Colonial Sociology on Morocco’s Rural Migration

Abstract

Sociology played a major role in facilitating Morocco’s colonization. Taking advantage of its colonial experience gained in Algeria, France sought to exert control over Moroccan tribes and cities by first dispatching her "scholars" who worked to understand the working mechanism of traditional institutions in the aim of making them compliant and turn them into institutions at the service of the protectorate. Following the gradual shift in the social and political center of gravity from the desert (the tribe) to the city as a result of internal migration,... Robert Montagne, a pioneering colonial sociologist in Morocco, would, immediately after World War II, undertake the first sociological study of migration from the villages. His key aim was to understand the new social class formed by colonial industrialization and modernization (the proletariat) with one clear ideological objective: how to transform this new social force into an ally of colonialism and use it in the confrontation with the aspirations for liberation that had started to emerge in both the new and the traditional urban milieu.