UC Davis

This dissertation examines how Morocco’s Saʿdian dynasty (1541-1631) briefly prevailed as one of the world’s top producers and exporters of sugar. Before sugar production spread across the Atlantic, Saʿdian Morocco was the site where sugar began to evolve from a minor crop into one of the most consequential commodities in the world—a commodity whose mass production and consumption heralded the dawn of capitalism. A key factor that contributed to Morocco’s dominance of sugar production was its reliance on slave labor following its invasion of the West African Songhay Empire in 1591. The influx of slave labor—specifically Black, Muslim, and African—marked an unprecedented historical moment in which Morocco shunned Islamic jurisprudence forbidding Muslims from enslaving fellow Muslims. Toward the end of its reign, however, Saʿdian Morocco was unable to compete with the burgeoning sugar economies in colonial Brazil, Haiti, and Jamaica, due to the growth of the Atlantic slave trade. Ultimately, sugar spelled both the rise and demise of the Saʿdian dynasty.

This project draws on archival research in Jamaica, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and the United Kingdom: sources include plantation records, deeds, trade ledgers, receipts, royal correspondences, and juridical texts. The sources reveal a tangled story that unsettles dominant assumptions and taxonomies. Sugar serves as a needle that threads early modern Northwest Africa into the historiographical quilt of color, race, and slavery in the early modern Islamic world. Its unwinding also relates to Africa’s role in the emergence of capitalism and the history of sugar production in the early modern Atlantic world. The Maghrib occupies the center of economic crosscurrents that bring together Africa, the Atlantic, and the Middle East. By tracing the processes that transformed sugar from a luxury into a commodity, the early modern Maghrib becomes a vital node in the emerging networks of global capitalism.