Project

From Colonies to Carriers

A digital history project tracing how newly independent African states used civil aviation to project sovereignty, establish national identity, and build postcolonial institutions — with a case study on Royal Air Maroc.

Historic route map showing European airline connections across Africa. — Source image from the African Airlines archive/video folder, now used as the project visual anchor.

Role
Researcher and data archaeologist
Areas
Digital History / Research
Skills
Archival research, Digital history, Database design, Data archaeology, Postcolonial history

Digital history / Research

Royal Air Maroc, 1957–1970

The postcolonial route network drawn from Casablanca — each arc traced the way the airline flew it. Built from the project dataset, not hand-drawn.

Network map · equirectangular · 1957–1970 Hub · CMN 33.6°N 7.6°W

EuropeMaghreb / N. AfricaWest Africa Hub · Casablanca

Destinations opened · 1957–1970

19571970

destinations reconstructed in the early RAM network

723

African airlines in the wider project dataset

1956

Moroccan independence — the year the network starts to grow

The deck

African Airlines presentation

Download the full deck (PDF) →

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Scroll or swipe through all 27 slides — or open the full PDF above.

Written paper

Open PDF: From Colonies to Carriers — working paper (intro & conclusion)

Overview

When African states achieved independence in the late 1950s and 1960s, establishing a national airline was rarely a matter of economic logic alone. An airline was a flag, a symbol of sovereignty, and a daily assertion that the new state existed and belonged in the world.

This project uses Royal Air Maroc as the close case while placing Morocco inside a wider African pattern of national carriers, joint ventures, state backing, foreign capital, and uneven institutional survival.

What the deck shows

The deck carries the argument through the 1957 Air Atlas and Air Maroc merger, ownership changes over time, RAM growth metrics, national-prestige imagery, labor training, and a broader dataset of twentieth-century African airlines.

The artifact set below pairs the deck with the working atlas, a RAM ridership visual, and a primary-source route map so the page shows the research machinery rather than only describing it.

Interactive atlas panel showing African countries shaded by airline count. — Digital atlas Atlas panel from the interactive map workflow: a continent-level view of airline density by country.

Royal Air Maroc ridership data visualization showing growth over time. — Data visual Royal Air Maroc ridership visual from the research/video asset set, used to make institutional growth legible.

Primary-source map of protected Royal Air Maroc routes in Africa. — Source visual Primary-source route map used to connect postcolonial airline policy to the geography of protected routes.

Map of African administrative divisions around 1960. — Historical geography Continental political geography gives the airline data a clearer independence-era frame.

Air Afrique advertisement source image. — Visual source Airline advertising helps show how carriers projected identity, modernity, and regional ambition.

Why it matters

African airlines were built at a moment when the infrastructure of sovereignty was being assembled from scratch. Reading them as institutions, symbols, and data problems at once helps explain why flag carriers mattered even when pure market logic was weak.

How this works as a workflow

This dataset is a practical case study in structured data extraction from fragmentary sources. AI can help identify repeated source patterns and propose variable definitions, converting raw entries into structured rows for a dataset.

The human role is definitional and verificatory: define what variables are meaningful, check every ambiguous entry against the original source, preserve gaps where evidence is absent rather than estimating, and document the extraction rules so the process is reproducible. What I would not automate: source interpretation, uncertain historical claims, or filling missing fields without clear evidence.