ARAB STATUS IN CYRENAICA UNDER THE ITALIANS.

This article refers to one of the two Libyan provinces, Cyrenaica, and is chiefly concerned with the single feature of policy towards the Arab population as shown in the various Royal Decrees and Laws defining its civic status. To understand the general in the development of Italian colonial policy in Cyrenaica it would be necessary to make a comparative study of policies in other Italian colonies and in the colonies of other European Powers. To understand the particular in this development it is, of course, import ant to know about local conditions in Cyrenaica itself, and it is no less important to know, in outline at any rate, the political circumstances in which the metropolitan country found herself at the time. The Italians had expected little opposition and were disagreeably surprised to find that the Arabs assisted the Turks and did so, particularly in Cyrenaica, with the blessing of the Sanusiya religious order to which almost all the Bedouin, and it was they who stood up against the Italians, adhered. In October 1912, the Turks, involved in difficulties in the Balkans, made peace with Italy, leaving the Arabs to resist the invader as best they could and, in Cyrenaica especially, they resisted with such determination that the Italians, exhausted by their efforts in the European war, were glad of a truce, and they would not even have got a truce if it had not been for British pressure on the Sanusi.