ABSTRACT
Commercial caravans approaching Tafilalt from the north in the late nineteenth century passed by an extensive cluster of ruins just before reaching their final destination at Abou Am in the Wad Ifli district. If gradual transformations in commercial life made the population broadly sensitive to European activity outside the region, the trading network itself enabled them to have concrete knowledge of how the European offensive was developing and how Africans both north and south of the Sahara were responding to it. The lines of trade crisscrossing southeastern Morocco in the late nineteenth century can be divided into four general categories: trans-Saharan trade, trans-Atlas trade with Moroccan and Algerian cities, inter-oasis regional trade, and finally local trade between desert and oasis. A large proportion of Figuig's professional merchants lived there, and most of the regional and trans-Atlas trade was handled in its market place.
