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Abbas Alnasrawi, The Economy of Iraq: Oil, Wars, Destruction of Development and Prospects, 1950–2010 , Contributions in Economics and Economic History 154 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994). Pp. 202.

and 1911; this era witnessed the construction of a modern urban-centered state effected through an older alliance between the powerful tribal and peasant confederations and the Ottomans based largely in Tripoli. Regional disparities found in Tripoli and Fezzan, on the one hand, and Cyrenaica under the Sanusiyya, on the other, are analyzed in depth in Chapters 3 and 4. The fifth chapter grapples with the tricky matter of resistance and collaboration on the part of various socioeconomic and political groups when faced with the unpleasant reality of the Ottoman-Italian peace treaty of October 1912. The concluding chapter is somewhat enigmatically entitled "Toward the Recovery of Libya's Civil Society." The sources which inform Ahmida's study are rich and wide-ranging. Unpublished archival documentation was culled from collections in Tripoli, Rome, London, and Washington, D.C. In addition, the author used interviews and a large number of published Arabic sources, as well as many theoretical works from the social sciences. Anyone with an interest in Libya in this period will want to mine Ahmida's lengthy footnotes and his extensive bibliography. Finally, he has rightly attempted to integrate oral data and traditions into the narrative and argument. One particularly moving example of oral data is found on page 139, which contains an epic lamenting the terrible fate of the tribespeople forced into Italian concentration camps in the early 1930s. Modern Libya makes a number of important points. About the colonial period, initiated with great brutality in 1911, the author makes one such significant observation: protracted warfare not only created large numbers of refugees, but also forced newly settled peasants and tribespeople back into the hinterland. The result was a "re-tribalization" of the population, particularly in the region of Tripolitania. There, they existed in a sort of economically liminal state—no longer autonomous, yet at the same time not integrated into the coastal agricultural system of the Italian colonial state. Liminality had its rewards, however, as these hinterland peoples, far from being passive or beaten, were able to stave off some of the more negative aspects of Italian domination between 1911 and 1932. Ahmida also revives the issue of factionalism between Tripolitanian notables and chiefs in the 1920-22 period, which nationalist historians have tended to "explain" as no more than the product of personal rivalry. Instead, he unravels some of the specific "structural socioeconomic" relationships which undermined attempts at solidarity after the disaster of 1912. Given the complex portrait he paints of the myriad forces at play all over Libya and working against a united front—whether for elites or ordinary folks—scholars of collective political action of the James C. Scott school will be somewhat perplexed by Ahmida's reduction of all political behavior and response to "resistance" or "collaboration." Moreover, his convincing examination of the pronounced regional variations marking off Tripolitania from Cyrenaica, differences with long historical antecedents, makes his assertions regarding "Libyan society" appear anachronistic, at least for the pre-1932 period. For what he has really demonstrated is that two Libyas existed until quite recently. Therefore, concluding his analysis of a century or more of Libyan regionalism with an epilogue devoted to "recovering Libya's civil society" seems to beg more questions than it answers. Nevertheless, due to Ahmida's work, some previously unknown historical terrain has been captured.