ABOUT THIS BOOKThe surprising story of the wine industry’s role in the rise of French Algeria and the fall of empire.
“We owe to wine a blessing far more precious than gold: the peopling of Algeria with Frenchmen,” stated agriculturist Pierre Berthault in the early 1930s. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Europeans had displaced Algerians from the colony’s best agricultural land and planted grapevines. Soon enough, wine was the primary export of a region whose mostly Muslim inhabitants didn’t drink alcohol.
Settlers made fortunes while drawing large numbers of Algerians into salaried work for the first time. But the success of Algerian wine resulted in friction with French producers, challenging the traditional view that imperial possessions should complement, not compete with, the metropole. By the middle of the twentieth century, amid the fight for independence, Algerians had come to see the rows of vines as an especially hated symbol of French domination. After the war, Algerians had to decide how far they would go to undo the transformations the colonists had wrought—including the world’s fourth-biggest wine industry. Owen White examines Algeria’s experiment with nationalized wine production in worker-run vineyards, the pressures that resulted in the failure of that experiment, and the eventual uprooting of most of the country’s vines.
With a special focus on individual experiences of empire, from the wealthiest Europeans to the poorest laborers in the fields, The Blood of the Colony shows the central role of wine in the economic life of French Algeria and in its settler culture. White makes clear that the industry left a long-term mark on the development of the nation.
REVIEWSA tour de force. This lively book explores the centrality of vineyards and wine to Algeria’s economy and society in a revealing, long-neglected story about the crown jewel in France’s colonial empire. White uses wine to shed new light on Algeria’s links with France, colonial labor relations, capitalism, and trade. He also engages with the history of science and technology and environmental studies while providing insight into a devastating war of decolonization and its fallout.
-- Eric T. Jennings, author of Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean
Deeply researched and elegantly written, this is the first major work on wine in Algeria, which is surprising given the extent to which Algeria helped rescue the French wine industry from the crisis of phylloxera. White tells a story that is at once French and Algerian, but also global, seamlessly weaving together histories of agriculture, labor, political economy, environment, migration, race, and colonial governance. I highly recommend this erudite and compelling book.
-- Mary Dewhurst Lewis, author of Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Empire in French Tunisia, 1881–1938
A beautifully researched and lucidly written book. Explaining how and why wine became the lifeblood of French Algeria, White tacks gracefully between the local and the global, weaving social, economic, and political history into a comprehensive portrait of a settler society. A commodity history that is also a concise, accessible account of French colonization in North Africa and its legacies.
-- Jennifer E. Sessions, author of By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria
In tracing the emergence of Euro-Algerian viticulturalists and the wine industry they developed, White achieves a sweeping view of French colonialism in Algeria grounded in the everyday experiences of those who made and unmade the Algerian wine industry. Innovative in approach and impressive in scope, this important book will garner a wide readership.
-- Elizabeth Heath, author of Wine, Sugar, and the Making of Modern France
A superb, elegantly written history of colonial Algeria’s immense wine industry and its complex relationship to mainland France. In this landmark work in the history of empire, labor, and capitalism, White covers the full span of Algeria’s tumultuous colonial past, from French conquest to the first years of national independence. A tremendous achievement.
-- Herrick Chapman, author of France’s Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic
This wonderfully insightful book shows us how wine production in Algeria became integral to France’s colonization project. As White makes clear, wine exports reconfigured Algeria’s economy within a fabric of colonial dependency. Little wonder that vineyards figured among the most decisive battlegrounds of the Algerian revolution. From start to finish, the detail is brilliant, the conclusions powerful.
-- Martin Thomas, author of Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and Their Roads from Empire
White describes the economics of the Algerian wine business in revealing detail.
-- Richard Vinen Literary Review
White brilliantly unveils the remarkable story of how Algeria became the world’s fourth-largest wine-producer, before the industry’s post-Independence reduction to insignificance…A fascinating and important study which may be warmly recommended to all those with an interest in the complex legacy of France’s colonial presence in Algeria.
-- Philip Dine French Studies
Handily brings together a history of wine—from unpromising beginnings, through phylloxera and the subsequent surge in production, to the travails of the interwar years and the eventual demise of viniculture—with a history of settler colonialism and all its contradictions…White has performed an admirable job and has served up a monograph that is scholarly in the best sense but also a real pleasure to read.
-- Paul Nugent Journal of Wine Economics
White traces France’s role in turning a largely Muslim country into a powerhouse wine producer before abandoning the vines when the country gained independence in 1962. Told with energy and riveting detail, it’s a fascinating—and sobering—tale that touches on issues of politics, race relations, economics and environmental sustainability that remain integral to the conversation around wine today.
-- Wine and Spirits
Through the prism of a single commodity, White offers new insights into the economics and cultural significance of French settler colonialism. An elegant and illuminating study.
-- David Todd, author of A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Note on Place Names
Note on Metric Conversion
Introduction: The Empire of Wine in Algeria
Rise and Fall
People of the Vine
Wine and the Economic Life of Algeria
When Is a Colony Not a Colony?
1. Roots: Antiquity to 1870
The Wine Frontier
Complementary Colonization
Settlement and the Wine Question
Searching for the Wealth of a Colony
2. Phylloxera and the Making of the Algerian Vineyard: 1870 to 1907
Phylloxera and the “Seduction” of the Colonist
The Insurgent: Phylloxera in Algeria
Masters of the Land?
The Perils of the Market and the Honor of Algerian Wine
Getting Caught Up with Capital
3. Companies and Cooperatives, Work and Wealth: 1907 to 1930
Phylloxera, War, and Reconstitution
War and the Horizon of Capital
The Cooperative Movement
Working in the Vines
Working for the Vines
Wealth and Influence
4. Algeria and the Midi: The 1930s (I)
Competition versus Complementarity
Plantation Fever
Fixing Limits
Backfire and Backlash
Allies and Antagonists
The Tide Crests
5. Labor Questions: The 1930s (II)
Toward “Welfare Viticulture”?
“Machines of Famine”: The First Wine Tankers
Politicizing the Agricultural Worker
Violence in the Vines
Mouths to Feed
6. Wine in the Wars: 1940 to 1962
Vichy Algeria
“Liberated” Algeria
The Other Entre-Deux-Guerres
The Logic of Descartes
The Front Lines
The Hollowing
The Future and the End
7. Pulling Up Roots: Since 1962
Self-Management
Breaking Dependence?
Wine Repatriated
Corsica, a New Algeria?
Algerian Wine at the Margins
Epilogue: The Geometry of Colonization
Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index