Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844-1886.

• Author: Miller, Susan Gilson

Tourists strolling through sleepy Essaouira on Morocco's Atlantic coast today might have difficulty believing that the quaint, white-washed little madina (old town) and the adjacent harbor were once Morocco's chief Atlantic seaport. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, Essaouira was the main outlet for Morocco's overseas trade, as well as the principal entrepot for an inland commercial network extending throughout Morocco's southwest. How this primacy evolved and then dissolved, consigning Essaouira to its now picturesque slumber, is the subject of Daniel J. Schroeter's superbly documented and absorbing study.

Among the countries of the Maghrib, Morocco alone stood beyond the political limits of the Ottoman Empire. Contributing to its isolation from the fifteenth century onward was the fact that Morocco lacked an all-season, all-weather port on the Mediterranean coast. Only two towns came close to playing a role in Mediterranean trade - Tangier and Tetuan. But Tangier's harbor was shallow and often buffeted by vigorous offshore winds, while Tetuan, the endpoint of the busy north-south trade route to the Sahara, was eight miles distant from the shore. On the Atlantic coast, Portuguese and Spanish invaders had built small, well-fortified positions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, thereby capturing control of Morocco's overseas trade with Europe. During the reign of the energetic Sultan Mawlay Isma il (1082/1672-1139/1727), Europeans were finally dislodged from the Atlantic ports, opening the way for local ascendance over seaborne traffic. At Mawlay Isma ili's death, the country fell into anarchy, and it was not until Sidi Muhammad b. Abdallah ascended the throne in 1171/1757 that the abandoned Portuguese port of Mogador, known locally as Essaouira, was selected as the site where the Sultan would launch his ambitious reorganization of Morocco's overseas trade.

Prof. Schroeter's account tells of the meteoric rise and equally rapid decline of Essaouira. Sultan Sidi Muhammad b. Abdallah envisioned a powerful system of monopolies centered on the town that would assure his control over the profits and tax revenues generated by commerce, as well as over the men who made them. This study shows how the various elements of that ambition were put into place, and how they eventually fell asunder.

Using the prestige and authority of the throne, Sidi Muhammad built a handsome new town and peopled it with...