ABSTRACT
This chapter allows us to discover a critical period in the history of Morocco: that of the XIXth c. and of the French Protectorate (1912–1956). The ideological changes that these two periods brought led, in particular, to the division of land but also the breakdown of communities. Changes included the introduction of new regulations that contrasted with traditional custodian laws; the distinction between a “useful Morocco” and a “useless” one; the resulting marginalization of regions due to their physical morphology and of groups of people, such as mountainous tribes and, overall, the modernization of agriculture illustrated through the focus on export crops. The very fact that, when the Protectorate ended, these changes were not questioned confirms that the form of agrarian capitalism that emerged during the XIXth c., initiated by some groups of Moroccan people, was not fundamentally different from that imposed by the French during the Protectorate. This is why this chapter focuses both on the XIXth c. and the Protectorate rather than only the latter. The objective is to identify the reasons why the new paradigm on water management, with economic and legal major changes affecting both land and water, created ecological, sociological, and economic problems.
