Negotiating Sovereignties
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Negotiating Sovereignties
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Negotiating the Sultan’s Sovereignty under European Imperialism in Morocco

The “sovereignty of His Majesty the Sultan” was formalized for the first time by the Algeciras Conference (January-April 1906), which internationalized the Moroccan economy. Paradoxically, this recognition came at a time when the Moroccan state’s actual power had been reduced to a minimum as a result of European ambitions. Since the mid-19th century, France, England, and Spain had sought to bring the last independent state in North Africa under their influence, as part of a global imperial rivalry. Morocco’s economy was subject to competition from European companies, several military defeats had weakened its army, and war reparations had ruined the public treasury. The exact nature of Moroccan sovereignty in the 19th century, threatened by these pre-colonial enterprises, is a matter of debate among historians.

El-Hadj el-Mokri, Moroccan Ambassador to Spain, signs the treaty at the Algeciras Conference on 7 April 1906. Source: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Morocco, the only country in North Africa to have escaped Ottoman rule, has not directly benefited from recent reinterpretations of the history of Ottoman sovereignty.1 The historiographical debate concerning Morocco dates back further. It was shaped by the generation of historians who emerged in the country after independence and sought above all to refute colonial theories. Those theories claimed that the Makhzen – the sultan’s state – had exercised only superficial control over the country prior to the 1912 protectorate. Postcolonial research has focused on the relations between the sultan and the tribes, which were viewed as concrete embodiments of Moroccan sovereignty in the 19th century, before the establishment of the French and Spanish protectorates in 1912. However, scholars have placed less emphasis on theoretical reflection regarding the legal models or ideological frameworks surrounding this concept of sovereignty.

Contemporary sources such as French travelers or ambassadors often reduced the sultan’s sovereignty to spiritual guardianship over a country that, due to the autonomy of local (in this case, tribal) fiefdoms, resembled “our medieval societies”.2 They more rarely emphasized the importance of the Sharifian genealogy of the sultans, which conferred upon them, through descent from the Prophet, a prestigious baraka (blessing). Historians and anthropologists nowadays agree on the intertwining of the sacred and royalty,3 but power was not limited to this religious aura. Sovereignty combined spiritual and temporal powers – which were, in fact, inseparable – and derived from Islamic law.

Sovereignty Grounded in Law (šarʿ): the Bayʿa

Moroccan authority followed the model of Muslim governance: sovereignty derived from God, who had entrusted, as the Moroccan historian al-Zayyānī (1734–1833) wrote, “the affairs of the Muslims” (amr al-muslimīn4) to a single person, the Commander of the Faithful (amīr al-muʾminīn), a title claimed by the sultans since the Saadian dynasty. This title, along with that of imām (leader of the community), most closely approximated the concept of sovereign. During a ceremony attended by the local elite, an oath of allegiance (bayʿa) was concluded as a legal contract.

The new sultan was charged with enforcing the Islamic legal order (šarʿ),5 in exchange for which his subjects promised him unconditional obedience. The absence of internal divisions (fitna) was thus guaranteed by the uniqueness and irrevocability of this power. The documents preserved by the sultans regarding the allegiance of the cities and tribes grounded this procedure in the Prophet’s precepts and justified this sovereignty by guaranteeing the interests of the country and its inhabitants.

Sovereignty combined spiritual and temporal powers – which were, in fact, inseparable – and derived from Islamic law.

The bayʿa and the official ideology championed by the ulema (religious scholars) and court historians highlighted the contractual nature of this power. In practice, local sources reveal reactive oaths of allegiance, solicited by the son or brother of the deceased sultan who had prevailed over his rivals through his personal qualities and the strength of his military support.

The 19th century saw two turning points. Under the influence of Nahḍa political thought in the Middle East, constitutional proposals spread among intellectual circles, for instance in Tangier. At the height of the crisis the country faced prior to the protectorate, in 1908, oaths of allegiance even imposed conditions on the new sultan, Moulay ʿAbd al-Ḥafīẓ, during a “conditional bayʿa” (mašrūṭa).

The other change was the territorialization of allegiance. Previously, Muslim subjects living in remote regions of Africa could pledge allegiance to the Sultan of Morocco on a symbolic basis, but when, in 1830, the inhabitants of Tlemcen, then under French occupation, sent a bayʿa to Sultan Moulay ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, this declaration of loyalty – which was also a call for help – sparked more debate than enthusiasm.6 At a time when imperialism was tightening border controls, the legal basis of power increasingly aligned with the actual conditions under which this power was exercised.

