Ayelet Marron is a doctoral candidate in history, specializing in American foreign relations. Her dissertation, “Occupation Economics in WWII”, examines the first large-scale occupation the US undertook in WWII – French North Africa (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia). American occupation administrators constructed occupation as liberation while reinforcing French colonial rule – and their economic policies became blueprints for postwar military interventions and foreign aid programs that preserved European colonialism under US hegemony. Each chapter deconstructs an economic paradigm – Aid, Relief, Trade, Compensation – by analyzing how American occupation administrators negotiated its meaning with French and Maghrebi actors in diverse domains – welfare and labor, market controls, reconstruction and production. Food constituted the largest portion of US imports for civilian consumption and drove economic strategy, from fears that hunger would stir unrest, to fantasies of a “North African breadbasket” that would feed US troops and the civilians of liberated Europe. At the CCA’s Hunger Seminar, Marron will probe this critical role of food policy in establishing political power and legitimacy. Marron’s dissertation is supervised by Dr. Jennifer Mittelstadt and has been supported by the Society for Military History and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).
