Should I Stay or Should I Go? Patterns and Consequences of Settler Withdrawal in Postcolonial Morocco

Studies of colonial legacies often utilize the spatial heterogeneity of institutions in periods of colonial rule to identify their long-term effects. Independence itself is characterized as a juncture, after which both colonists and their institutions disappear. In this paper, I argue that this characterization often leads to incorrect identification of colonial institutions and their effects. Using a novel longitudinal, property-level, and geospatial dataset of settler landholdings in French and independent Morocco compiled from numerous archival sources, I identify substantial differences in how, why, and when settlers left Morocco in a complex process spanning over twenty years. I find that settler departures resulted from the interaction of land reform projects implemented by the independent monarchy on one hand, and the quality, locations, and legal status of settler-held properties on the other. The independent monarchy developed its land policies in part to transfer colonial lands to a patronage network on which it depended for political support, utilizing expropriation, diplomatic pressure, and market mechanisms in different periods to achieve its goals. In articulating how political projects interact with land characteristics, I argue that heterogeneity in the persistence of colonial institutions after independence must be characterized with reference to postcolonial projects, and as such, that projects working to identify the colonial legacy cannot rely solely on the distribution and presence of colonial institutions during the colonial period. Lastly, I demonstrate the salience of withdrawal patterns through analysis of colonial settlement’s impact on local socioeconomic development in rural Morocco.