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

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria by Owen White Benjamin Sparks White, Owen. The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria. Harvard UP, 2021. ISBN 978-0-6742-4844-1. Pp. 336. The economic life of French Algeria revolved around its agricultural productions, primarily viticulture. During this time, the production of wine in Algeria rose to prominence, and the French colony became the fourth largest producer globally. Through the expropriation of colonized land, the settler population, which White refers to as Euro-Algerians, planted tens of thousands of hectares of grapevines, creating French Algeria's largest export. In the mid-1930s, roughly 400,000 hectares of land was devoted to viticulture, generating a product that could not be consumed by the local Muslim Algerian population, but which required their manual labor to produce. White's book aims to look at the role of wine in French Algeria chronologically and how it can be traced to France's largest colony's rise and fall. The beginning of French Algeria's viticultural endeavors brought about issues with the Midi region in France over the possibility of competition with metropolitan France's wine industry, sparking a debate around the idea of complementarity versus competition. This debate continued throughout the colonial period, affecting France's political landscape and its neighbors across the Mediterranean, especially during the 1930s. The introduction of phylloxera, a plant louse and pest of the vines, in France in the 1860s would be in the back of the minds of those planting vines in Algeria as the possibility of contamination would be devastating to the new vines. White, however, demonstrates that it was during the late nineteenth century that the agricultural production of wine would boom in the colony, creating a wealthy Euro-Algerian population and sparking interest from French investors. This chronological analysis then focuses on the 1930s and the ensuing labor conflicts, including the strikes against wine tankers in 1935 and the two violent attacks and labor stoppages on the vineyard estates on the Mitidja plain and around Oran in 1936 and 1937, respectively. These attacks on the vineyards primarily included Algerian agricultural workers with organizational help from Euro-Algerian leftists. White declares that it is too easy to view these actions as anti-colonial movements. He argues that these attacks intended to change and improve conditions for workers immediately, rather than acting as part of the anti-colonial narrative. These events, therefore, should be viewed instead as opposing colonists' employment practices while not directly challenging the colonial system. However, these protests would serve as precedents for future actions, spreading insurgent moods among rural Algerians whose low wages would continue to decrease even as they already struggled to make a living. White continues by arguing that the 1945–54 period constituted another interwar period, like the 1920s and 1930s, which included similar labor disputes that would become more overtly hostile and anti-colonial. These Algerian agricultural workers would remain at the heart of the conflict. After independence, Algeria still grappled with the vestiges of colonialism, particularly the ever-present vineyards, which would slowly be uprooted. The Blood of the Colony provides an engaging, in-depth chronological analysis of viticulture and its implications on French Algeria's political landscape. [End Page 253] Benjamin Sparks University of Memphis (TN) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French