thomas, Fictio Legis: L’empire de La Fiction Romaine et Ses Limites Médiévales (Presses Universitaires de France, 1995).

Modern International Law can be seen through the series of events that have warranted certain power structures coming together. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) set into motion sovereignty and the modern nation-state as it is currently known; the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) concerned provisions for the Spanish succession to be decided by other members of the European community of nations and the General Act of the Berlin Conference (1884), which set out the carving up of non-European land to be distributed amongst Europeans through a set of legal criteria.17

13. W. W. Buckland, A TextBook of Roman Law from Augustus to Justinian (Cambridge University Press, 1921), 205.

The only text on the matter requires knowledge on part of the occupant. - 41. 7.2. pr. Just.

14. Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of the Seas, or the Right Which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade (1609), Trans. by R. Van Deman-Magoffin (Oxford University Press, 1916).

15. It is important to note that Ancient Roman legal doctrines comprised a repertoire rather than a blueprint for designing imperial claims. C.f. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France C. 1500-C. 1800 (Yale University Press, 1995).

fig.6 Conference of Berlin, (1884). In Allgemeine Illustrierte Zeirung, S.308, Am 28.



16. ‘a pirate [pirata] is not included in the number of lawful enemies, but is the common enemy of all.’ in Cicero, De Officiis (On Obligations, 44BC).

17. The Treaty of Utrecht not only provided an agreement for the succession of the Spanish Monarchy, but it also set out Asiento, determining that the British (delegated to the South Sea Company) had the sole right of trading slaves for thirsty years across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Spanish Colonies.

This monopoly on maritime trade contended directly, following Grotius, with the sea being a free space and open to all.

This recasts this domain from its res communes status into the privilege of British maritime hegemony. A crucial turn in which Schmitt referred to as caesura in the history of International Law. In Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth (1950), ed. G. L. Ulmen (Telos Press Publishing, 2003), 181.

18. Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Modern Law Review, vol. 69 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 72.

This later Berlin Conference [fig.6], also known as the Congo Conference or the West African Conference in which free navigation of the Congo and Niger River was a central issue in relation to a wider set of criteria upon which the different nations in attendances could come to an agreement without resorting to warfare. Those in attendance, those who were deemed sovereign amounted to just 15 nations in 1884. The question of granting a right to one sovereign body to exclusive trade with another sovereign is one which is predetermined by the nature of how sovereignty is viewed as by both sides. It is prefigured on the basis that they recognise each other’s (racial) status, and to have faith in the signatures that bind them together. This privileged domain, of constituting law on an international stage, and granting legal personality means that ‘the sovereign becomes the prism, the gaze which reconstitutes the legal universe’.

This gate-keeping quality that is inherent in the concept of sovereignty is crucial to understand how the construction of empty space came to be. Sovereignty was originally established through a reliance on the concept of society, but which now constituted asserts its supremacy, its self-determined and exclusive prerogative of presenting itself as the vehicle by which this society is deemed to exist as such and comes into being. What is crucial to stress is that sovereignty is a possession, a guarded privilege of the few, specifically European, that in turn grant and deny this possession to others.18 This nationalist project of law making on an inter-state level is one that determines not only who can participate, but also opens the land in which those denied participation for conquest. Within this formulation, the pirate, specifically PPiracy as Method

Consular roads as means of a dialectical relationship with the territory

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that figure who acts without sovereign authority, is denied both any condition of self-governance, and the land that they operate is then equally denied recognition.

ates what constitutes the possibility of this subject-position and associated set of social relationships, but also an epistemic viewpoint from which a strategy of alternate concepts can be put forward that provide potentially viable modes of living and societal exchange. This utilises the work of Sandro Mezzarada and Brett Neilson who propose a framework of 'Border as Method' to reveal the significance of bordering practices in relation to the production of labour. In how they enact social divisions. Borders, they argue, do work at the epistemic and ontological level. Piracy as method takes this viewpoint forward in a space that is reified and constructed through the inhabitant who occupies it. A pirate as the figure who acts outside the realm of sovereign authority. If we understand sovereignty to be a possession bestowed or denied by other sovereign bodies, then the pirate's illegal status is defined by a predetermined (missing) privilege.

