The contributors to this volume critically rethink the history of colonial and nationalist categories and analyses of the Maghrib. Their goal is to explore the ambiguities, failures, and silences manufactured by colonial and nationalist scholarships, and to present alternative strategies and scholarship to the study of history, culture, and state-society relations in the Maghrib during the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite the fact that the contributors come from different disciplines and perspectives-political science, history, or sociology-they share a critical view of the history of the Maghrib, and they approach Maghribi societies not as a footnote to Europe and capitalism, but within its own dynamics.