In August 1931, Sultan Mohamed ben Youssef of Morocco visited the International Colonial Exposition in Paris alongside Maréchal Hubert Lyautey, France’s first resident general in Morocco. Celebrating France’s “civilizing” mission, the Exposition presented justifications for various French colonial projects. Whereas the Algerian pavilion showcased the assimilationist logic of settler colonialism and direct rule, the Moroccan pavilion honored the protectionist claims of indirect rule through a partnership with the sultan, who remained Morocco’s nominal sovereign. In Making Morocco, Jonathan Wyrtzen treats the Exposition as a window into the logics of legitimation and legibility in the French protectorate of Morocco. He then draws on an extensive archive, including previously neglected oral sources, to analyze how these logics shaped contestations over identity formation in Morocco throughout the first half of the 20th century.
Making Morocco is an insightful, beautifully-written, original contribution to the sociology of colonialism and empire that embodies the best of historical and cultural sociology. It exemplifies the emerging field that Julian Go calls “post-colonial sociology.” According to Go,Footnote 1 this field is defined by studies that analyze the entanglements of culture and power, deconstruct the tropes of “tradition” and “modernity,” and reject Eurocentric bias in the production of knowledge. All three of these dimensions are central to Wyrtzen’s work.
Bringing Bourdieu back to North Africa, Wyrtzen analyzes the emergence of a “new colonial political field” within the French and Spanish protectorates of Morocco. His field analysis emphasizes three dimensions: the space/territory of the field, the organizing logics of the field, and contestations within the field.
The French and Spanish protectorates were established in 1912 through treaties imposed on the Moroccan sultan. While the treaties created the basis for a new colonial political field, the space of the field was produced through military conquest—or “total pacification”—in the Atlas and Rif mountain regions. For Wyrtzen, these conquests initiated an important shift in the political field. Under previous regimes, rural communities (blad al-siba) remained partially autonomous from the sultan, whose authority was exercised most fully in urban areas and coastal plains (blad al-makhzen). Through the “pacification” of the Rif and Atlas mountains, the French and Spanish colonial states established a geographically defined territorial unit that eventually became the independent Kingdom of Morocco.
One of the highlights of Making Morocco is Chapter 3, which focuses on the French conquest of tribal communities in the Atlas region. Wyrtzen draws on an incredible archive of Tamazight (Berber) oral poetry compiled by a French soldier, educator, and interpreter during and after the conquest of the Atlas. This rich archive allows Wyrtzen to analyze the ways in which local communities understood and responded to the sultan’s treaty with the French, French military incursions into the Atlas, and the ultimate defeat of the tribal communities. Tribal poets expressed their hopes, fears, and desires through tropes of religion, gender, and economic opportunity. Through this analysis, Wyrtzen traces a fundamental transformation in the political logics of the region: from strategic debates about how to maintain autonomy to ambivalent discussions about life under French colonial rule. Drawing on this previously overlooked popular archive enables Wyrtzen to analyze how the emergence of a new colonial political field looked from below.
Another highlight is Chapter 2, in which Wyrtzen uses Sultan Mohamed’s visit to the International Colonial Exposition to analyze the “logics of legitimation and legibility” in French Morocco. As “protectorates”, France and Spain claimed that their mission was to uphold the sovereignty of a failing state while providing tutelage in economic development and political modernization. These promises formed the basis of their claims to legitimacy in Morocco. Using the Exposition as an opportunity to portray itself as a protectorate, French officials incorporated three organizing logics into the Moroccan pavilion. First, an ethnographic logic celebrated the production of “scientific” knowledge about Moroccan society. The colonial state’s ethnographic knowledge was structured by vulgar binary oppositions (Arab/Berber, urban/rural, blad al-makhzen/blad al-siba, oppressed/free women) that supported divide-and-rule policies. Second, a preservationist logic, meant to uplift the sultan, treated “traditional” Moroccan political institutions and urban spaces as static and unchanging. From the invention of political traditions to the creation of a cordon sanitaire between the old (Arab) and new (European) cities, this logic manifests a strict division between the “traditional” and “modern.” Finally, a developmentalist logic celebrated the “modernizing” policies of the French in urban planning, industrialization, and infrastructure. Together, these three organizing logics became the “rules of the game” that structured contestations over identity and legitimacy within the Moroccan protectorate.
