Armies of the Italian-Turkish War : Osprey Publishing : 9781472839428 : 1472839420 : 17 Sep 2020 : This title chronicles and illustrates Italy's conquest of Libya during the Italian-Turkish War, which involved not only the armies and navies of both sides, but also a number of tribal insurgents, and had major implications for both World Wars. In the early 1900s, the decaying Ottoman Turkish Empire had lost some of its Balkan territories, but still nominally ruled all of North Africa between British Egypt in the east and French Algeria in the west. Libya had fertile coastal territory, and was the last North African (almost, the last African) region not yet conquered by a European colonialist power. Italy was a young country, ambitious for colonies, but had been defeated in Ethiopia in the 1890s. The Italian government of Giovanni Giolitti was keen to overwrite the memory of that failure, and to gain a strategic grip over the central Mediterranean by seizing Libya, just across the narrow