The present work retells the story of state-societal relations in Morocco over the long expanse of nearly two hundred years, beginning with the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 and ending with the death of King Hassan II in 1999. This history is arranged chronologically and falls into three large tranches: the period 1830–1912, before the coming of the French Protectorate; the period of the Protectorate between 1912 and 1956, when Morocco was a dependency of France; and the post-1956 years, when Morocco became an independent state under a monarchy. Writing across this broad swath of time has necessitated painful choices about what to include and what to leave out. While the desire to be comprehensive is a worthy one, it is in reality a losing cause: the pertinent fact, the delicious quotation, the choice observation, the nutty conclusion, all selected at the discretion of the author, may not always satisfy the reader. The expert will undoubtedly find many inexcusable absences in this book. The sweeping optic has opened the way for integrating the results from many different areas of social science research that might otherwise not have found a shared home.

This narrative presents a “writing against” earlier histories of modern Morocco, whether they are in French, English or Arabic. It is inspired by recent and profound changes within the field of Moroccan historiography, in turn influenced by the political opening of the 1990s that motivated Moroccan intellectuals to “liberate” their own history from the strictures of an earlier period. Furthermore, the exposure of the crimes of the “years of lead” via testimony given to the Instance Equité et Reconciliation (the ERC, or Commission of Equity and Reconciliation) in the first years of the twenty-first century has not only seized the public mind, but also forced people to confront a past they might have preferred to forget. Suddenly the historical profession in Morocco has become a vortex of ideas about what constitutes “authentic” history, and who is responsible for writing it. The personal histories and memories of ordinary people that welled up in the context of the ERC are valuable historical sources of the first order, filling in yawning gaps in the official record.