The Sultan’s Compromised Duties

European pressure, the presence of foreigners and merchants, and economic competition undermined the sultan’s exercise of sovereignty in two of his essential duties as Commander of the Faithful. The first was tax collection, which the sultans justified in the name of zakāt (almsgiving), one of the pillars of Islam. By increasing the debt burden on their state, the Europeans forced the sultans to create new unpopular taxes, notably a new fiscal system moving away from traditional Islamic taxes toward a universal tax (tartīb), in 1880 and then in 1901. Considered as mukūs (non-canonical taxes), they were rejected by an impoverished population and privileged elites alike.

The battle of Tetouan. Source: Mariano Fortuny Marsal, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Another essential duty was the waging of jihād: the Makhzen not only proved powerless against the French armies (defeat at Isly in 1844) or the Spanish (defeat at Tetouan in 1860) but was even forced to disarm tribes at the request of the Spanish. Criticism leveled at the Makhzen did not concern excessive despotism, but rather its inability to support the tribes, which were left to fight the foreign enemy alone.7 This explains why the northern tribes rallied behind rebel forces challenging the dynasty’s legitimacy, such as that of Zarhūnī, known as “the man with the donkey” (Bū Ḥmarā), in 1902.

Official photo of Jilali Ben Driss Zerhouni, also known as Bou Hamara. Source: Archive familliale, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Maintaining the Sultan’s Sovereignty?

Moroccan sovereignty was thus hindered in the exercise of its fundamental obligations by European imperialism. Moroccan actors were fully aware of this, as evidenced, for example, by their criticism of the regime of protégés. This system allowed Europeans to protect their Moroccan intermediaries by subjecting them to their consular jurisdiction, to the detriment of the sultan’s authority, thus extending to Morocco the system of capitulations in place in the Ottoman Empire. For the ulema, accepting protection was simply a breach of the bayʿa.8 The sin of breaking the oath made to the imām did not, however, prevent powerful supporters of the throne, such as the Ouezzane zawiya, a Sufi lodge, from obtaining French protection in 1884. Although its practical application was challenged by Europeans and Moroccan dissidents alike, the legal principle of Moroccan sovereignty endured despite successive crises. The European powers chose to rely on the legitimate throne to safeguard their interests, soon formalized by the protectorate treaties in 1912. By maintaining the sultan’s sovereignty, they contributed to his survival and to the consolidation of his territorial anchorage during the colonial period, following dynamics set in motion in the 19th century.9 This same combination of personal loyalty and territorial claims was central to the monarchy’s conception of national sovereignty, particularly in its claims to territories such as the Sahara, an issue that became crucial for the country after 1975.

  1. E.g. Lâle Can, Aimee Genell, “On Empire and Exception. Genealogies of Sovereignty in the Ottoman World,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 40, no. 3, (2020), 468-473. ↩︎
  2. Gabriel Charmes, Une ambassade au Maroc (Calmann Lévy, 1887). ↩︎
  3. Zakaria Rhani, “Saints et rois : la genèse du politique au Maroc,” Anthropologica, 2008, vol. 50, no. 2 (2008), 375-388. ↩︎
  4. Abū l-Qāsim al-Zayyānī, Al-Bustān al-ẓarīf fī dawlat Awlād Mawlāy al-Šarīf, ed. Rašīd al-Zāwiya, Rissani (Markaz al-Dirāsāt wa l-buḥūṯ al- ʿAlawiyya, 1992), 420. ↩︎
  5. In the Moroccan context, šarʿwas the main source of the law, besides local jurisprudence or customs and Makhzen rules. ↩︎
  6. Raḥma Bū Ruqiyya, Al-dawla wa l-sulṭa wa l-muǧtamaʿ, dirāsa fīl-ṯābit wa l-mutaḥawwil fī ʿalāqāt al-dawla bi l-qabāʾil fīl-Maġrib (Dār al-ṭalīʿa li l-ṭibāʿa wa l-našr, 1991), 28. ↩︎
  7. Amira K. Bennison, Jihad and its Interpretations in Pre-Colonial Morocco. State-Society Relations during the French Conquest of Algeria (Routledge, 2002). ↩︎
  8. Mohammed Kenbib, Les protégés. Contribution à l’histoire contemporaine du Maroc (Publications de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines, 1996), 94. ↩︎
  9. I have explored this topic in Un seul trône. Souveraineté et divisions coloniales au Nord du Maroc (CNRS Éditions, 2025). ↩︎
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Antoine Perrier, "Negotiating the Sultan's Sovereignty under European Imperialism in Morocco," ant.e, July 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/negotiating-the-sultans-sovereignty-under-european-imperialism-in-morocco/
Negotiating Sovereignties
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Negotiating Sovereignties
ARTICLE

