Casablanca

• 1. Introduction

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  Casablanca sits on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and for most of the world, the name conjures a black-and-white film shot entirely in California. The real city is something far stranger and more layered. It is the largest city in Morocco, home to more than 4.27 million people in its greater urban area, and the most populous city in the entire Maghreb region. It ranks ninth-largest in the Arab world. Its port is one of the largest artificial ports in Africa. Its stock exchange is the continent's third-largest by market capitalization.

  Yet this economic giant began as a Berber settlement in the seventh century BC, was bombarded into rubble by the Portuguese in 1468, was flattened again by an earthquake in 1755, was shelled by French gunboats in 1907, and hosted a secret wartime summit between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1943. The city has been a pirate haven, a colonial extraction port, a cradle of Moroccan independence, and a center of Jewish life. It has been called, by the French who built much of it, a "laboratory of urbanism."

  What made this particular stretch of Atlantic coastline the engine of an entire nation's economy? How did a series of violent erasures produce a city that now ranks 54th in the Global Financial Centres Index, nestled between Brussels and Rome? And what happens to a place that carries so many names, so many conquests, and so many departures?

• 2. A City of Many Names

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  Before the 15th century, the settlement stood under the name Anfa. European cartographers spelled it variously as El-Anfa, Anafa, Anafee, Nafe, and Nafee. The sociologist Andre Adam spent considerable effort tracing where the word came from, only to conclude that the available evidence was insufficient to settle the question definitively.

  Ibn Khaldun believed Anfa derived from the Anfaca, a branch of the Awraba tribe. Adam rejected that claim because the name lacked the tribe's third syllable. A Hebrew etymology proposed by Nahum Slouschz, drawing on the Lexicon of Gesenius, pointed to the word anaphah, a type of bird, or anaph, meaning face or figure. Adam refuted this too, arguing that even a Judaized population would still have spoken Tamazight, not Hebrew. An Arabic root, anf, meaning nose, failed Adam's test because the city predated the Arabization of Morocco. Adam's own conclusion leaned toward Tamazight: anfa could mean hill, promontory on the sea, sandy beach, or threshing floor.

  The name Anfa persisted on maps until around 1830, and in some cases until 1851, largely because cartographers copied earlier maps rather than updated them. When Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah rebuilt the city after the 1755 earthquake, he renamed it ad-Dar al-Bayda, meaning The White House in Arabic. The Portuguese had already called their rebuilt settlement Casa Branca for the same reason: a white-washed structure on a low hill, possibly a Sufi zawiya, served as a landmark for sailors. The 16th-century Portuguese cartographer Duarte Pacheco noted that a tower made the city easy to identify from the sea. Nautical guides from the late 19th century still mentioned a white tower as a navigational reference. When Spain took over trade from Portugal via the Iberian Union, the name became a calque of the Portuguese: Casablanca.

• 3. Conquest, Earthquake, Rebirth

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  The Phoenicians and then the Romans used the site as a port. Leo Africanus, writing in his Description of Africa, called Anfa a great city founded in the Berber kingdom of Barghawata in 744 AD, and described it as the most prosperous city on the Atlantic coast because of its fertile land. Barghawata survived as an independent state until the Almoravids conquered it in 1068. Arab tribes of Hilal and Sulaym descent moved into the region after the defeat of the Barghawata in the 12th century, mixing with Berbers and producing widespread Arabization. The Merinids raised the port's importance during the 14th century, but the last Merinid rulers were toppled by a popular revolt in 1465.

  The town then returned to independence, becoming a harbor for pirates and privateers. The Portuguese bombarded it into ruins in 1468. The rebuilding produced Casa Branca. Then the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 destroyed that town again, along with the first Jewish synagogue, the Rabbi Elijah synagogue built around 1750.

  Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah rebuilt the port and the town between 1756 and 1790. The timing was likely not coincidental: the Portuguese had evacuated Mazagan in 1769, and the Sultan appeared to be fortifying defenses between Rabat and Mazagan, the city now called El Jadida, to prevent a Christian return. That rebuilt town became ad-Dar al-Bayda, the city that would eventually carry the Spanish calque Casablanca into the modern world.

