ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how and why Tangier stood at the centre of the troubled relationship between alcohol and colonialism in Morocco and how that relation was not unilaterally determined by Europeans. It challenges accounts that have emphasized the destructive effects of European alcohol on Moroccans and proposes, instead, to understand the case of this country as an example of dialectic relationship between Western and non-Western drinking cultures. The city of Tangier, located at the strategic entrance of the Strait of Gibraltar, symbolized the existence in Morocco of a fairly developed local alcohol industry and well entrenched consumption that predated the arrival of European alcohol and reduced the latter’s harmful effects. From the late nineteenth century, Europeans used Tangier as the main gateway for a flow of alcohol into the country that should ease its colonisation. However, the city turned out to be as resilient to consumption as to colonial domination, very much like sultan Mawlay Abd-al-Hafiz, who successfully resisted the attempts of French diplomats to intoxicate him for political purposes. Eventually, alcohol consumption became an idiosyncratic feature of the residents of that city, which, after having been used as the main gateway for European “civilizing” initiatives, managed to remain outside both the French and Spanish Protectorates established in 1912 with a unique international regime that sheltered the last remnants of a Moroccan autonomous administration.