Comment: Sovereignty and Legal Transformation – Beyond the Binary

Modern international law has often approached sovereignty through binary distinctions: sovereign or non-sovereign, independent or colonized, equal or unequal. The formally independent but externally constrained polities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries complicate these categories. The examples discussed in this colloquy, Qing and interwar China alongside 19th century Morocco, reveal forms of sovereignty increasingly measured against ideals of territorial exclusivity and sovereign equality, yet continually qualified by extraterritorial privileges, foreign intervention, and unequal international obligations. Rather than chronicling a linear expansion of sovereign equality, these cases show how jurisdictional plurality and asymmetrical power relations were reconfigured within an international order formally based on equality.

Intermediary Governance

One of the clearest common features across these contexts of constrained sovereignties seems to be the growing importance of intermediaries. In China, as Li Cao shows in “Legal Order from Disorder”, the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) emerged from the fractured legal and political environment of the treaty ports as an institution that was formally Chinese yet largely administered by foreigners. It functioned simultaneously as customs administration, diplomatic advisor, translator of international law, and mediator between Qing authorities and foreign powers. Neither fully foreign nor fully national, the CMCS occupied an in-between position that destabilized the idea that sovereignty requires exclusive and unitary state authority. It further illustrates a broader tradition of non-state entities vested with public authority in international affairs, as exemplified earlier by the Dutch East India Company.

This tension between formal sovereignty and dispersed authority appeared elsewhere in regions subject to imperial pressure. In “Negotiating the Sultan’s Sovereignty under European Imperialism in Morocco”, Antoine Perrier notes that in Morocco, European powers fragmented the sultan’s authority without formally abolishing it, by progressively expanding systems of consular protection that placed Moroccan protégés under foreign jurisdiction. Further east in the Ottoman Empire, capitulations and mixed courts similarly institutionalized overlapping jurisdictions and shared legal authority between imperial and foreign actors.1 In all these cases, intermediary institutions mediated rather than displaced sovereignty, a possibility facilitated by longstanding traditions of legal pluralism.2 What later legal doctrine would characterize as fragmentation3 was, in practice, a durable form of political ordering.

The Territorialisation of Sovereignty

Next to the proliferation of intermediary institutions, one of the most significant consequences of the legal transformations of the long nineteenth century was the growing tendency to define sovereignty through territorial administration, fiscal extraction, and centralized governance. Across a range of settings, from the Meiji land tax reforms in Japan4 to the tartīb in Morocco, fiscal reorganization became closely associated with the consolidation of territorial state authority.

In Morocco, authority had long rested on relational forms of allegiance grounded in Islamic law and the contractual logic of bayʿa rather than exclusive and territorially uniform control. Under rising imperial pressure, however, claims to sovereignty were increasingly measured by a state’s capacity to administer territory, collect revenue, and exercise effective jurisdiction. Fiscal reforms such as the tartīb reflected this shift, linking political authority to administrative reach even as consular protections and foreign jurisdictions limited the sultan’s authority.

Modern territorial statehood emerged through institutions that expanded state capacity while simultaneously embedding it within unequal international arrangements.

A comparable dynamic unfolded in China. Despite longstanding forms of differentiated authority, sovereign claims gradually came to be based on territorial jurisdiction, administrative capacity, and centralized state power. The treaty port system and institutions such as the CMCS contributed to this reorientation by extending Qing administrative reach and fiscal capacity, even though they remained embedded in internationalized structures of authority. By the interwar period, as Lucas Brang’s analysis in “Inequality and its Afterlives” demonstrates, efforts to revise the unequal treaties and recover tariff autonomy reflected this emerging conception of sovereignty. Yet the realization of these sovereign claims remained mediated by international agreements and enduring asymmetries of power.

