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The Extraterritorial Mediterranean: Consular Courts and Connectivity in Nineteenth-Century Morocco
Abstract
Law in the Mediterranean—as in most parts of the pre-modern world—was characterized by a hodgepodge of jurisdictions which coexisted and competed with each other more or less successfully. But by the nineteenth century, the local manifestations of legal pluralism took on an increasingly international dimension throughout the Islamic Mediterranean. The capitulation treaties signed between various European states and their Ottoman and Moroccan counterparts laid the groundwork for a regime of extraterritoriality. By the nineteenth century, this developed into a system by which large numbers of individuals—both “locals” and “foreigners” (categories that are oversimplifications at best)—had some sort of extraterritorial status which afforded access to consular courts that applied the laws of the states they represented. The expanding network of consular courts served as a new and increasingly important connecting force in the Mediterranean, bringing the southern and northern shores of the Middle Sea into a shared legal space. The fact that the rise of extraterritoriality occurred in the nineteenth century—a period during which the Mediterranean is often thought of as already being in decline—suggests that new forms of connectivity continued to arise even long after the region’s supposed golden age. This paper focuses on consular courts in Morocco during the second half of the nineteenth century, arguing that these institutions acted as a force integrating Morocco into the broader Mediterranean. This observation is particularly important given the paucity of scholarship focused on the legal consequences of extraterritoriality—as opposed to the relatively well-known political effects of protection, which did much to chip away at the sovereignty of North African states. Paying attention to consular courts as legal institutions points to cross-Mediterranean connectivity in two ways. On the one hand, the availability of consular courts afforded those Moroccans with either protection or foreign nationality an entirely new set of legal institutions to which they could appeal. From the point of view of the legal consumer, then, the expansion of consular protection brought a little of Europe into North Africa. On the other hand, consular courts shifted the legal landscape from an institutional point of view. Consul-judges had to adapt their practices to those which prevailed in local courts (both Islamic and Jewish). In other words, a little bit of North Africa seeped into European law as it was applied in Moroccan consulates.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Mediterranean Countries
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries