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Decolonization on the Construction Site: Labor, Debt, and Violence in the Final Years of the French Protectorate in Morocco
Abstract
In the four years preceding Morocco’s independence in 1956, anticolonial urban unrest in the country constituted a perpetual source of concern for French municipal officials. Following the December 1952 uprising in Casablanca, a group of colonial engineers, planners, and administrators in the city experimented with a novel set of techniques designed to contain both nationalist activism and everyday urban conflicts. This paper will examine a collection of material, financial, and organizational technologies developed during the final years of the French Protectorate in Morocco (1912-1956). These technologies remade the construction process—changing the way that building, demolition, and housing finance were organized in the city—with the aim of curbing urban violence and anticolonial resistance. I argue that three interlocking strategies—techniques of prefabrication, the reorganization of labor on the construction site, and the creation of low-interest, state-backed mortgages—constituted an attempt not only to stave off decolonization but to shape its outcome. In this paper, the late-colonial construction site serves as a prism for addressing a series of broader questions about the nature of decolonization in Morocco: How were the strategies and logics of colonial rule cemented within the built environment in the years leading up to the country’s independence? How was technology—specifically construction technology—made resistant to decolonization as a political movement? What role did debt play in creating new forms of dependency designed to weather the transition to post-colonial rule? Drawing on archival sources from the end of the French Protectorate, oral histories with residents of Casablanca, and close readings of technical documents, this paper engages with recent scholarly work that attempts to rethink the process of decolonization in North Africa by attending to the ways that environments, infrastructures, and institutions were materially reorganized. By analyzing how the construction site became a space for containing anticolonial aspirations, I offer a historical account of how officials endeavored to insulate technology, housing finance, and engineering from the broader aims of nationalist movements in ways that would continue to shape the trajectory of urban activism after independence.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
None