On the Origins of the Morocco Question

This book’s lack of an introduction and conclusion make it extraordinarily easy to get lost in Parsons’s material. As a 650 page book, there should be some guideposts to show us what Parsons wants us to extract from his text, but it is instead written only as a narrative with some level of analysis. For one, diplomatic narratives aren’t exactly the most interesting. Moreover, diplomatic history without deep analysis isn’t even particularly useful—the narrative likely could have been cut in half without losing much of substance.

Lastly, Frederick V. Parsons is in many ways the definitive pre-Saidian orientalist. For instance, he writes of pre-Protectorate Morocco:

“The peasants did starve, and die. A complete lack of medical services, non-sanitation producing ’effluvia’ which startled even those who knew ’the East,’ plus an approximately seventy-five per cent incidence of syphilis, all helped to explain why ‘you see very few old men in Morocco’; ‘smallpox is always more or less about here.’ The needs of the Moors, however, were ‘almost nil,’ and their country was capable of continuing more or less indefinitely, as for years past, ‘in its stagnant state.’” (8)

This is not Parsons merely quoting late 19th century observers—the author is instead sharing this as fact, although his only sources for this is correspondence between a number of Britons active in the 1870s and 1880s. Surely, many people died of malnourishment and bad sanitation, but 75% of Moroccans have syphilis is incredibly suspicious. Moreover, Morocco was hardly in a state of “stagnation.” Admittedly, the makhzan did have issues with corruption, but it was still a dynamic state. This doesn’t even include the bled es-siba, which was often at odds with the makhzan and ultimately faced a variety of different conditions (as it was not even a unified space). I don’t think I need to add much more here, but I do think this is representative of the content that follows.