International Law, the global commons and the piratic others19 are set out as the three cornerstones in which the community of nations started to construct and divide the modern world. The high seas as a commons domain was reified as a smooth and homogenous space. Intrinsically empty and thus inalienable. This allowed it to perform a series of necessary functions for the maintenance of the global hegemonic order, specifically of the hegemony of the British and French Empires in the 19th century.

If the seas can be considered as such, then the desert, also referred to as the ‘sand sea’ has a certain equivalence. As Kant describes in his project for a 'Perpetual Peace', describing the very need for this ‘empty space’:

II. 22. Jacques Derrida, “Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion,” in Limited Inc, ed.

Samuel Weber (Northwestern University Press, 1988), 135.

‘The community of human beings is divided by uninhabitable parts [unbewohnbare Theile] of the Earth’s surface, such as oceans and deserts. These ‘parts’ may not be appropriated, being, “no one’s thing,” or, to employ the German form of the Latin res nullius, ‘without master’ [herrenlos]. But it is possible for the human beings to approach their fellows over these ownerless tracts [herrenlose Gegenden], and to utilise, as a means of social intercourse, that right to the earth’s surface that the human species shares in common. The travel through the ‘uninhabitable parts of the earth’s surface’ is due, in the case of the desert, to the exceedingly useful beast that is the dromedary. In the oceans, the possibility of the exceptional passage through ‘ownerless tracts’ may be attributed, with perfect symmetry, to the camel of the sea that is the ‘ships.’20 Empire as network of consular roads

Empty space becomes a key spatial imaginary of modernity and yet there is a confusion in which res nullius, things that are ungoverned or ungovernable, are mistaken with res communes, things that are governed in common. This is a chief tenet that Schmitt puts forward in the Nomos of the Earth in which he brings to light the controversy between Gilbert Gidel and Sir Cecil Hurst.

Whereby Schmitt proposes res nullius as the more apt reference for the sea.

Whereas if held in common, ‘every state has a right to pursue war with all the modern military means at its disposal – to lay mines and, even at the cost of third parties, to take prizes and booty, which one scarcely can imagine as the content of a principle of common use on Land.’ What is highlighted is that in an extra-juridical space, and at a time of war, ‘the strongest deals with all in the name of the law’, and thus only res nullius could apply when such an outcome was possible.21 Piracy as method is put forward not only as a process of research that renegoti

19. C.f. A Policante, The Pirate Myth: Genealogies of an Imperial Concept (Routledge, 2015); Daniel Heller-Roazen, “The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations,” 2009; Carl Schmitt, “The Concept of Piracy (1937),” Humanity 2, no. 1 (2011): 27–29; Kristen A. Harkness, “Pirates , Privateers , and State Power,” 2011.

20. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay (1775), ed. Mary C. Smith, Cosimo Classics Philosophy (Cosimo, Incorporated, 2010).

21. Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth (1950), 178.

23. Ori Bates, The Eastern Libyans (London: Macmillan and Co., 1914); David O’Conner, “Egyptians and Libyans in the New Kingdom. An Interpretation,” Expedition (Pennsylvania, November 1987). It is important to note that the people west of the Nile have been recorded within four broad ethnic groups of which the Libu/Rebu are one, of which there are many other tribes, communities and groups of people who existed in that stretch west of the Nile. It is important also to note what modern archaeologists and Egyptologist refer to as the ‘missing Libyan record’ in which a very sparse amount of information is recorded by the Ancient Egyptians until well into the 20th Dynasty, yet other proofs of exchange and commerce between the two groups of peoples have been observed.

24. Signed J.R.W, “Will the Libyan Desert Bloom Again?”.

Found in: Weizman and Sheikh, “The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert,” n. 38.

25. Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France C. 1500-C. 1800.

‘There is a police that is brutally and rather “physically” repressive (but the police is never purely physical) and there are more sophisticated police that are more “cultural” or “spiritual,” more noble. But every institution destined to enforce the law is a police…

There is no society without police even if one can always dream of forms of police that would be more sublime, more refined or less vulgar.’22 The reification of empty space puts forward a strategy that is not specific to any particular place or time, but rather a rhetorical gesture that exists independently from it. The area of the Sahara that has considered under this rubric however has been conceptualised under many names previously. From the time of 4th Dynasty in Ancient Egypt, the area west of the Nile was considered to be an extent that reached the shores of the Atlantic to the west and the line of Ethiopia to the south. This earlier conception was what the colonial Italian project atavistically referred back to when claiming the Quarta Sponda as part of a ‘Greater Italy’. Libia derives from an ethnic name first mentioned by Herodotus, of the Libu what was a possible mistranslation (Rebu rather than Libu) and omission of other ‘Libyan’ peoples.23 This is to stress that ‘Libia’ never existed outside an Ancient Egyptian/Greek negation, in which 1911 is a clean break of every form of human occupation that existed in this area previously.

‘The far-seeing eyes of Mussolini looked way beyond the waste-lands that had been abandoned for more than a thousand years by all but fighting Arabs when he made a triumphal journey through the colony … the frontier of cultivation moved 35 miles from the coast … acreage of barley has been quadrupled, hundreds of thousands of new olives trees have been set out, bringing the total to PPiracy as Method

Juritical definition of Roman Roads

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about a million.’24 A key characteristic of colonial projects in what has been coined the ‘Age of Empire’25 has been in rendering ‘unknown’ territories more knowable. Unknown to the colonists, and so made knowable through a normalising codification by them. This double move would then provide not only practical information for the means in which the expansion would occur, but also legitimates the expansionist sentiment itself. One of the key characteristics of the Italian Colonial project was not only the various academic and scientific institutions that had been an integral part of the process, but also the speed in which they operated, an efficiency that was commented upon by other researcher-explorers at the time.26 This speed and efficiency was achieved through the collaboration of three key institutions. The institutes of Military Geography (IGM), of Colonial Agriculture (IAO) [fig.7] and of the Geographical Society of Italy (SGI) working in tandem, surveying, mapping and cultivating with a purpose that formed an integral policy objective of the Fascist regime once it was in power in 1922. With the greatest period of activity in the years leading up to the eve of WW2.27 These ‘far-seeing eyes’ of Mussolini, perceiving this land as a wasteland, and so by expanding the coastline between these two empty spaces, of the Mediterranean and the sand sea, its intention was to engineer a change of the very regime of representation that the empty space rhetoric had bestowed upon it in the first place.

26. Bagnold, Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World.

fig.7 Above and below: Sala della Somalia Italiana e della Libia, in Istituto Agronico per l’Oltremare.



27. David Atkinson, “The Politics of Geography and the Italian Occupation of Libya,” Libyan Studies 27, no. 1996 (1996): 71–84.

Fig. 8 depicts this island strip. A view of the city of Tripoli, its urban centre surrounded by fortress walls. This is encompassed by larger surrounding farmland.

Specifically, date palms that stretch along a ‘frontier of cultivation’ abruptly ending at blank space, labelled Deserto. There is a small area of the paper map that shows the laying out of rows that traditional agriculture entails in the middle portion of the map, but the majority of the small hand drawn palms indicate a seemingly random dispersal of cultivation that only indicates intensity, as the scale of the trees does not conform to that of the space of the map as set out by the markers on the bottom right. What it seems to be doing is to set out an area of land whose boundary is recognisable, and one in which through the absence of fixity, is defined by an absence. terra incognita. The sea and the deserto are given graphic equivalence, yet the use of the maritime scale (in addition to the traditional linear metrical scale) doesn’t give a possibility of reading this space without its ‘consolidation’ [fig.10] and further cultivation, cultivation performing a double role of inscription and enclosure.

Drawn in 1923, the map utilises six distinct boundary lines. The coast line and limits of anchorage, roads, building outlines, city walls and those of describing the vegetal. Topography is notably absent. A feature that is prominent in a map made three years after in 1926, [fig. 10] of the entire extent of the state alongPPiracy as Method

fig.8 Following page: Carta Citta’E Porto di Tripoli (1923). In Biblioteca Attilio Mori, Florence, IT.

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Road as large-scale spatial device of territorial control

ďťż

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side its neighbouring countries. Here topography of the area is approximated (when compared against contemporary maps of the region today), but what is particularly revealing is the open-endedness of the southern border of the territory. The cohesiveness of a border is dependent on its integrity, its continuity, to effectively encircle and demarcate one land from another. Its power only exists without an opening, without leakage. This spillage of the map’s regions into one another highlights the problematic role in which the desert, without geographic features that have historically been conceived as borders, and its shifting landscape, denies an easy marking, denies a practical form of policing that a map would provide. This has been resolved using the geometric straight line that is still held today. Drawn with a ruler, it highlights a condition, present elsewhere, but explicit here, that property (in this case, at the scale of territory) and topography are not co-extensive.28 28. This is most convincingly argued by Pottage in relation to the rise of the Ordinance Survey and Land Registery in England in the late 19th Century in Alain Pottage, “The Measure of Land,” The Modern Law Review 57, no.