• 4. French Cannon and Colonial Design

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  By the 1860s, roughly 5,000 people lived in the city. Trade in wool for Britain's textile industry was driving growth, and British merchants were shipping gunpowder tea in return, the tea that became Morocco's national drink. The population reached around 10,000 by the late 1880s.

  The Treaty of Algeciras of 1906 formalized French preeminence in Morocco and handed direct control of Casablanca's customs revenue to French officers. The French holding company La Compagnie Marocaine was assigned to develop the port. To build the breakwater, a narrow-gauge track was laid in June 1907 for a Decauville locomotive, cutting through the sacred Sidi Belyout graveyard. Tribesmen of the Chaouia attacked the locomotive, killing nine Compagnie Marocaine laborers, three French, three Italians, and three Spanish. The French response was immediate and devastating. In August 1907, French gunboats shelled the city, troops landed, and between 600 and 3,000 Moroccans were killed. Total casualty estimates reached as high as 15,000 dead and wounded. The European quarter and the Mellah, Casablanca's Jewish neighborhood, were sacked, and the Mellah was set on fire.

  French control was formalized in March 1912 under the Treaty of Fez. General Hubert Lyautey assigned Henri Prost to plan the new colonial city. Prost designed a European ville nouvelle outside the medina walls, and also a ville indigene to house Moroccans arriving from elsewhere in the country. By 1921, the population had reached 110,000, largely through the growth of shanty towns. A typhoid outbreak in 1937-1938 was used by colonial authorities to justify clearing Moroccans from informal housing in the city center, displacing them to Carrières Centrales. The French themselves called Casablanca a laboratory of urbanism, though the experiments were rarely conducted on equal terms.

• 5. Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Anfa Conference

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  After Philippe Petain signed France's armistice with Germany, French colonial forces in Morocco were ordered to resist any aggressor, Allied or otherwise. French colonists in Morocco largely supported Petain, while Moroccans tended to favor de Gaulle and the Allies.

  Operation Torch launched on the 8th of November 1942. The Western Task Force, led by Major General George S. Patton and Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt, carried out landings at Mehdia, Fedhala, and Asfi. Vichy French forces surrendered on the 11th of November 1942, handing Casablanca to American control. But the Naval Battle of Casablanca continued until the 16th of November, when American forces sank the German submarine U-173.

  Casablanca also served as the staging area for all American aircraft headed to the European theater. The airfield used for that purpose, Berrechid Airfield, eventually became Mohammed V International Airport.

  Two months after the city fell, Churchill and Roosevelt arrived for the Anfa Conference in January 1943. Free France generals Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud attended in minor roles and were excluded from military planning. At that conference, the Allies formally adopted the doctrine of unconditional surrender, committing to fight the Axis powers until total defeat. Roosevelt also met privately with Sultan Muhammad V and expressed support for Moroccan independence after the war. Moroccan nationalists took that signal seriously, and the independence movement gained open momentum from that moment.

• 6. Resistance and Independence

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  Through the 1940s and 1950s, Casablanca was the main center of anti-French unrest in Morocco. On the 7th of April 1947, a massacre of working-class Moroccans was carried out by Senegalese Tirailleurs serving the French colonial army, timed precisely as Sultan Muhammad V was about to deliver a speech in Tangier calling for independence.

  Riots swept Casablanca on 7 and the 8th of December 1952, triggered by the assassination of the Tunisian labor unionist Farhat Hached by La Main Rouge, the clandestine militant wing of French intelligence. Then on the 25th of December 1953, Muhammad Zarqtuni organized a bombing of Casablanca's Central Market in retaliation for the forced exile of Sultan Muhammad V and the royal family on the 20th of August of that year, the day of Eid al-Adha.

