Abstract
Moroccan historian Abdallah Laroui’s L’histoire du Maghreb: Un essai de synthèse (The History of North Africa: An Interpretative Essay) (1970) offers a prime example of a former colonized subject’s effort to decolonize the discipline of history. Scholars of Arab and North African historiography have either dismissed it as an ideological text or lauded it as an ambitious attempt to call out French hegemony in its former colonies. This essay offers an alternative reading that underlines its social and political dimensions in the context of Moroccan nation-building in the 1970s. It puts Laroui in dialogue with other intellectual voices of this time to illustrate the originality of his call for the public role of historians of decolonization. The article also discusses Laroui’s political withdrawal in the next decade and his shift from Marxism to liberal state reformism.