3 (1994): 379.

29. M Battaglia and F Morandi, Libia Dal 1902-1940 Agricoltura E Storia Nelle Fotografie dell’Istituto Agronico per l’Oltremare (Firenze: Ist. Agronomico per Oltremare, 2015), 46.

Emphasis my own. Trans. Theodora Giovanazzi, ‘In Tripolitania l’Ente rilevo tre aziende nella Gefara tripolina, a Fonduck el Togar, a Zavia ed ad Azizia. Successivamente dopo un accurato piano di studi nell’altopiano di Tarhuna, fu fondato il centro agricolo di Breviglieri, fu fondato il centro agricolo di Breviglieri, seguit a sua volta dai centri di Gioda e di Crispi, nelle vicinanze di Misurata, in conseguenza del rinvenimento in profondita di falde artesiane di grande portata ed all possibilita della lora captazione.’

30. The region of the east of Libya is called Cyrenaica after the Ancient Greek city of Cyrene founded in 630BC.

fig.9 Detail from Carta Citta’E Porto di Tripoli (1923). In Biblioteca Attilio Mori, Florence, IT. fig.10 E Regioni Limitrofe (1926), In Biblioteca Attilio Mori, Florence, IT.



31. Battaglia and Morandi, 46.

‘Lo scopo dell’Ente fu quello di valorizzare i terreni della Cirenaica “pacificati”, attraverso l’appoderamento e l’immissione di famiglie coloniche metropolitane, con il fine di costituire la piccola proprieta coltivatrice.’

Suburban Appian Way: a memorial avenue

This was approached through a form of institution, as made explicit in the following passage from a contemporary retrospective of the work published in 2006: ‘In Tripolitania, the Institution [of Colonial Agriculture] created three enterprises in the Gefara Tripolina, specifically; Fonduck el Togar, Zavia and Azizia.

Subsequently after an accurate plan was made to study the Tarhuna plateau, the agricultural centre of Breviglieri was founded, followed in turn by the centres of Gioda and Crispi, in the vicinity of Misurata, as a result of the discovery of aquifers with a great depth [of water] and their possible extraction.’29 The accurate plan that is referred to is the work shown in the 1926 map [fig. 10], made with greater detail in the areas closest to the coast. What they achieved was a cycle in which through agricultural cultivation, greater cartographic accuracy was attained. The fixity of the vegetal features gave rise to seemingly greater accuracy in the plan. This in turn opened upon the possibility of more agricultural cultivation on the surface. This fixity was achieved two-fold. Not only was the planting of trees an active act of intervention which necessitated continual maintenance and thus the presence of a worker tasked with the job, but also through the organic functioning of the plant, through the tolerance provided for it by the system of roots in connection with the trunk that would move in accordance with the wind-blown sand.

This view of the land is best described in another passage from the institute’s corpus of literature, ‘the purpose of the Entity [Institute of Colonial Agriculture] was to enhance the "pacified" Cyrenaican30 earth [terrani], through the addition and placement of metropolitan farm families, with the aim of establishing the small cultivating property.’31 Where the reach of this ‘pacification’ did not stop at the bio-political order of the subjects indigenous to the land, but the PPiracy as Method

Roman private housing turned its back to the street

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very ‘earth’ on which they stood. This empty space had been constructed at a distance, and now with proximity and direct access to it, is being re-constituted at the level of the chemical composition of the soil itself. This was achieved through the establishment of the small cultivating property as what have been also termed colonial farm villages. Though no conclusive number have been publicly compiled, the numbers attached to some of the documents I have found in the Institute indicate that they numbered in their hundreds across the whole breadth of Libia. Fig. 11 conveys the early distribution of the first and most notable ‘villages’, whose size far exceeds what would typically be considered the scale of a ‘village’. In an aerial photograph from circa 1940, [fig. 13] the buildings are shown, in which they are made to house the minimal administrative and other necessary social services.

