‘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...