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The new framework of critical post-colonial studies adds the innovative feature of a broader geopolitical view to an existing branch of critique that challenges the postcolonial regime of knowledge as a whole, simultaneously taking into account the impact of the “traveling concepts” of postcolonial theories on contemporary thought. A radical scrutiny of its core tenets questions postcolonial studies’ perception and representation of colonialism that are selectively confined to the areas of the West and the formerly colonized non-West. The new research field of critical post-colonial studies, by contrast, deploys a multidirectional framework that strives to unthink the quasi-Manichean reverse division of the world into a devalued West and an upgraded non-West characteristic of the postcolonial mainstream. Critical post-colonial studies is thus not intended to be yet another subdivision of the wide academic field of postcolonial studies but one that departs from a broadening of the geopolitical space and shows how this inevitably inflects conventional understanding of the postcolonial. Important steps for a critical dismantling of mainstream postcolonial studies are a conceptual disengagement of the mechanisms of “othering” and a disentanglement of the components of the specific postcolonial continuity thesis. Discarding these and other restrictions makes room for the urgently needed paradigm shift in postcolonial scholarship and for the fashioning of a new academic language of critical post-colonial studies that, on the one hand, meets the needs of the multidirectional conditions of imperialism and colonialism and their various semantics and is, on the other hand, able to grasp universal patterns in different geopolitical and historical conditions.

The modern Libyan state began to take shape within the Ottoman Empire from the mid-16th century onward. Libya’s path to independent statehood was violently interrupted in 1911 with the onset of an Italian conquest. Rome’s efforts to annex Libya through settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing were in turn disrupted by World War II. The United Nations (UN) helped to guide Libya to independence under the Sanusi monarchy in 1951, albeit in close collaboration with the United Kingdom and the United States. The Sanusi monarchy, founded in the eastern region of Cyrenaica in the late 19th century, faced substantial difficulties in its efforts to transform an incredibly vast, thinly populated, socially diverse, and seemingly resource-poor country into a modern nation state. Though the extraction and exportation of oil from the 1960s onward help to alleviate some of the financial constraints on the government, the increasing centralization of power within the monarchy eventually led to a military coup in 1969. Libya’s new regime, under the leadership of Mu‘ammar Al-Gaddafi, would eventually pursue a radical program involving centralized economic planning funded through oil sales, a baroque system of popular consultation, a terrifying array of “revolutionary” security institutions, military aggression in Chad, and confrontations with North Atlantic powers directly and indirectly. Though the Gaddafi regime was able to survive an array of domestic and international challenges for over four decades, a mass armed uprising in 2011, which precipitated a merciless civil war and foreign military intervention, led to its downfall. Subsequent international assistance and successive transitional authorities, however, were unable to address the spiral of insecurity that consumed Libya from 2012 onwards. A second civil war erupted in 2014, one fed not only by competing domestic visions for the future of Libya, but also by the competing ambitions of other states in the region.

The Ottoman Empire stood at the crossroads of intercontinental trade for six centuries until World War I. For most of its existence, the economic institutions and policies of this agrarian empire were shaped according to the distribution of political power, cooperation, conflicts, and struggles between the state elites and the various other elites, including those in the provinces. The central bureaucracy managed to contain the many challenges it faced with its pragmatism and habit of negotiation to co-opt and incorporate into the state the social groups that rebelled against it. As long as the activities of the economic elites, landowners, merchants, the leading artisans, and the moneylenders contributed to the perpetuation of this social order, the state encouraged and supported them but did not welcome their rapid enrichment. The influence of these elites over economic matters, and more generally over the policies of the central government, remained limited. Cooperation and coordination among the provincial elites was also made more difficult by the fact that the empire covered a large geographical area, and the different ethnic groups and their elites did not always act together. Differences in government policies and the institutional environment between Western Europe and the Middle East remained limited until the early modern era. With the rise of the Atlantic trade, however, the merchants in northwestern European countries increased their economic and political power substantially. They were then able to induce their governments to defend and develop their commercial interests in the Middle East more forcefully. As they began to lag behind the European merchants even in their own region, it became even more difficult for the Ottoman merchants to provide input into their government’s trade policies or change the commercial or economic institutions in the direction they preferred. Key economic institutions of the traditional Ottoman order, such as state ownership of land, urban guilds, and selective interventionism, remained mostly intact until 1820. In the early part of the 19th century, the center, supported by the new technologies, embarked on an ambitious reform program and was able to reassert its power over the provinces. Centralization and reforms were accompanied by the opening of the economy to international trade and investment. Economic policies and institutional changes in the Ottoman Empire began to reflect the growing power of European states and companies during the 19th century.

