The Journal of North African Studies

ISSN: 1362-9387 (Print) 1743-9345 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fnas20

A history of modern Morocco

Gareth Smail

To cite this article: Gareth Smail (2015) A history of modern Morocco, The Journal of North
African Studies, 20:3, 496-498, DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2015.1030185

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1030185

Published online: 07 Apr 2015.

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 496 Book Reviews

and which holds promise, despite some inmates’ recidivism. While Saudi Arabia preceded Maur-
itania in its emphasis on de-radicalising prisoners, Nouakchott’s approach merits consideration. It
remains more topical than ever as of this writing in 2015.
Ould Ahmed Salem’s higher education at Sciences Po-Paris is conveyed not only through his
erudition but unfortunately also in his prose. The author takes great pains to enliven his descrip-
tions with brief portraits of key figures, most notably Jemil Ould Mansour, as well as imams’ per-
sonal narratives. The occasional density of his writing is, however, all the more challenging when
he moves to exploring such esoteric matters as Shariah family law through a lengthy treatise that
makes use of case law. Here only the astounding deeds behind these precedents lighten the text.
Notwithstanding such minor issues, there is no doubt that this work will serve as a core reference
for years to come. The author concludes that Islam is not immutable, fixed, or atavistic. He has
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nonetheless captured the essence of Islam in Mauritanian politics in this generation.

Noel Foster
Independent scholar
noel.foster@coleurope.eu
© 2015, Noel Foster
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1023046

A history of modern Morocco, by Susan Gilson Miller, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 2013, 306 pp., $29.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-00899-0

Susan Gilson Miller’s new text, A History of Modern Morocco, is a concise introduction to Moroc-
co’s political history. As the first of its kind since C. R. Pennell’s 2000 volume, Miller’s work builds
on new sources and research to provide a deeper look at Hassan II’s legacy, as well as engage with
new historiographical questions about the impact of the protectorate years, the role of ‘society’ in
shaping political history, and the mythical unity of nationalist movement. Miller relies mostly
French and English secondary literature, but also complements it with Arabic sources, all well docu-
mented in 50 pages of endnotes and citations. Her narrative is supplemented by appendices to orient
new students of Morocco, including a chronology, maps, a glossary of Arabic terms, a ‘who’s who’
list of recurring names, chronologies the ‘Alawite monarchs and French Residents-General, and
photographs and illustrations. For English-language readers engaging with contemporary Moroccan
politics for the first time, Miller’s book should be considered the best single work available for
understanding the continuities between Morocco’s present and recent past.
Miller’s approach to writing history is a material one. Though ideologies and traditions are
important, Morocco’s political history can best be explained through the ‘tactics and accommo-
dation of interests’ that political actors employ, using the assets available to them, to address the
threats or opportunities of the moment (214–215). Deciding who these actors are, and when they
become important for Morocco, thus becomes the central task of the ‘synthetic’ process of writing
political history (215).
Perhaps most important among these decisions is when to begin the history of modern
Morocco. Miller begins her narrative with the French invasion of Algeria, a starting point
which has been problematised in North African historiography because it associates the beginning
of ‘modernity’ with European action. Miller’s opening chapters proceed with an awareness of this
historiographical danger. She situates the decisions of Sultan ‘Abd al-Rahman and the Makhzen
 The Journal of North African Studies 497

