'Not a drop for the settlers': reimagining popular protest and anti-colonial nationalism in the Moroccan Protectorate

This article reevaluates the so-called Meknès water riots of 1937 as a way to understand how rural economic decline and the contest over natural resources during the Protectorate period sparked anti-colonial protest in Morocco. The 'riots' have long been considered an early example of Moroccans unifying under the banner of an emergent anti-colonial nationalism. This article argues, however, that the revolt cannot be adequately conceptualised as simply a reflection of the nationalist message based on the rehabilitation of the Alawi sultan and Islamic scriptural reform. When situated in the long-term transformations of the regional economy, urban infrastructure and local forms of religious power, the protest emerges as an organic and powerful attempt by Meknès residents to reclaim local sovereignty over natural resources that had been wrested away from their pre-Protectorate arbiters by the sultan's government and French forces. Popular action in Meknès took many forms based on a range of local logics that had little to do with abstract questions of national rebirth and was often diametrically opposed both to nationalist groups from outside the city and to the sultan's government.