Colonial Echoes: Land and State-Building in (Post)Colonial Morocco

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Adams, Julia

Abstract

Following independence from France in 1956, the Moroccan government introduced several land reforms intended to return European-settled lands to Moroccan ownership. Surprisingly, their reforms mirror earlier French efforts to introduce a settler population—yet no colonial institutions persisted that are sufficient to explain policy recurrence for such an important element of state policy. How can we explain the formation and recurrence of land reform in Morocco? In this work, I present three empirical studies of resource politics and state-building in Morocco to understand how their essential characteristics were formed and reproduced through mechanisms beyond institutional persistence. The introductory chapter presents the case and main theoretical questions through a discussion of land policy in Morocco and the study of colonial legacies across the historical social sciences. In Chapter Two, I answer the question: how do state actors construct legibility and state knowledge within administrations? Drawing from archival records of internal memos and draft legislation recognizing and ratifying water rights in French Morocco, I evaluate patterns in information’s transformation as administrators collect, synthesize, and transmit information across bureaucratic levels. In many cases, practical, necessary, and effective measures taken by administrators appear to conflict with broadly defined directives. I find that in such cases administrators routinely transform information to improve others’ perceptions of their individual efforts. I then demonstrate how systematic changes in state information emerge from the structure and pattern of administrative responsibility within the state. In Chapter Three, I directly answer the question: why did the independent Moroccan state implement the same sequence of policies as its colonial predecessor? The approaches of historical persistence and path dependence are common among studies of colonial legacies, yet neither adequately conceptualize recurrent processes such as we see in Morocco. The goals of this paper are twofold. First, I construct an approach–recurrent continuity–to analyze repeated sequences in which an outcome, or sequences of outcomes, emerges independently from functionally equivalent conditions before and after a juncture. Second, I apply this approach to the recurrence of Moroccan land reforms. I argue that both the colonial and independent states needed to secure control over the agricultural economy with low state capacity, requiring dependence on a patronage network. As states’ capacities increased with patronage support, elites expanded their demands, creating similarly expanding trajectories of land reform. Chapter Four poses the following question: why do settlers depart and divest from former colonies? It is often unrecognized in studies of colonial states, decolonization, and colonial legacies that many settlers choose to remain and maintain investments in newly independent nations. Using an original longitudinal and geospatial dataset of settler land-holding at the property level from the end of the French Protectorate to the final expropriation of foreign-held lands in 1973, I track land ownership in the Rabat Province, one of Morocco’s most important agricultural regions. Through longitudinal regression analysis of land sales, I found that settlers were differentially sensitive to changes in pressure from the Moroccan state and their perceived risk of expropriation. At low levels of pressure, owners of low-quality land were more likely to divest, while with increased pressure, those with high-value properties became more likely to depart. The paper concludes by discussing how the heterogeneous effects of postcolonial policies on the withdrawal of colonial settlement impact theoretical and methodological assumptions used in studies of colonial legacies. In Chapter Five, I conclude with a discussion of how the findings from these papers relate to one another. I argue that these papers demonstrate how the study of colonial legacy is improved by integrating studies from the institutional economics paradigm with theoretically broader analyses of how colonial institutions are built, rebuilt, and modified. I demonstrate this approach illuminates important understudied dynamics of colonial rule. Only through attending to these dynamics can we understand the trajectories of land reform in French and independent Morocco.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS