Hal yaslah li-taqansut (Is He Suitable for Consulship?): The Moroccan Consuls in Gibraltar during the Nieteenth Century

The purpose of this article is to record the history of the Moroccan consulate in Gibraltar during the nineteenth century, utilising published sources and discoveries in a recently catalogue private archive, the archive of the ar-Razini (Erzini) family of Tetuan. The nineteenth century is a period of great economic activity for the merchants of Teruan, conducting trade with the Middle East and Europe through nearby Gibraltar. The Moroccan consuls were chosen by the sultanate from the well-established international wholesale merchants resident abroad., Muslim and Jewish, and most of the consuls appointed to Gibraltar, and their deputies, were merchants from tetuan. There was not a modern type of salaried consular corps, and the appointment was somewhat informal, with numerous absences and unofficial deputies. However, compared to other more distant consulates, that of Gibraltar was probably the busiest, the most continuously occupied and most closely regulated. The role of the Moroccan consul was to represent the interests of Moroccan merchants, to protect Hajj pilgrims, and to administer the sultan's trade and credit to merchants, but also to inform the sultanate of political and technological developments. In the Erzini archive, the most extensive records of Moroccan trade through Gibraltar date from the 1840s to 1860s. Given the informal nature of the Moroccan consulates, the few records of the administration of the Gibraltar consulate that survive in the Erzini archives are quite rate. These records include letter books documenting the attempt to set up a sugar refinery in 1864-6, account books of the Moroccan students sent for military training in 1876-7, a register of passports issued from 1866 to 1875, and a register of residence permits dated 1863-72.