Describing poverty in the Maghreb, from colonial surveys to post-independence sociology (1930s-1970s)

This paper describes changes in the methods and functions of social surveys in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia from the 1930s to the 1970s, based on a corpus of works published in French and Arabic. The measurement of poverty in the Maghreb shifted from an observation of traditional societies in which low living standards were explained by seemingly immobile social structures, to a critique of underdevelopment. From the 1930s onwards, several factors contributed to this change in perception of income disparities: the development of social knowledge that was in part autonomous from the administration, the development of direct survey tools, and the nationalisation of surveys by sociologists after independence. However, efforts to measure poverty remained incomplete and the social sciences were fragmented into different areas, particularly linguistic ones. They did not converge towards the more synthetic portraits of “composite societies”, as theorised by Paul Pascon in the 1960s, but showed the many nuances within these societies, between urban and rural areas, or between each of the three countries.