The First Moroccan Crisis - in Morocco
Probably one of the first things I learned about in modern history when I was a school was the Moroccan Crisis. Frankly, the way it was taught, I never really understood it. Somehow, I thought, it started World War One. Or showed why it started. Or something like that.
Completely separately, I learned about something called the Entente Cordiale, which was, I heard, a peace treaty or pact between the British and the French that also somehow caused World War One. Or showed how it started. Or something like that.
Eventually, at uni, I was able to piece these things together. Turns out the peace treaty between the two powers was about Morocco (and Egypt of course). And this treaty actually sparked the crisis. Finally it made sense to my undergrad brain. France and Britain were able to patch up their colonial differences in North Africa and clear the way for a united front against an expansionist Germany. Germany, slighted at being left out of North African deliberations made a show of their ability to upset the apple cart if they weren't consulted.
Even later than this it would occur to me that it wasn't just Germany that was expanding, and that the idea that Germany brought the First World War on itself by attempting to create a global empire in competition with Britain was simply a self serving British narrative that normalised their empire but demonised its rival. Fritz Fischer just didn't cut it anymore.
Not once, however, did I ever stop to think about the underlying architecture of this entire line of analysis. Morocco, and the Kaiser's visit there in 1905, only had meaning in terms of its ramifications for Europe. The experience of Sultan Abdul Aziz, his position vis a vis the Europeans and his fate before, during and after the crisis was simply not a part of the Eurocentric (there, I said it) line of discussion.´that I had been invited to embrace.
It turns out that the Sultan and the Moroccans played an integral role, and his 'Sherifian Majesty', as well as the Europeans, were acting and reacting in response to the changing inner dynamics of Morocco at the turn of the century. Once again, African agency had been completely overlooked in an attempt to elucidate the effects of the Kaiser's visit to Tangiers on Europe.
So the chapter I'm researching at the moment will try to recover this history (as well as contetualise it amongst the stories of other extra-European monarchs). It's trying to give a sense of how the Sultan and the domestic politics and material realities of Morocco both shaped and were shaped by European imperialism. It's an interesting story - the rocky internal history of Morocco at this point is really fascinating. And how his rule intersected with German foreign policy is worth interrogating.
To that end, I'm in the archives of the German Foreign Office at the moment. It's the usual story of archival life. Yesterday I whizzed through 10 files, because they dealt with the wrong time period and didn't approach the subject matter. I thought I'd find nothing. Today I got through about 120 pages of 1 file and I have about 19 more files there just waiting and there's way too much stuff to use.
Frustratingly, some of these documents are already in the Grosse Politik, the selective collection of Foreign Office files published after WWI. But not all. And I have to check. Today one memo I was working on (a great but long memo that spells out the relationship between the Kaiser and Bülow and the attitude of both towards the Sultan) took me about 2 and a half hours to transcribe (damn Sütterlin). I was feeling very pleased with myself until I got home, whipped open the Grosse Politik Volume 20(i) and there it was. But at least now I can compare the two for consistency. And there really is a lot missing from the GP volumes.
One other thing I finally remembered today saved me a fair bit of effort. Often, the first time a memo appears in the archive it's almost illegible. If I'm lucky, it appears again, neatly rewritten by a secretary. Today (after more than a decade of archival experience) I finally remembered to check and see whether the scrappy copy I was working from wasn't easier to read a bit further into the file. I found a few of those today and it saved my eyes and a fair bit of time. Win!
I have to go back to Münster tomorrow, but I'll kick off with the files I've just ordered the next time I'm in Berlin, later on this year if don't get through them tomorrow. Which I won't. This one is going to take a lot of archival grunt work. But that's why I'm here.
Completely separately, I learned about something called the Entente Cordiale, which was, I heard, a peace treaty or pact between the British and the French that also somehow caused World War One. Or showed how it started. Or something like that.
Eventually, at uni, I was able to piece these things together. Turns out the peace treaty between the two powers was about Morocco (and Egypt of course). And this treaty actually sparked the crisis. Finally it made sense to my undergrad brain. France and Britain were able to patch up their colonial differences in North Africa and clear the way for a united front against an expansionist Germany. Germany, slighted at being left out of North African deliberations made a show of their ability to upset the apple cart if they weren't consulted.
Even later than this it would occur to me that it wasn't just Germany that was expanding, and that the idea that Germany brought the First World War on itself by attempting to create a global empire in competition with Britain was simply a self serving British narrative that normalised their empire but demonised its rival. Fritz Fischer just didn't cut it anymore.
Not once, however, did I ever stop to think about the underlying architecture of this entire line of analysis. Morocco, and the Kaiser's visit there in 1905, only had meaning in terms of its ramifications for Europe. The experience of Sultan Abdul Aziz, his position vis a vis the Europeans and his fate before, during and after the crisis was simply not a part of the Eurocentric (there, I said it) line of discussion.´that I had been invited to embrace.
It turns out that the Sultan and the Moroccans played an integral role, and his 'Sherifian Majesty', as well as the Europeans, were acting and reacting in response to the changing inner dynamics of Morocco at the turn of the century. Once again, African agency had been completely overlooked in an attempt to elucidate the effects of the Kaiser's visit to Tangiers on Europe.
So the chapter I'm researching at the moment will try to recover this history (as well as contetualise it amongst the stories of other extra-European monarchs). It's trying to give a sense of how the Sultan and the domestic politics and material realities of Morocco both shaped and were shaped by European imperialism. It's an interesting story - the rocky internal history of Morocco at this point is really fascinating. And how his rule intersected with German foreign policy is worth interrogating.
To that end, I'm in the archives of the German Foreign Office at the moment. It's the usual story of archival life. Yesterday I whizzed through 10 files, because they dealt with the wrong time period and didn't approach the subject matter. I thought I'd find nothing. Today I got through about 120 pages of 1 file and I have about 19 more files there just waiting and there's way too much stuff to use.
Frustratingly, some of these documents are already in the Grosse Politik, the selective collection of Foreign Office files published after WWI. But not all. And I have to check. Today one memo I was working on (a great but long memo that spells out the relationship between the Kaiser and Bülow and the attitude of both towards the Sultan) took me about 2 and a half hours to transcribe (damn Sütterlin). I was feeling very pleased with myself until I got home, whipped open the Grosse Politik Volume 20(i) and there it was. But at least now I can compare the two for consistency. And there really is a lot missing from the GP volumes.
One other thing I finally remembered today saved me a fair bit of effort. Often, the first time a memo appears in the archive it's almost illegible. If I'm lucky, it appears again, neatly rewritten by a secretary. Today (after more than a decade of archival experience) I finally remembered to check and see whether the scrappy copy I was working from wasn't easier to read a bit further into the file. I found a few of those today and it saved my eyes and a fair bit of time. Win!
I have to go back to Münster tomorrow, but I'll kick off with the files I've just ordered the next time I'm in Berlin, later on this year if don't get through them tomorrow. Which I won't. This one is going to take a lot of archival grunt work. But that's why I'm here.
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