Owen White. The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria.

Abstract

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited Algeria in the early 1840s, he was skeptical that the mountainous areas surrounding Algiers would be suitable for cultivating crops, including wine. This was worrying, given his conviction that agricultural settlement would be a decisive factor in the success of the France’s colonial project. Owen White’s engaging monograph, The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria, mentions this anecdote as it charts the “rise and fall” of French Algeria, using wine as a lens to study the economic, political, and social contours of French settlement. Tocqueville’s impressions were ultimately misguided; in the 1880s, “anyone who was in a position to plant vines did so,” which reflected an optimistic frenzy analogous to the gold rush in the United States (50). The monograph builds on a number of excellent works on wine, many of which were written in the 1950s and 1960s. Emphasizing the “human element” in the story of wine, White poses a broader set of questions regarding the relationship between Algeria and metropolitan France. In so doing, he contributes to a recent wave of scholarship that draws upon William Sewell’s notion of “embedded economies” to examine the economic life of the French Empire.