This builds on the ideologies set up by the Berlin Conference of 1884, that relates to the construction of empty space as a key imaginary of modernity. The role of demonstrating effective occupation was reformulated in an important turning point in colonial expansion, away from the settler colony model that had been employed earlier, to a model in which colonial infrastructure had come to dominate. This was determined through the accepted notion that the European colonial settler is ill suited, and even unable, to make the remaining parts of Africa suitable for their habitation. This not only meant that it was harsh to western eyes, but further than that – that the very ability to live in these conditions distinguished one as being not ‘civilised’-of not belonging to the ‘community of nations’. The centuries of environmental adaptations and cultural techniques that have enabled people and their empires to exist and thrive in this ‘harsh’ place could not be so easily subsumed by European settlers at the time. The Italians in this case, rather than simply settle in the desert, I argue they set up a process of eradicating its regime of representation entirely. From being ‘harsh’ to one that was more in tune with European sensibilities. As evidenced by the design and proposals of these colonial villages.

Visual relevance of the stylistically eclectic tombs along the Way

These villages were brought into being by a specific design, as is shown in figure fig.12. Here the explicit interest is less in the topography of the land as much it was about the extent and quality of the economic features of it. This shows the distribution of farming based on topography, the limit and specific dimension of each rectangular plot is evidently determined by local factors that are not present in its repertoire of notations. These factors are well known in advance for such a precise plan to put forward, in which each plot is pre-determined in an arrangement as shown in fig.14 that has more similarities with an index or taxonomic table than a representation of land.

fig.12 Redrawn by author.

Villaggio Breveglieri.

Pianta villaggio (1934). In Battaglia and Morandi, Libia Dal 1902-1940 Agricoltura E Storia Nelle Fotografie dell’Istituto Agronico per l’Oltremare.

These features, drawn to scale, are symbols that represent its economic qualities, its value in the most abstract sense of the word. This then points back to the 

PPiracy as Method

Opposite page: fig.11 Distribution of fascist-era rural settlements in the west of Libya (1940).

fig.13 Consolidamento delle dune con essenze vegetali pioniere (1924). In Battaglia and Morandi, Libia Dal 1902-1940 Agricoltura E Storia Nelle Fotografie dell’Istituto Agronico per l’Oltremare.

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bizarre nature of the photographs of these villages, in which looking at the land was only to confirm what this paper inscription said about the worth of the plot as a socio-economic unit. It was in this reading one through the other, in which paper and land come together to express and realise the quality of it, that the reification of private property is made strongly apparent.

Not drawn in ‘relational’ terms, yet clearly utilised an advanced knowledge of the local and surrounding area, the orientation and perspective of the map, much like 18th century English estate maps, is ‘governed by the view of the manor house, and adjusted to the task of allocating land between tenants, to the review of the distribution of crops and pastures.’32 It was made with a knowledge of the much larger topographic grid, yet the space it depicts was not geometric or cartographic, but economic.

This is made clearer in the ambition of the Colonial body’s view of the labour force set to manage this ‘estate’, that design, ownership and use of the land were distinct and based on personhood, of which the goal was set out for that subjectdivision, ‘[in the colonies], we need to know and dominate the native, to know how to use him for what he can yield according to his physical and psychological characteristics…’33 In setting about an alteration in this regime of representation that was first given to the empty space, the Italian colonial project set about surfacing the Sahara, bordering it, to enclose not only the land, but also enforce a mode of communality that was singular. In setting it up as a nation state, labelling it as Libia, they defined its legal space. The possibility of other unforeseeable modes of living and exchange to prosper within the logic of the piratic method, the figure who sits outside this ability to provide a ‘yield’, places a harsh light upon the inheritance of a contemporary Libya’s status as a nation-state.

32. Pottage, “The Measure of Land,” 147.

33. Nacha Vachelli, “Coscienza Geografica,” L’Oltremare, no. 2 (1928): 159–60; quoted in Atkinson, “The Politics of Geography and the Italian Occupation of Libya.”

34. Sybil E Crowe, The Berlin West African Conference, 18841885, Imperial Studies (Royal Empire Society (Great Britain), 1942), 220–21.