in a discussion of the century-long political struggles following the death of Morocco’s second
‘Alawite sultan, Moulay Ismail.
Despite this much older political history, Miller rightly asserts that France’s 1830 invasion of
Algeria was an important turning point in the history of the Moroccan state, propelling the
Makhzen towards a position of financial weakness vis-à-vis Europe and pushing it to adopt the
centralising reforms. In 1844, the Moroccan army confronted the encroaching French military
and lost in a crushing defeat at the Battle of Isly. Attempting to manage the ensuing foreign mili-
tary and diplomatic pressure, ‘Abd al-Rahman agreed in 1856 to a treaty that granted trade con-
cessions to the British, which forced the Makhzen to turn further inward for revenue. Just three
years later, in 1859, the Spanish invaded Tetouan and demanded similar terms and a massive
indemnity. Morocco’s defeat by the Spanish coincided with the ascension of Sultan Mohammed
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IV. Though often thought of as a time of decline, Miller sees his reign, along with that of his suc-
cessor Hassan I, as a time of significant reform, characterised by agency and change on the part of
the sultanate in its limited spheres of influence, including matters of domestic taxation, adminis-
tration, and the military.
Throughout her account, Miller weaves in Moroccan society as an increasingly variegated and
complex historical actor, especially after the death of Hassan I in 1894, that resists, supports, and
funds state authority. The period leading up to the 1912 Treaty of Fes, marked by the unstable
rule of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and his disposition in favour of elder brother ‘Abd al-Hafiz, is often read
as a forgettable period of political collapse before the beginning of colonial rule. Yet Miller’s intro-
duction of ‘society’ as a prominent political actor – those rebelling against the French in the streets,
elements of the Makhzen rallying around ‘Abd al-Hafiz, those developing a political consciousness
parallel to other parts of the Arab world – recasts the early twentieth century as a time of vigour and
strength on the part of many elements that would become central to contemporary Morocco.
Miller’s treatment of the early years of the protectorate focuses primarily on the French admin-
istration’s project of moulding Morocco into a modern client state under the leadership of Resident-
General Lyautey, as well as the concurrent war between ‘Abd al-Karim Khattabi’s insurgency and
Spanish forces in the Rif. She notes the emergence of Moroccan resistance to Lyautey’s increasingly
hollow and untenable vision of associational rule, but ultimately, Miller argues that Lyautey’s resi-
dency, when viewed in balance of its administrative achievements, should ‘[elicit] our admiration’
(92). While Miller recognises the implicit violence of Lyautey’s adaptive brand of colonial moder-
nity, she argues that the legacy of the Resident-General and the early protectorate has yet to be fully
assessed in Moroccan historiography, especially in light of the intended and unintended contri-
butions to the emergence of the modern Moroccan state.
The narrative incorporates a new set of non-state actors Miller’s fifth chapter, in which she
describes the emergence of nationalism around 1930, through to independence in 1956 and the
death of Mohammed V in 1961. Here, her work reflects her efforts to address what she identifies
as a major ‘blockage’ in Moroccan historiography, namely the prevailing understanding of the
nationalist movement as a unitary, or monolithic one (4). She unpacks this in several ways.
First, in discussing the public reaction to the 1930 Berber Dahir, Miller questions the narrative
of national unity in opposition to it, pointing to the lack of real evidence concerning rural and
Berber support for or opposition to the Dahir. Second, she shows that the predominately Arab
nationalist intellectual movement, which mobilised in the wake of the Berber Dahir, was made
up of multiple currents, from religious to communist, from French-educated to Qarawayin gradu-
ates, and had already begun to factionalise along these lines by the late 1930s. As the movement
radicalised around independence during the Second World War, and expanded under the symbolic
leadership of Mohammed V, resistance to the French adopted even more constituencies. Indeed, it
 498 Book Reviews

is precisely along these divisions, as Miller demonstrates, that the monarchy was able to maintain
its centrality throughout the first five years of independence.
The final third of the book deals with the nearly 40-year reign of Hassan II, beginning in 1961
and ending with his death in 1999. Miller’s discussion first outlines Hassan II’s political man-
oeuvring to consolidate his rule in the early years until 1975, disposing first of leftist parties,
and then two coup attempts (1971 and 1972) from inside his own camp. These efforts culminated
in the 1975 ‘Green March’, the Palace-led popular mobilisation to settle the Western Sahara that
secured Hassan II’s legacy in Morocco as the ‘unifier’. Despite these political achievements,
Miller also draws our attention to Moroccan society’s impatience with unequal economic devel-
opment and authoritarian rule in the late 1970s and 1980s, drawing protestors to the streets and
provoking a more assertive civil society and media sector.
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While Miller’s account of the Hassan II years touches on the major milestones of political econ-
omic change that marked the era – distribution of colonial assets to Makhzen elite in the 1950s
and 1960s, structural adjustment and cooptation of the new business elite in the 1980s, royal
family purchases of formerly state-owned enterprises – it misses the opportunity to fully lay
out the extent to which the economic sphere functions as a political arena into which the monar-
chy has effectively extended its power. Miller frames 1990s Alternance reforms, for example, as
an imperfect liberalisation on the part of the state, unsatisfying to a society increasingly intolerant
of autocratic governance. However, this is an incomplete picture. Concurrently, the monarchy was
consolidating dominance over the private sector by purchasing stakes in privatising state-owned
enterprises and the burgeoning consumer sector. Thus, the monarchy effectively cemented its
indispensability in an era when the formal private sector has had a growing importance in the
lives of Moroccan citizens. Should this shift from explicit to implicit power be seen as tangential
to state-society relations? Unfortunately, a lack of data that has long precluded any substantial
investigation of royal finances, and it may be some time yet before these recent changes fit
neatly within the long durée of Morocco’s political history.
This point aside, A History of Modern Morocco is the ideal English-language work for those
looking to understand the historical context of contemporary Moroccan politics, including
general readers, students in introductory courses, and non-Morocco scholars of the looking to
become (re)acquainted with Moroccan political history. Throughout the book, Miller makes
well-reasoned choices in service of constructing a narrative that reads clearly, without losing
an appreciation for the messy process of defining political actors, or the issues of sourcing that
privilege powerful perspectives. While not necessarily pushing the bounds of Moroccan historio-
graphy, she frankly presents to the general reader some of the field’s major ambiguities, especially
the continuities before and after the Protectorate, the cooptation of Moroccan nationalism after
independence, and the ambiguous nature of Moroccan ‘society’ as a political actor. Perhaps
most importantly, however, Miller’s accessible account puts Morocco’s specific material
history at the forefront of relations between Moroccan society, the state and the monarchy. At
a time when states in the region have increasingly come to be viewed in terms of transnational
phenomena, like extremism or the 2011 uprisings, Miller trains our attention to Morocco’s
own history as a means of framing the challenges and opportunities of state-society relations.

Gareth Smail
Georgetown University
gcs40@georgetown.edu
© 2015, Gareth Smail
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2015.1030185