Having outlined the space and the organizing logics of the new political field, Wyrtzen uses the core substantive chapters of Making Morocco to analyze contestations over identity within this field. The question that Wyrtzen sets out to address is how a dominant understanding of Moroccan identity—emphasizing a common religion, ethnicity, territory, and monarch—emerged within this field. Rather than privileging a top-down or bottom-up approach, Wyrtzen analyzes contested processes of identification with attention to internal divisions and competing truth claims. Wyrtzen highlights the importance of marginalized groups by recognizing Berbers, Jews, and women as objects of identity claims by the colonial state and nationalist elites as well as active subjects in these identification struggles. Wyrtzen focuses on several sets of contestations: claims about ethnicity and religion among urban nationalists, tensions over the position of Moroccan Jews, the centrality of gender to debates about ethnicity and religion, and the survival of the monarchy through processes of colonization and decolonization.
In the 1930s, urban nationalists in Morocco arose to challenge a decree creating different legal systems for Arabs (Islamic law) and Berbers (tribal laws). Their demands were informed by the state’s logics of legitimization and legibility. On one hand, the nationalists sought to minimize the significance of ethnic or religious divisions between Arabs and Berbers. In doing so, they rejected the state’s ethnographic binaries and its claim to be preserving longstanding social divisions. On the other hand, they incorporated aspects of the colonial state’s logics. Acknowledging the state’s promise to uphold the sovereignty of the sultan, they argued that the creation of separate legal systems actually diminished his authority. Similarly, they appealed to the state’s modernization claims by insisting that Berber women would be better off under Islamic law than customary law.
Another arena of contestation was the position of Moroccan Jews in relation to the Moroccan nation. Under French colonial rule, Moroccan Jews were pulled in three different directions: France promised cultural assimilation and legal nationalization, Moroccan nationalists called for loyalty to the homeland, and political Zionists encouraged colonial settlement in Palestine/Israel. Wyrtzen explores debates among Moroccan Jews about how to navigate these appeals as the political context shifted due to the rise of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in France, US military campaigns in North Africa, the expansion of anti-Semitism in France and Morocco, and the creation of the State of Israel. By the late 1950s, he argues, debates about the religious boundaries of the Moroccan nation were largely diffused through widespread Jewish migration to Israel, France, and North America.
Gender was central to contestations over ethnic and religious identity as well as development/modernization in French Morocco. The colonial state used gendered legal and educational policies in its preservationist efforts to stabilize “traditional” family structures and ethnoreligious divisions between Arabs, Berbers, and Jews. Moroccan nationalists countered that the colonial state was oppressing Moroccan women by privileging customary over Islamic law and by refusing to provide Moroccan women with opportunities for modern education. As Wyrtzen demonstrates, Moroccan women played a central role in promoting women’s emancipation through an Islamic legal and modernizing educational framework. Women not only published articles in the nationalist press, they also created feminist organizations, mobilized demonstrations, participated in strikes, and took part in armed struggle.
Finally, Wyrtzen explores how the pre-colonial monarchy survived the colonial period and the struggle for decolonization. He argues that the overarching French claim of “protecting” the sultan’s power established the “rules of the game” within which contestations over the monarchy took place. But the outcome was produced by the ways that nationalist elites engaged this logic, Sultan Mohamed’s increasingly active role in the national movement, and a series of contingent events including Allied operations in Morocco during World War II and a chance encounter between Sultan Mohammed and US President Franklin Roosevelt.
Ultimately, Wyrtzen argues, contestations under French colonial rule politicized four aspects of Moroccan identity: territory, religion, ethnicity, and the monarchy. After independence, he concludes, the “unitary Arabo-Islamic configuration” (299) that urban nationalists began promoting in the 1930s became the official policy of the Moroccan state. Yet these four poles remain central to debates about national and political identity today.
Making Morocco is a big book: empirically rich, theoretically grounded, and attentive to history and culture. And it is also exceptional in its intersectional approach to colonialism. By highlighting the experiences of Berbers, Jews, and women, Wyrtzen consistently draws attention to the centrality of gender and ethnicity to processes of colonization, anti-colonial mobilization, and contestations over identity and belonging. Despite the book’s impressive breadth and depth, some questions remain unanswered. For instance, Wyrtzen largely focuses on French Morocco with only one chapter dedicated to a discussion of the Spanish protectorate. Similarly, after his brilliant analysis of Berber resistance to “total pacification,” Wyrtzen does not discuss Berber responses to claims by Moroccan nationalists from the 1930s onward. Finally, in arguing that the space of the colonial political field was firmly established by the conquest of the Rif and Atlas, Wyrtzen largely sidesteps difficult questions about the relationship between the Sahara and the Moroccan sultan. Despite these minor concerns, Making Morocco is an important contribution to historical and cultural sociology as well as the sociology of colonialism and empire. It will rightfully become a centerpiece in the emerging field of post-colonial sociology.
