English Colonial Texts on Tangier, 1661–1684: Imperialism and the Politics of Resistance by Karim Bejjit (review)

Tangier, on the coast of Morocco and adjacent to the Straits of Gibraltar, was the site of England’s earliest colonial venture in the Mediterranean. King Charles II acquired the settlement from Portugal in January 1662, as part of the dowry for his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. Pragmatic Englishmen looked forward to Tangier becoming a prosperous trading centre, a haven for merchants against the depredations of Muslim corsairs, and a base of operations against them. The great optimism for Tangier’s future soon gave way to despair in the face of the reality of mismanagement, domestic political tensions, and, critically, a local religio-nationalistic movement committed to the removal of Christian enclaves. By February 1684, after much expense and loss of English life, the town was abandoned and its infrastructure demolished, with rubble virtually the only reminder that Tangier had once been part of the nascent British Empire.

English Tangier, and the activities of the English in the early modern Mediterranean more generally, were left to become footnotes in the historiography of the development of the British Empire until rescued from obscurity around the turn of the twentieth century by a number of writers, most notably Enid Routh and Julian Corbett. The work of these writers is typically imbued with a strong imperial ideology, and conceivably it was for these reasons that interest among scholars in these subjects fell into decline following the Second World War. Over the past decade and a half, however, the encounters of Britons with North Africa in the early modern period have begun attracting the interest of a new generation of scholars.

Karim Bejjit’s book concerning the English occupation of Tangier makes important contributions to this corpus of new work. One stems from the collection of eighteen pamphlets and thirteen letters it contains. Several contemporary pamphlets cited in other works on English Tangier have been omitted for reasons Bejjit provides in the Preface, but two are included that I do not recall having ever come across before: A Letter from Tangier Concerning the Death of Jonas Rowlands the Renegade and A Letter from Tangier to a Friend in London. Bejjit adds value to these texts with some judicious editing and an attempt to arrange them so as to provide continuity in the narrative of the events to which they relate. They are arranged into four parts, each defined by a general theme and time period. Above all, readers will benefit from the contextual information that precedes each text.

The letters, provided in the Appendix, cover a period of only a little over three years from November 1680 to the withdrawal of the English from Tangier. Eleven of these letters have not been published previously, and Bejjit has translated two of them from Arabic. They focus particularly on the diplomatic manoeuvrings between the English and Moroccans, and as such provide a fascinating insight into the attitudes and issues which framed the relationship between the two countries at this pivotal time, and which ultimately decided Tangier’s fate.

In his Introduction, Bejjit offers an adroit survey and analysis of key developments during the course of the English occupation, both in England and Morocco, and a reasonably useful critique of past and current scholarship on the subject. He emphasises the way in which developments in Tangier influenced English domestic politics, and how the processes of resistance employed by the Moroccans against the English colonial presence affected these developments. While neither of these perspectives is novel, Bejjit effectively argues the case for their recognition.

The volume is well structured and written, and makes enjoyable reading. As Bejitt himself asserts in his Preface: ‘Read collectively, these texts offer a genuine glimpse into the colonial scene and the interplay of forces which governed the English presence in Tangier.’ The English occupation of Tangier is long overdue for a comprehensive reappraisal...