Early 19th Century–1911: (Tripoli, the Sanusiyya, and the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade — Yusuf Karamanli’s Network Reaching Bornu and Sokoto, the Sanusiyya Esta…

Early 19th Century–1911: (Tripoli, the Sanusiyya, and the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade — Yusuf Karamanli’s Network Reaching Bornu and Sokoto, the Sanusiyya Establishing Stability Across the Fezzan and Central Sahara After 1830, Sanusi Merchants as Determined Slave Traders, and Resistance to the Italian Conquest Continuing to the 1930s): In the early nineteenth century the British supported the pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, who extended his control over the Fezzan and developed an extensive network of contacts with states further south, including the sultanates of Bornu and Sokoto. Despite British patronage, Tripoli was one of the most significant slave traders on the Mediterranean coast, as the terminus of long-distance trans-Saharan routes. After Karamanli’s death in 1830, civil war broke out, resolved by the reassertion of Ottoman authority by the early 1840s. But it was Muhammad al-Sanusi, founder of the Sanusiyya order, who established real stability across the Fezzan, Cyrenaica, and the central Sahara, as far south as Wadai and Bornu. The Sanusiyya spread across the region exhorting formerly feuding clans to return to a pure form of Islam with such success that Ottoman governors in Tripoli were compelled to maintain good relations with the order, which had become the only guarantor of peace across present-day Libya’s vast interior. Sanusi merchants were also determined slave traders — in this region the slave trade proved singularly difficult to suppress, surviving well into the twentieth century and ending only with the Italian conquest of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and French penetration of central equatorial Africa. Although the Italian conquest was officially complete by 1911–1912, the Sanusiyya continued to resist bitterly down to the 1930s.