Yet before this Italian colonisation, before Libya as a nation-state there existed an alternative model of governance whose demise can be traced back that foundational moment in 1884. The idea for the Berlin Conference was first developed by France and Germany, in which then invitations to the house of Otto von Bismarck were sent out in three stages; first to Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and the United States; later to Austria, Russia, Italy, Denmark, Sweden and Norway; and finally to the Ottoman Empire.34 This staged invitation process speaks volumes in relation to the order of importance in which these nation-states constituted the body of International Law. A hierarchy that can be read in the cartoon on page 7 [fig.6]. The dining room in which, against a large map of the continent, the legal envoys are given pictorial prominence respective to their roles. This late invitation of the Ottomans is then mirrored in the figure of the downward cast bearded man, hand against forehead, running a finger across a piece of paper in the middle left of the frame. Partaking PPiracy as Method

Opposite page: fig.14 Villaggio Breveglieri. Ordinamento Colturale di un Podere (1934). In Battaglia and Morandi, Libia Dal 19021940 Agricoltura E Storia Nelle Fotografie dell’Istituto Agronico per l’Oltremare. fig.15 Villaggio Crispi.

Vista aerea d'insieme del Centro civile (date unknown). Photograph IAO. fig.16 Societa Agricola Industriale. Bengasi (1931).

Photograph IAO. fig.17 Villaggio Breveglieri. Centro civile (1934). Photograph IAO. fig.18 Villaggio Bianchi.

Particolare del portico (1939). Photograph IAO.

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in a close reading of the possible clauses of the act, and forlorn, hidden in the shadows, perfectly mirrors the position of the Empire at the time.

In signing the General Act,35 the Ottomans had accepted the French Empire’s control to what had been, very recently with respect to 1884, provinces under its dominion; Algeria and Tunisia, [fig. 19 depicts the extent of this change].

Yet crucially, it also meant that they were then able to lay their own ‘legitimate’ claim to the provinces in Africa and the Hijaz that had yet to be contested. In Northern Africa, namely the provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan was all that had remained of the Empire.36 Through the rhetoric and protocols as laid out by this General Act they utilised the new language of European Colonialism as International Law to attempt to safeguard their colonies. This is to say, they took the full repertoire of devices, and the general ‘acting in good faith’ ideas that the conference imparted.

Two of these are key devices that relate to the construction of empty space.

Firstly; role of demonstrating effective occupation, secondly; the ‘hinterland’ doctrine. The former shows an important turning point in colonial expansion, away from the settler colony model that had been employed earlier, to a model in which colonial infrastructure had come to dominate. As mentioned earlier, this determined that the European colonial settler simply had to show effective governance the parts of Africa deemed unsuitable for their personal habitation.

This consideration and the resource starved and economically weakened state of the Ottoman Empire at this time led its claim of effective occupation through proxy administration of the region.

What had previously referred to as provinces of the Empire becomes ‘müstemlekat’, the Turkish word for colonies, in correspondences with European counterparts. Hinterland, the German for ‘back-land’, applied to the land that supported a coastal region or port. This was then imported transliterally, to convey the full contextual and rhetorical power, for their legal claim of the land from the Tripoli-Benghazi coast to the shores of Lake Chad (a distance equivalent from Benghazi to Berlin) as the ‘Devlet-i Aliye’nin Trablusgarb hınterlandı’.37

35. All participating nations except the United States had placed their support behind the acts.

fig.19 Expected territorial changes in Africa. In Cep Atlasi Umumi (1906).



36. Mostafa Minawi, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa : Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz. (Stanford University Press, 2016), 254.

37. ‘The Ottoman Empire’s hinterland of Tripoli.’

This proxy rule was achieved through forging an alliance with the head of the Sanusi Order. An order which was the most proximate to a body of governance that encompassed the Bedouin tribes of Libya and the Sub-Sahara, and at its height had outposts [fig. 20], dubbed zawāyā’s in locations from Benghazi to the Sudan. The way that relationship was forged, and its practical implications is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is important to stress a few key factors.

That the Sanusi Order’s influence had been of such a great extent that many other European powers had published reports and assessments of their movements during the late 19th Century. The up-take of members of the Order, the PPiracy as Method

Consular roads as rhythmed sequences of service points

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geographical distribution of them can be accounted for in the many documents that the order kept in relation to the location of the lodges that administrated and held its functioning. In addition, the Benghazi-Kufra-Wadan trade route had at this stage become the most important north-south trans Saharan trade route, in no small part to the Order’s efforts.38 The zawāyā (lodges) operated as points in a network of mediation and coordination amongst various tribes and as a space of contact between the Ottoman state apparatus and the local population. Through religious and customary rules, conduct and guarantees were formalised for the safety of caravan en-route between each of the lodges, and importantly they catered for the services necessary for such long-distance travel, specifically caravanserai and storage depots. In turn, the Ottoman state constructed a telegraph line between each of the lodges [fig.