In the last few decades, discussions concerning the presence of spirit possession and healing practices associated with Sudanic Africans in North Africa and parts of the Middle East, coined as “slave religion,” have highlighted the relationship of these practices to indigenous religions and belief systems of Sudanic Africa. Unlike in the Americas, where the Atlantic slave trade was primarily responsible for the diffusion of similar indigenous African religious practices such as candomblé, Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and their variants, the history behind Sudanic African spirit possession and healing practices in North Africa and the Middle East is much more complex. While increased enslaving activities during the late 18th century through the 19th century may have exacerbated the diffusion of the various Sudanic religious practices such as the Hausa Bori, the Zarma Holey, and the Zar cults to North Africa and the Middle East, their presence and practice outside their original milieu cannot be attributed solely to the slave trade. Interregional commerce, pilgrimage, voluntary migration, and elements of cultural unity underlying the Sudanic African religious and cosmological systems have all contributed at different historical time periods at varying scale to their spread and diffusion in North Africa and the Middle East.

The Ibero-Romance-speaking Jews of medieval Christian Iberia were linguistically distinct from their non-Jewish neighbors primarily as a result of their language’s unique Hebrew-Aramaic component; preservations from older Jewish Greek, Latin, and Arabic; a tradition of translating sacred Hebrew and Aramaic texts into their language using archaisms and Hebrew-Aramaic rather than Hispanic syntax; and their Hebrew-letter writing system. With the expulsions from Iberia in the late 15th century, most of the Sephardim who continued to maintain their Iberian-origin language resettled in the Ottoman Empire, with smaller numbers in North Africa and Italy. Their forced migration, and perhaps a conscious choice, essentially disconnected the Sephardim from the Spanish language as it developed in Iberia and Latin America, causing their language—which they came to call laðino ‘Romance’, ʤuðezmo or ʤuðjó ‘Jewish, Judezmo’, and more recently (ʤudeo)espaɲol ‘Judeo-Spanish’—to appear archaic when compared with modern Spanish. In their new locales the Sephardim developed the Hispanic component of their language along independent lines, resulting in further differentiation from Spanish. Divergence was intensified through borrowing from contact languages of the Ottoman Empire such as Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic. Especially from the late 18th century, factors such as the colonializing interests of France, Italy, and Austro-Hungary in the region led to considerable influence of their languages on Judezmo. In the 19th century, the dismemberment of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and their replacement by highly nationalistic states resulted in a massive language shift to the local languages; that factor, followed by large speech-population losses during World War II and immigration to countries stressing linguistic homogeneity, have in recent years made Judezmo an endangered language.

Safavid, Iran, was a modest economic player in West and South Asia in terms of population numbers, productivity, and resources. Yet its strategic location at the crossroads of Asia’s commercial arteries allowed it to punch well above its weight in terms of trade—especially trade in transit. The reign of Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587–1629) represents the high-water mark in this development. His forward-looking policies, beginning with his choice of Isfahan as Iran’s new capital and the subsequent resettlement of a large number of Armenians, expanded the ambit of the country’s commerce. Most importantly, he established a viable maritime alternative to the overland trade route by facilitating the maritime connection via the Persian Gulf, with the aim of depriving the Ottomans of revenue. In the process, Iran became more firmly connected to the wider Eurasian market, with commodities like silk and porcelain moving into the center of a hemispheric commercial network. In this, South Asia was clearly the regional “world economy,” manufacturing goods that were coveted by people all over West Asia and beyond, while the inhabitants of Europe, and to a lesser extent of the Ottoman Empire, Central Asia, and Russia, functioned as consumers who were generally forced to pay for their tastes and desires with hard cash.

Four-centuries-long encounters between the Ottoman Empire and the Grand Duchy of Muscovy/Russian Empire point to complex relations that have been triggered and defined mostly by territorial, trade disputes, and wars, and maintained by diplomatic rivalry and occasional military alliances. Starting as friendly encounters during Sultan Bayezid II reign at the beginning of the 16th century, these relations, essentially and persistently asymmetrical, reveal an initial and long Ottoman dominance over the Muscovy/Russian side; one that lasted from the early 16th to the late 18th century—whereby the two sides shared no direct borders, traded and did not fight each other until the late 17th century—followed by a late 18th-century and mid-19th-century Russian ascendency. This ascendency was achieved largely thanks to the military reform that Tsar/Emperor Peter the Great undertook, namely, the establishment of a standing and professional army and consequentially due to the many wars that Russia won throughout the 19th century; the decisive ones being those fought during the reign of Empress Catherine the Great. The mid-19th century and the early 20th century—which witnessed the implosion of the Russian Empire due to the Bolshevik Revolution and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France—was a long period that saw few and brief military alliances, contested trade relations and yet continued wars. It was ultimately marred by an Ottoman drive to counterbalance Russia’s dominance, while the latter sought to preserve it, by involving other European powers (British and French)—the most crucial moment being the British, French, and Ottoman armies defeating the Russian one in the Crimean War (1853–1856)—transforming their bilateral interactions into multilateral but unsustainable relations.