Excerpt from Prisoners of the Red Desert: Being a Full and True History of the Men of the 'Tara' I hold a Philosophy which, briefly expressed, is this - that in all human affairs that which happens is always for the best. This is no fatalism, no blind belief in the inevitableness of predestined events; it is, on the contrary, a practical working faith in the Providence which directs our ends. The ways and methods of Providence may not often be Visible in their unfold' ing, but to those who know how to wait and to work, the final result is always sure. Man is no mere sense less tool - he is a Workmanmand Circumstances; whether good or ill, ' are the tools with which he must work. And He who made the Workman knows also how to direct the work, and to supply those tools which are necessary, so that they shall not fail the Workman at his need. But, for his part, the Workman must needs work according to the immutable laws of his trade, lest his tools be broken and his labour vain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Desert Borderland investigates the historical processes that transformed political identity in the easternmost reaches of the Sahara Desert in the half century before World War I. Adopting a view from the margins—illuminating the little-known history of the Egyptian–Libyan borderland—the book challenges prevailing notions of how Egypt and Libya were constituted as modern territorial nation-states. Matthew H. Ellis draws on a wide array of archival sources to reconstruct the multiple layers and meanings of territoriality in this desert borderland. Throughout the decades, a heightened awareness of the existence of distinctive Egyptian and Ottoman Libyan territorial spheres began to develop despite any clear-cut boundary markers or cartographic evidence. National territoriality was not simply imposed on Egypt's western—or Ottoman Libya's eastern—domains by centralizing state power. Rather, it developed only through a complex and multilayered process of negotiation with local groups motivated by their own local conceptions of space, sovereignty, and political belonging. By the early twentieth century, distinctive "Egyptian" and "Libyan" territorial domains emerged—what would ultimately become the modern nation-states of Egypt and Libya.