Sources for the Socio-economic study of rural Morocco

This paper explores the utility of 19th- and 20th-century taxation and court records as tools for mapping the changing social topography of rural Morocco. Little serious work has been done with such records to date, and it is hoped that this paper will encourage more researchers to use this material. As a subset of the Moroccan official record, legal and tax records obviously have an epistemological character differing from that of private correspondence and even other administrative records. Yet in the post-modern era, it is obvious that this cannot be simply reduced to the official record providing us with truth while private correspondence is a mixture of fiction and possible truth. All sources need to be scrutinized both in the traditional ways of the historian and, more generally, as reflecting social forces conceived broadly.