- English Colonial Texts on Tangier, 1661–1684: Imperialism and the politics of resistance ed. by Karim Bejjit
Karim Bejjit introduces his volume as an attempt to bring further scholarly attention to the English occupation of Tangier. Given the work of Linda Colley and Nabil Matar, one cannot say that the English occupation of Tangier from 1661 to 1684 has been ignored in contemporary British imperial history and cultural studies.1 However, as Bejjit argues, this failed episode of English colonialism in the Mediterranean deserves more consideration. It speaks to a fascinating history of English engagement with the Islamic world and also of continuities between English and Iberian colonial projects in North Africa, which often involved controlling walled citadels along the coastline of Morocco. This history is still very much with us as the Spanish colonial towns of Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco have recently been in the news as refugees have flocked to these places in an attempt to obtain legal status in Europe.
While Bejjit does not delve into such comparative contexts, his valuable book does contain an excellently researched fifty-four-page introduction to the failed English occupation of the city that could stand on its own as a revisionist essay. Reviewing the literature on Tangier, Bejjit rightly notes that most of the historical writing on the colony was done by those with an imperialist Victorian sensibility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He also argues that contemporary scholars have not yet fully rectified this shortcoming in the historiography on English Tangier and that not even Colley and Matar have done enough to consider Moroccan viewpoints about the successful military actions that ultimately pressured the English into destroying and abandoning the city.
While I do not believe that Bejjit’s overall assessment of Colley’s book is quite fair, as she does acknowledge that Moroccan pressure and military strength ultimately helped lead to Tangier’s downfall, Bejjit does make an important contribution by turning to Moroccan archives and the perspectives of Moroccan historians. In this way, Bejjit is able to produce an excellent overview of the various Moroccan leaders with whom the English had to contend, and he “illustrates the dynamics of resistance which animated Moroccan warriors and guided their efforts to liberate the town” (44). He also places Moroccan military action against Tangier in a wider context of Moroccan attempts to wrest control of their territorial sovereignty from various European powers: “Far from being an incidental or isolated case, the recuperation of Tangier was part of an ongoing process to recover coastal towns (known as A-Thūghūr-A-Saliba) taken by the Europeans during periods of weakness” (45).
Bejjit also includes a revisionist perspective on the reign of the famous Moroccan sultan Mawaly Ismā’īl, who came to power in 1672 and whose military assault on Tangier in 1678 ultimately led to its recapture as a Moroccan territory. While Ismail is regularly demonized in both English primary sources from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in twentieth-century Western historiography, Bejjit cites historians writing in Arabic who have created a more balanced and even-handed account of his life (46–47). Both in the introduction, and in his helpful notes on the primary sources that he edits, Bejjit integrates important correctives to English perspectives through his use of Arabic-language sources and Moroccan points of view. Bejjit refuses to “sever the situation of Tangier from the more immediate Moroccan context and tie it exclusively to English domestic politics or to a broad theory of imperial expansion” (48).
Bejjit’s volume reproduces and briefly introduces eighteen primary documents on the English occupation that were printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as thirteen letters of correspondence between English and Moroccan agents which concern the diplomatic mission of Mohamed Attar Ben Haddu to London in 1682. Eleven of these letters have never appeared in print before and, therefore, Bejjit provides a valuable service in making them widely available to scholars who do not have access...
