Early 19th Century–1912: (Morocco — The Only Maghreb State Not Administered by the Ottomans, Stubborn Resistance to European Influence, the 1845 French Incur…

Early 19th Century–1912: (Morocco — The Only Maghreb State Not Administered by the Ottomans, Stubborn Resistance to European Influence, the 1845 French Incursion Provoked by Moroccan Support for Abd al-Qadir, the 1860 Spanish War and the Loan That Began the End of Independence, Mawlai al-Hasan’s Extension of the State 1873–1894, and Final Partition Between Spain and France in 1912): Morocco stubbornly resisted European influence and restricted the activities of European merchants — its isolationism was especially pronounced under Sultan Mawlai Sulaiman in the early nineteenth century. But regional events soon had a profound impact: the Moroccans under Sultan Abd ar-Rahman assisted Abd al-Qadir in Algeria, provoking a French incursion in 1845. A renewed threat came from Spain, which dispatched an army that inflicted heavy defeats — in 1860, Morocco agreed to pay a hefty indemnity, and to raise the required loan from Britain, which awarded the British a degree of control over Moroccan commerce. This was the beginning of the end of independence. Under Sultan Mawlai al-Hasan, between 1873 and 1894, the state was greatly extended by subduing disloyal groups in northern Mauritania and the Atlas mountains — Morocco achieved remarkable autonomy and stability until the early twentieth century. Only in 1912 did Morocco finally fall under European control, partitioned between Spain and France. Across the nineteenth-century Maghreb, the response to an increasingly Europeanized Mediterranean had been reform and modernization in some places, while in the Sahara and on its fringes the response was an increasingly militant and fundamentalist Islam — even where European presence was apparently strongest, the seeds were sown for the Islamic and nationalist movements of the twentieth century.