The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz by Mostafa Minawi (review)

Mashriq & Mahjar 6, no. 1 (2019), 130–133 ISSN 2169-4435 MOSTAFA MINAWI, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016). Pp. 240. $24.95 paper. ISBN 9780804795142. REVIEWED BY LUCIA CARMINATI, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Israel, email: lc.carminati@gmail.com In The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz, Mostafa Minawi offers an invigorating analysis of the Ottoman Empire’s later and supposedly crepuscular decades. He takes the reader on a tour from Istanbul to Berlin, the eastern Sahara, the Lake Chad basin, and the Hijaz that revisits conventional knowledge about colonial history, international diplomacy, and Ottoman imperialism between 1880 and 1902. Rather than sick, old, semicivilized, and mute, the Ottoman Empire in Minawi’s analysis appears agile, flexible, expansionist, and eager to reinvent itself as a global power dexterous with the “new tricks” of the post-Berlin age of “new imperialism,” an era which the author characterizes as “marked by the significance of frontiers in determining the fate of empires” (12). Frontiers, or rather “frontiers-cum-borderlands,” indeed play a central role in Minawi’s analysis. First, he approaches them as privileged locales for imperial rivalry among different empires: after 1880, he argues, the Ottoman government was not simply surviving or sheepishly withdrawing from competitive imperialism along its edges. Rather, it was consciously and competitively deploying “a multileveled expansionist Ottoman strategy” on both its African and Arabian fringes (4). Second, Minawi considers both the Saharan and the Hijazi frontiers as lookout points over the attitudes of governmental administrators at various levels toward the Bedouin population, the negotiations that ensued, and the relationships that developed. Minawi also makes a convincing case for the necessity of a “transimperial” or “intraimperial” study of frontiers: in a word, for the need to examine the African and Arabian edges of the empire simultaneously and transversally. He argues that the outcome of the Ottoman expansionist experiment in central Africa Reviews 131 explains Istanbul’s policies on the Red Sea. Minawi acknowledges that this might have been because the strategists experiencing the first and testing the latter were often drawn from the same relatively small circle. However, more importantly, the African-Arabian connection highlights the fact that Ottoman bureaucrats followed a logic that eschews the boundaries of post-imperial nation-states. Chapter 1, mainly historiographical in character, is aimed at tracing the emergence of the Sanusi order as the de facto leader of the eastern Sahara at the end of the nineteenth century. It illustrates the vision of Abdül Hamid II’s regime for expanding Ottoman sovereignty deep into the Sahara and Lake Chad basin after 1885. Minawi argues that “the Ottoman state’s policy and the Sanusi philosophy of administration were ideologically synchronistic” and that “their work on the ground was complementary, cooperative, and at times even synergetic” (36). The success of the Sanusi order in coordinating trade, education, and political activity in the eastern Sahara, Minawi claims, must have been viewed favorably by Istanbul at times of post-1885 growing imperial competition over central Africa. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 linger on in the same region. The second chapter explains how Istanbul entered the race for Africa with a plan to expand its territorial claims south into the Sahara and the Lake Chad basin. Against much traditional historiography, it shows that tax revenue was not the main concern of Istanbul in the Libyan desert and it argues that Istanbul both established a partnership with the Sanusi leadership and built telegraph lines to assert the Ottoman state’s presence. Chapter 3 analyzes the events leading up to the forging of a covert military alliance between Istanbul and the Sanusi order. Not only did Istanbul cultivate the Ottoman-Sanusi political alliance and create a secret Ottoman-Sanusi military front, but it also assumed a more aggressive diplomatic posture toward the empire’s European competitors. Ultimately, Minawi argues, Istanbul relinquished the notion that it could expand its territorial claims in central Africa according to the standing international agreements and decided instead to forge a military alliance with the local population. Chapter 4 shifts from Ottoman...