Following the defeat of Carthage in the Punic Wars, Ancient Rome organized the region (along with what is now modern day Tunisia and eastern Algeria), into a province known as Africa, and placed it under the administration of a proconsul.

It was part of the region known to the Islamic world as Ifriqiya, whose boundaries roughly mirrored those of the old Roman province of Africa Proconsularis.

The region of Tripoli or Tripolitania derives from the Greek name Τρίπολις "three cities", referring to Oea, Sabratha and Leptis Magna.

The Vandals took over in 435, and were in turn supplanted by the counter offensive of the Byzantine Empire in the 530s, under the leadership of emperor Justinian the Great and his general Belisarius.

Abu Zakariya Yahya, a vassal of the Almohads, established an independent state in Tunisia in 1229 and took control of Tripolitania shortly after.

Hafsid rule ended when the Ottoman Empire brought Abu Abdallah Muhammad VI ibn al-Hasan to Constantinople in 1574 and executed him.

It was the first formally declared republican form of government in the Arab world, but it gained little support from international powers and had disintegrated by 1923.

During World War II, several back-and-forth campaigns with mobile armour vehicles ebbed and flowed across the North African coastal deserts between first Fascist Italians and the British, soon joined by the Nazi Germans in 1941.

From 1942 and past the end of the war in 1945 to 1951, when Libya gained independence, Tripolitania and the region of Cyrenaica were administered by the British Military Administration.