21], and from Tripoli to Istanbul to facilitate direct communication. Evidence of the support that the Ottoman’s provided can be seen in two decrees issued concerning the Order’s zawāyās, declaring them ‘waqf khairi’, i.e. as charitable and inalienable property and so tax exempt, recognising the Sanusi's authority (and power) more than simply as a tax-able subject.39 Though, and perhaps regrettably, this venture failed however tactical and adept the Ottoman diplomats had become in the practise of International Law. The ultimate demise arrived with the Franco-Italian Convention of 1902. The Ottomans claims simply ignored, recasts this portion of the Sahara as an empty land, res nullius, open to colonisation and conquest anew. In setting it up as a nation state, labelling it as Libia, the Italian colonial projected that proceeded the Ottomans defined its legal space. They set about surfacing the Sahara, bordering it, to enclose not only the land, but also enforce a mode of communality that was singular. The nation state and the production of subjectivity that it embodies is the tip of a geopolitical mode of power that needs to be radically questioned if other forms of society are to be imagined.

fig.20 Location of Sanusi zawāyā lodges in North Africa, (1902). Dotted line indicate known sub-Saharan trade caravan routes. fig.21 Undersea Ottoman telegraph lines as of 1889.

In al-Zahiriyya Library.

Damascus, Syria.



38. Evans E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (Oxford University Press, 1956).

39. Abdulmola El-Horeir, “Social and Economic Transformations in the Libyan Hinterland during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century : The Role of Sayyid Aḥmad Al-Sharī f AlSanūsī ” Phd Diss. (University of California, Los Angeles, 1981), 148.

The Sanusi Order's relationship with the Ottoman Empire gave a local population a form of voice and standing on an International stage, to which they were only indirectly able to engage with yet as described above permitted them the ability to govern themselves to a large extent. The order's relationship with the local population was specific and relative to the area and the tribal presence in each individual area. Through a set of quasi-universal rules, they set about bringing in local chiefs to each lodge, chosen by the immediate inhabitants, as well as tribes who pass through the lodge on their mobile routes. This would be then in turn the person who facilities the choice of a caretaker, of a teacher, and the local staff of the lodge. The surrounding land would be put in his care, and be opened up to the tribes who passed through the area to build shelters for themselves. It would also be used common land for the settled population to farm PPiracy as Method

The architectural grammar of the Way made every city of the Empire a continuation of Rome

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40. trans. Author. Mohamed Ibn el-Sanusi, El-Sanussiya El-Kabeera, (Maktabit Cairo, 1954). 29

(but not for grazing of livestock). Milling facilities, storage and oven functions would be free to use as determined by the capacity of each respective lodge. The authority of this chief and the lodge’s council of elders would be called upon in the mediation of disputes. Specifically if land was in contestation between two tribes or familial groups, it would be proposed that it be placed under the care of the lodge and to be used as a common land by all. This then places the familiar cadastral map and register in start contrast to tribal homes and family trees as shown in fig.23 and fig.24.

An additional key function of the zawāyā was the identification of 'empty land', known as 'ared mubar'40, that would be the use of the lodge's taxes to rehabilitate and make common. Far from perfect, the Sanusi order allowed a re-engagment with other possible subject-positions and property ownership types that have since become absent in the (re)becoming of modern Libya that warrant re-visiting. Taking an epistemic view-point, piracy as method asks if Libya perceiving itself as a nation-state is an obstacle in a path to making anew a form of community and social relations that have been absent since its very inception as one, in this present moment of rife and escalating upheaval.

Religion and divination as political instruments to gather consensus in citymaking processes

Opposite page: fig.22 Sanusi zawāyā at Jaghbub, South of Libya. date unknown, author unknown. fig.23 Location of Sanusi zawāyā lodges in west of Libya, (1902). In EvansPritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenacia. fig.24 Family tree of Al-Hasa tribe. In EvansPritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenacia.



PPiracy as Method