Call for Applications | PhD position “Spreading Fertilizer Around the Phosphatvilles: Chemical Fertilizer and Moroccan Agriculture, 1920s-1970s”, University of Birmingham — LIMITE : 08/12/2025
About the Project
The History Department at the University of Birmingham, UK, invites applications for one fully- funded, four-year PhD position, under the auspices of the SNSF project “Feeding the Earth: Synthetic Fertilizers and the Remaking of Agriculture in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”.
The project is a collaboration between the University of Basel, the University of Birmingham, and Helmut-Schmidt University in Hamburg. It enquires into the spread of synthetic fertilizers and the ways in which it transformed agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The use of synthetic fertilizers exploded over the twentieth century, boosting yields while fostering dependency, land concentration, soil degradation, and water pollution. Despite their unsustainability and resistance from some farmers, synthetic fertilizers remain globally dominant. As climate change, soil loss, and pollution compel a rethinking of food systems, this project asks: how have societies historically shifted between fertilizing regimes?
The overall project investigates the uneven transition from traditional to synthetic fertilizers in northern Europe, South Africa, Turkey, and Morocco, addressing the largely understudied global history of fertilizer adoption.
PHD PROJECT #3: Spreading Fertilizer Around the Phosphatvilles: Chemical Fertilizer and Moroccan Agriculture, 1920s-1970s
This project re-interprets the history of chemical fertilizers in twentieth century Morocco, examining their role in reshaping the agricultural context of some of the world’s most influential mineral deposits. To date, Morocco’s part in the rise of synthetic fertilizer is typically studied through its role as a leading global exporter of rock phosphate. This project, however, moves away from the narrow focus on extraction and production, which treats Morocco mainly as a source of nutrient exports.
Artificial fertilizer is an understudied but central aspect of Morocco’s agricultural transformation from the 1920s-1970s. Often distributed for free or heavily subsidised at first, subsequent forced purchases of chemical fertilizer helped enmesh farmers in debt, or prompted them to join buyers’ cooperatives. These dynamics helped re-engineer modes of rural solidarity and racialised differentiation, as farmers suffered from dispossession and land commodification by settlers and from the disruption of pastoral transhumance. Fertilizer’s uneven uptake among farmers also captures the sharp limits and remixes to which dominant agro-chemical knowledge regimes were subject. Such practices and contingencies were a crucial aspect of its role and must be understood historically.
While the social and ecological impact of colonial modernization in Moroccan agriculture is relatively well known, and while newer scholarship has examined the ecological dimensions of migratory agriculture or the role of gender in the rise of export monocultures, the fertilizer nexus has not benefited from historical study to date, outside of research on phosphate extraction, mining towns and fertilizer production. Historicizing anthropological studies of present day fertilizer production and dissemination, this project will produce a history of an agrarian system that shaped phosphate extraction and global fertilizer use, even as it was itself subject to the contested influence of chemical fertilizer.
This PhD will therefore focus on chemical fertilizer’s uneven and gradual embedding in the social, political and cultural worlds of Moroccan agriculture from the 1920s-1970s. It will contextualise the history of phosphate mining, and Morocco’s global significance in the rise of input-intensive food production, within the changing agrarian situation of Morocco itself, analysing chemical fertilizer’s role in that change and farmers’ varied response to it.
Among the expected key research themes are: analysing the various brokers of synthetic fertilizer use in Morocco in this period, and the subsidy, credit, distribution, cooperative, and publicity systems they worked in; the colonial and national policies on fertilizer as they related to agricultural capitalisation and mechanisation, model farms and changes to labour, ownership and ecological regimes; the racialised and gendered migratory labour regimes that linked phosphate mining and agriculture, studied in combination; finally, the regional and transnational role of Morocco as a driver of synthetic fertilizer use in West and North Africa.
You will be expected to work closely with your supervisor to:
- conduct independent archival research and potentially oral history research on and in the geographical area of your work package and complete the dissertation within the funding period
- publish one peer-reviewed article or book chapter and present your findings at international conferences
- actively participate in advancing the project’s overall research goals, collaborate closely with the whole team on the funded project
- help with admin tasks, conference organization, communication tasks, webpage content management.
Eligibility criteria/entry requirements:
- Doctoral candidates need to hold a strong Master’s degree (or equivalent) in History or a related discipline.
- You need to be fluent in English, our team’s working language. Preference will be given to candidates who bring additional language proficiencies relevant to their work package on Moroccan history, in this case Modern Standard Arabic and Darija or Tamazight, as well as French.
- Experiences in archival research and a robust historical understanding of modern Moroccan history and historiography are essential.
- Finally, you are flexible to travel for the project, and you are able to be primarily resident in Birmingham during your entire contract period.
How to apply/references:
Prospective applicants are required to apply by sending in:
- A cover letter (this should set out your reasons for applying for the scholarship and why you are suited to the research proposed. It should discuss relevant scholarly literature and speak to the proposed research themes of the PhD.)
- An academic CV (include the names and contact details of two referees at the end of the CV)
- Scientific writing sample (max. 10 pages).
- Official transcript of MA grades.
These documents should be sent to: calscholarshipprizes@contacts.bham.ac.uk by 8 December 2025.
Following shortlisting, interviews will be held. It is anticipated that Interviews will be held via video-call on 8/9 January 2026.
At this stage we will ask for reference from the referees nominated by shortlisted candidates.
Please note that only the PhD position focused on Morocco will be based at University of Birmingham. Applicants who would like to apply for PhD positions focused on South Africa or Turkey, and based at the University of Basel, should apply here:
University of Birmingham Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Statement: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/about/equality-diversity-inclusionOpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Chargé de diffusion scientifique (14 novembre 2025). Call for Applications | PhD position “Spreading Fertilizer Around the Phosphatvilles: Chemical Fertilizer and Moroccan Agriculture, 1920s-1970s”, University of Birmingham — LIMITE : 08/12/2025 . IISMM. Consulté le 16 décembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/1559h
