The Social Life of Phosphate on the Two Shores of the Mediterranean: Ecology, Work and Migration

This article focuses in on the extraction, travel, and processing of phosphate, tracing the commodities’ movements from Khouribga in Morocco to Porto Marghera in Italy. For decades, these two sites have been silently connected in what historian Simon Jackson calls the Phosphate Archipelago: a network of extractive and industrial spaces on the two shores of the Mediterranean, spaces once managed by the French empire. In what follows, the nature of their relation—bound, as ever, by phosphate—is subjected to inquiry. This article has been translated in Arabic (https://alsifr.org/social-life-phosphate).