ABSTRACT
The new ‘United Kingdom of Libya’ was established as a federal state with three constituent provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and the Fezzan, this last comprising the desert oases south of Tripolitania. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that some sort of political unity of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, including the Fezzan, was established under Turkish hegemony. The Libyan federal government, under the leadership of King Idris, was in every way receptive to the approaches by western concerns to initiate a search for oil, more especially by European and American oil companies. Agriculture and animal husbandry always have been and must clearly continue to be one of the mainstays of the Libyan economy, and there is enough land and water, if properly conserved, to supply a considerably larger farming population than at present at a higher standard of living.
