Booty into Property: The View from the Desert

Lauren Benton’s paper invites a comparison between deserts and oceans, camels and ships. This is a comparison that I have always resisted, partly because it is somewhat trite; partly because it directs attention away from the desert—the Sahara, in this case—not merely as a space to be crossed, but as a space of life in its own right. Much of the recent renewal in Saharan studies stems from the rejection of this analogy (McDougall 2007): people live in the Sahara in a way that they do not live in the in-between spaces of the ocean, which is something I will return to later. But if, just for once, we set these misgivings aside, a few interesting parallels do emerge.