Leaving the “Fourth Shore”: The effect of Italian farmers’ expulsions from post-colonial Libya, 1930–2005

Numerous Italian farms were established in colonial Libya during the 1920s and 30s, but Italian settlers were expelled in two steps: from Cyrenaica (East) in 1942, and from Tripolitania (West) in 1970. I study the consequences of these expulsions and, through their lenses, of the presence of Italian skilled farmers on the agricultural sector of 20th century Libya. Leveraging newly assembled district-level data on agricultural production, I estimate two separate triple differences that combine unaffected Italian districts and Libyan ones to build a credible counterfactual. The removal of Italian farmers led, in both cases, to a relative reduction in the level of commercialization and a return to the production of traditional field crops. The abandonment of particular farming practices, such as irrigated commercial crops, explains this pattern.