During his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival London 2021, William Dalrymple, while talking about the reality and the legacy of the British empire, talked of Queen Elizabeth and the joint projects of the empire. “She was busy making an alliance with the Moroccans against the Catholhic Spanish and there were various joint projects,” that echoed the sentiment that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’.
The Muslim Moroccans had allied with the Elizabethan court with a view to attack sporadically the Spanish and Portuguese treasure ships that were coming back from the New World and there was even a suggestion made of a joint colonisation project by the Sultan of Morocco - he asserted that the Morrocans would be better off settling in Virgina than the white British for they were better at dealing with the heat and the climatic extremes.
Even today, in the Moroccan Embassy in London, there is an extraordinary full-length portrait of Morocco's ambassador who was sent to Elizabethen’s England - a handsome guy portrayed by Tudor painters as almost a Shakespearen villain with a wicked gleam in his eyes. The empire was made of many complexities - there was racism against one people, but there was also the possibility of alliance with the Muslims in Morocco. This is the kind of complexity we need to understand, Dalrymple said, when we read and write history.
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