Mostafa Minawi’s The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz is a work of political and diplomatic history that describes Ottoman efforts to establish African colonies within the international legal regime that emerged from the Berlin conferences in 1878 and 1884–1885. Like other scholars who have become uneasy with the “limitations and assumptions of areas studies” (p. 7), Minawi uses this episode to challenge the artificial boundaries undergirding the logic of area studies by highlighting the transregional connections between central Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East (p. 16).

Minawi’s overall aim is to refute the view that the Ottoman Empire was “irrelevant on the international stage after the Congress of Berlin in 1878” (p. 145). Far from being the silent observer depicted in much imperial history, Minawi argues that the Ottoman state, despite internal and external challenges, exercised agency as it maneuvered to build an African colonial presence. Indeed, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman leadership had developed expansionist ambitions and was determined to reinvent the Ottoman state “as a global power” (p. 145).

The first four chapters of the book document Ottoman efforts to establish colonies beyond their Libyan possessions (Trablusgarb [Tripolitania], Benghazi [Cyrenaica], and Fezzan), all the way across the eastern Sahara to as far as the Lake Chad Basin some 1,300 miles away. Moving to take advantage of the 1885 General Act of the Berlin Conference’s conditions for legitimizing colonial possessions, İstanbul sought “effective occupation” of this vast area by building an alliance with Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Sanusi, the son of the eponymous founder of the Sanusi Order, who led the only effective “state structure in the Libyan hinterland” (p. 49). The Ottomans also sought to demonstrate their presence in this sparsely populated expanse and extended telegraph lines from İstanbul to the new African frontier. The book follows a number of Ottoman officials, among them the general Ferik Muhammad Zeki Pasha, who in 1882 urged İstanbul to increase its focus on Ottoman North Africa, and Sadik al-Mouayad Azmzade—a scion of the al-Azm family of Damascus—who was eventually tasked with establishing contact with al-Sanusi in 1885. Minawi credits Azmzade with recognizing the potential benefits that entering into a partnership with al-Sanusi could offer İstanbul in its efforts to expand its African possessions. He argues that al-Sanusi was amenable to a partnership because, like the Ottomans, he was aware of other European states’ designs on the area and recognized the danger of further European encroachment. In Minawi’s account, al-Sanusi became a proxy for Ottoman rule, providing de facto governmental authority and security for cross-Saharan trade routes.

Ottoman efforts to build an African empire eventually came up against the reality of the imperial order. In 1890, the British and the French agreed to place the central African kingdoms of Kanem-Bornu, Bagirmi, and Wadai—which the Ottomans viewed as their possessions—into the French and British spheres of influence. Then, in 1894, the British and the Belgians signed an agreement that encroached on other areas claimed by the Ottomans, even as French and Italian aims on other parts of Ottoman Libya were soon to become public. Ottoman complaints that these moves violated the spirit and the letter of the 1885 General Act of the Berlin Conference were met with indifference and obfuscation. Finally, the 1899 Franco-British London Declaration, which gave the French the right to invade and occupy the central African kingdoms, served as the final death knell for Ottoman expansion efforts in Africa.

The book’s final two chapters argue that the African experience influenced Ottoman strategic policy-making in the Hijaz and beyond. As the Ottomans endeavored to consolidate their hold on “increasingly vulnerable frontiers” through infrastructure projects like the Damascus-Hijaz telegraph, they rejected offers of technical assistance from French and British companies (p. 100). In Africa, there had been persistent communications problems on Ottoman telegraph lines passing through British-held territory, and so the government of Sultan Abdülhamid II went to great pains to avoid any British involvement in projects designed to “reassert its sovereignty […] along its southern frontiers” (p. 123). The Ottomans also feared that any British or French technical assistance might later serve as a pretext for those states to make claims on Ottoman territory. On the other hand, the positive experience with al-Sanusi and the Bedouins of the Libyan desert paved the way for a strategic partnership with Bedouins in the Hijaz, who were employed as the labor force in the building of the new telegraph line.

Questions of partnership and agency appear throughout the book. By showing that the European powers were not the sole agents of change on the global stage, Minawi argues for Ottoman agency during the Age of High Imperialism. The book also illustrates ways in which non-state actors exercised agency in important ways. The Sanusis and the Bedouins of the Libyan desert, for instance, were not mere intermediaries for colonial rule: instead, through their partnership with the Ottomans, they could “establish their own style of rule and create their own legacies” (p. 50). Likewise, although the Hijazi Bedouins entered into a mutually beneficial partnership with the Ottomans in the building of the Damascus-Mecca telegraph line, they later chose to sabotage these efforts when local officials in Mecca refused to fulfill promises made by Ottoman officials from the center.

While the book is well argued and documented, there are two basic questions that are worth considering. First, Minawi, borrowing a term from Thomas Kühn, argues that Ottoman partnerships with the Sanusis and the Bedouins of the Libyan desert and the Hijaz were informed by the idea of “colonial Ottomanism” (p. 15). According to this idea, the Ottomans eschewed the racialized categories of colonizer/colonized that were so much a part of the European rule of colonial difference. However, could one not also suggest that, whatever nomenclature one wishes to employ, the Ottoman-Sanusi/Bedouin relationship was simply born of a recognition of the limitations of Ottoman power? What choice did the Ottoman leadership have? It is unlikely that they possessed the military wherewithal in either the vast expanses of Libya or the harsh environment of the Hijaz to simply impose their will on the locals. Indeed, to some extent both of these projects eventually foundered precisely because of the inability of the Ottomans to project their strength in these far-off regions.

Second, with regard to the question of Ottoman agency on the international stage, while there is much merit in Minawi’s argument, one still has to acknowledge that, in the end, the Ottomans were compelled to play by a set of rules established in the General Act of the Berlin Conference. Accordingly, they could not make claims on Muslim-inhabited territories based on religious solidarity, nor did the title of caliph carry any weight within the framework of this legal regime. What project, then, would ultimately be furthered by the Ottoman exercise of agency?

Overall, this is a brief book—146 pages of text—yet it is very engaging and well written. Minawi very clearly connects each section to the main questions that animate the study. This book will be of interest to both undergraduates and graduate students working in such fields as Ottoman history, Middle Eastern history, African history, and the history of imperialism and colonialism.