Allied administration of Libya
1943–1951 Anglo–French administration
The Allied administration of Libya was the control of the ex-colony of Italian Libya by the Allies from 13 May 1943 until Libyan independence was granted in 1951. It was divided into two parts:
British Military Administration of Libya (UN administration after 1949)
French Military Territory of Fezzan-Ghadames (UN administration after 1949)
Characteristics
The Allied administration was administered by the United Kingdom in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and by France in Fezzan. Officially Libya remained "Italian Libya" until February 1947, when Italy signed the Peace Treaty ceding all the colonies and possessions of the defeated former Italian Empire.
The British administered it as the British Military Administration of Libya. The French forces occupied the area that was the former Italian Territorio Sahara Libico and made several requests to administratively annex Fezzan to the French colonial Empire. The administrative personnel remained the former Italian bureaucrats.
The British administration began the training of a badly needed Libyan civil service. Italian administrators continued to be employed in Tripoli, however. The Italian legal code remained in effect for the duration of the war. In the lightly populated Fezzan region, a French military administration formed a counterpart to the British operation.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Allied administration of Libya” is 1943–1951 Anglo–French administration. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Allied, administration and Libya, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2080099. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1943, 1951, 1949 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Allied administration of Libya” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.