Colonial Power Facing New Challenges

Using an example of Morocco, article aims to answer the question, how the methods of the French colonial rule transformed (or not transformed) under the pressure of international and interior challenges of the post-WWI period. Politics of the administration headed by the Resident-General of France, Marshal H. Lyautey is analyzed during the period ranged from the end of the WWI to the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate. Lyautey feared that the latter reform could weaken the French colonial hold on Moroccan protectorate. Basing on the wide range of archival and published evidence, Lyautey’s correspondence with the authorities in Paris being the most important part of it, author aims to reveal, how the French administration in Morocco reacted to “old” and “new” challenges, what interactions between them were underlined. Article concludes that Lyautey’s answers to the different challenges of the post-WWI period were parts of a concept which didn’t change radically after 1918. While using the military and other forms of violence, Lyautey was eager to find an optimal way to pursue the French colonial interests, having a support of the Moroccan traditional elites with the Sultan in the head, playing on the contradictions between different noble clans, and, especially, on those ones between Arabs and Berbers. The Resident-General of France hoped to use scarce resources in a rational way, to balance military and political instruments of control and subjugation and to create, at the same time, an image of Morocco as a land where the different civilizations coexisted in harmony though under this coexistence often hided various forms of inequality and colonial oppression

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Geography · Power (physics · Protectorate · African history and culture studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History