Introduction

With the advent of the fascist regime under Benito Mussolini in 1922 a new brutal policy was designed to conquer the colony of Tarabulus al-Gharb and defeat the interior resistance. The people of Libya had resisted from the outset, and they mounted a major rebellion that the Italians would suppress only after 20 years of counterinsurgency culminating in genocidal policy. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the hidden history of the Libyan genocide by the Italian colonial state that took place in eastern Libya between 1929 and 1934. The genocide resulted in a loss of 83,000 Libyan citizens as the population declined from 225,000 to 142,000 citizens. The book challenges colonial and nationalist assumptions so as to understand the culture and the history of the people who were forced into the Mutaqalat, or colonial concentration camps.