These cases suggest that rather than displacing layered authority, modern territorial statehood emerged through institutions that expanded state capacity while simultaneously embedding it within unequal international arrangements whose effects would outlast the formal achievement of sovereign equality.

The Stickiness of Inequality

The interwar Chinese debates surrounding the “new treaties” illustrate this dynamic with particular clarity. Histories of unequal treaties often present treaty revision as recovery of sovereign equality. However, the replacement of formally unequal treaties by “equal” agreements did not eliminate asymmetry. Instead, inequality reappeared in new legal vocabularies of reciprocity, reform, and economic openness, as the relinquishment of extraterritorial privileges was made conditional upon the opening of Chinese markets to foreign trade and residence. Formal equality thus coexisted with new forms of external economic discipline.

The Moroccan experience points to the same underlying dynamic. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 formally recognized the “sovereignty of His Majesty the Sultan” but also expanded European supervision over Moroccan finances and administration. Likewise, further east, institutions such as the Ottoman Public Debt Administration subjected key areas of fiscal governance to international oversight while leaving the formal structures of sovereignty intact.5 In each case, recognition and constraint advanced together rather than sequentially.

“A dwarf is as much a man as a giant is; a small Republic is no less sovereign State than the most powerful Kingdom.” Emer de Vattel, Le droit des gens, 1758, English translation: The Law of Nations, 1797. Image source: Joaquín Torres-García, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

These examples challenge teleological accounts claiming that imperial inequality gave way to sovereign equality. They reveal the “stickiness” of inequality: asymmetrical relations persisted through adaptation to new legal forms. Rather than disappearing, hierarchy was recast through doctrines of reciprocity, reform, international supervision, and juridical recognition. Sovereignty was not simply restricted from without; it was reconfigured through practices that redistributed authority and rendered external oversight compatible with formal independence.

This tension outlived the imperial formations in which it first emerged. Although decolonization and the universalization of sovereign equality transformed the juridical landscape, disputes over economic dependency, natural resources, and the New International Economic Order continued to expose the gap between formal equality and substantive power. The persistence of these inequalities suggests that the problem was never the absence of sovereignty, but the unequal conditions under which sovereign authority was exercised.

Conclusion: Negotiating Sovereignty under Asymmetry

The Chinese, Moroccan, and other polities often described as “semi-colonial” cast doubt on narratives of an international order founded on the progressive realization of sovereign equality. Positioned between formal independence and colonial subordination, they confounded these ideals and categories in practice.

Their significance lies not just in challenging the binary categories through which global history has often been written, but in revealing sovereignty itself as a historically contingent and continually reconfigured form of political authority. Far from being a stable, territorial, or indivisible possession, sovereign authority was exercised through layered jurisdictions, intermediary institutions, and differentiated governmental competences. What distinguished these polities was not that sovereignty was negotiated or shared, as it often was in European political history, but the conditions under which it was negotiated: within an international order that universalized the language of sovereign equality while reproducing enduring asymmetries of power.

These polities continually reimagined sovereignty in diverse institutional forms, seeking to preserve and expand autonomous political authority to the fullest extent that imperial encroachment allowed. However, rather than overturning hierarchy, their efforts reconfigured it through new institutional arrangements and legal vocabularies that reconciled sovereign authority with persistent external constraints. They therefore illuminate a constitutive tension of modern international law: the universal promise of sovereign equality has long coexisted with unequal conditions for the exercise of sovereign authority

  1. Zülâl Muslu, “Ottoman Mixed Commercial Courts,” in Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law (Oxford University Press, 2023). ↩︎
  2. For discussions of how pre-existing regimes of legal pluralism facilitated overlapping jurisdictions like consular courts, see e.g. Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012). ↩︎
  3. International Law Commission, Fragmentation of International Law: Difficulties Arising from the Diversification and Expansion of International Law, Report of the Study Group of the International Law Commission, finalized by Martti Koskenniemi, UN Doc. A/CN.4/L.682 (2006). ↩︎
  4. See Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 2000). ↩︎
  5. See e.g. Murat Birdal, The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt: Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth Century (I.B. Tauris, 2010). ↩︎

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Zülâl Muslu, "Comment: Sovereignty and Legal Transformation - Beyond the Binary," ant.e, July 2026, https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/https://ante-blog.univie.ac.at/article/comment-sovereignty-and-legal-transformation-beyond-the-binary/