Britain and imperial rhetoric of reforms in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Morocco.

Although Morocco was not fully colonised until 1912, the second half of the nineteenth century saw significant changes in the country’s politics, culture, and economy as European colonial powers intensified competition for control of the southern shore of the western Mediterranean. This essay examines the British conceptualisation of social, economic, fiscal, and military reforms that precolonial Morocco tried and/or was wreaked to implement under the auspices of the British. The rhetoric of reform and rescue served as the British Empire’s civilising mission and was complementary to the discourse on supremacy and hegemony. This rhetoric fed into a larger colonial project of domination but also served a more surreptitious purpose of self-fashioning and self-legitimisation. British envoys, officials, and travel writers, the most prominent of whom are John Drummond Hay, Arthur Leared, Walter Burton Harris, Hugh Stutfield, and Budgett Meakin, treated the reform and rescue of Pre-protectorate Morocco as a peculiar and bounden duty of the white race. This essay revisits the representational strategies these writers deployed in their accounts and how they propagated the premise that the implementation of these reforms would enable Morocco to be transformed from a fragmented ‘Sharifian Dominion’ replete with bureaucratisation, embezzlement, and decay into a modern state. In this sense, this essay traces the reciprocal relationships between writing, policy making, capitalism, modernity and the broader European colonialist discourse and <italic>zeitgeist</italic> of this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]