  Morocco achieved independence in 1956. But independence did not end social upheaval in Casablanca. On the 22nd of March 1965, student protests organized by the National Union of Moroccan Students began in front of Lycee Mohammed V and spread across the country. The protests had started as a march for the right to public higher education, but expanded to include the concerns of laborers, the unemployed, and other marginalized groups before devolving into riots. Security forces responded with tanks and armored vehicles. Moroccan authorities reported a dozen deaths; the National Union of Popular Forces put the number at more than 1,000. Interior minister Mohamed Oufkir directed the suppression personally, machine-gunning rioters from a helicopter. King Hassan II then blamed the events on teachers and parents, and said in a speech on the 30th of March 1965: "There is no greater danger to the State than a so-called intellectual. It would have been better if you were all illiterate."

  Sixteen years later, on the 6th of June 1981, the Casablanca Bread Riots broke out following a sharp rise in the price of butter, sugar, wheat flour, and cooking oil. The government reported 66 dead and 100 injured; opposition leaders counted 637 dead, many killed by police and army fire.

• 7. Jewish Casablanca

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  A Sephardic Jewish community lived in Anfa until the Portuguese destruction of 1468. Jews were slow to return, but by 1750 the Rabbi Elijah synagogue had been built as the first Jewish place of worship in the rebuilt city. The 1755 earthquake destroyed it along with much of the town.

  In the 19th century, industrial imports from Europe displaced traditional Jewish crafts, pushing Moroccan Jews from the interior toward coastal cities, including Casablanca. The French invasion of 1907 ravaged the Mellah. Through the interwar period, Jewish patrons played a central role in shaping Casablanca's skyline. The architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen documented that Jewish clients commissioned the overwhelming majority of the city's tallest buildings during those decades. One example is the Levy-Bendayan Building, designed by Marius Boyer.

  By the 20th century, Casablanca had become the center of Jewish life in all of Morocco, with more than 80 synagogues and numerous Jewish social, cultural, and charitable institutions. In 1956, the year of Moroccan independence, 100,000 Jews were registered in the city. Approximately 28,000 Moroccan Jews had already immigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1951, many departing through Casablanca. The Mossad-organized operation known as Operation Yachin then ran from 1961 to 1964, with Casablanca as the main departure point. By 2018, estimates put the remaining Jewish population at around 2,500; according to the World Jewish Congress, only around 1,000 Moroccan Jews remained in the city. The Moroccan Jewish Museum, established in 1997, now holds that history.

• 8. Economic Capital and Future Risks

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  The Grand Casablanca region draws 32% of Morocco's production units and 56% of its industrial labor. The region accounts for 30% of national electricity consumption and contributes 44% of the kingdom's industrial output. About 33% of national industrial exports originate there. The port complex at Casablanca and nearby Mohammedia together handle 50% of Morocco's international commercial traffic.

  The city ranked 54th in the September 2023 Global Financial Centres Index, between Brussels and Rome. Its stock exchange ranked third in Africa by market capitalization as of December 2022. Major Moroccan banks, including Attijariwafa Bank, BCP Group, and Bank of Africa, are headquartered in Casablanca. The city hosts the Technopark hub for IT and digital companies, and the National Ports Agency has its headquarters there.

  On the 1st of November 2023, Casablanca joined UNESCO's Creative Cities Network alongside Ouarzazate.

  That cultural recognition arrives alongside a stark physical reckoning. A 2019 paper in PLOS One projected that by 2050, Casablanca's climate under a moderate warming scenario would most closely resemble today's climate of Tripoli, Libya. The 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report identified Casablanca as one of twelve major African cities facing the most severe exposure to future sea level rise. Collectively, those twelve cities could sustain cumulative damages of US$65 billion under the moderate scenario and US$86.5 billion under the high-emission scenario by 2050. Under the high-end ice sheet instability scenario, aggregate risks across all scenarios could climb to US$397 billion. The Casablanca that survived Portuguese cannon, French gunboats, colonial displacement, and bread riots now faces a threat with no armistice date.