The Blood of the Colony

Owen White, professor in the Department of History, will visit UCLA on May 1, 2024, to present a lecture on his award-winning book, The Blood of the Colony: Wine and the Rise and Fall of French Algeria​ (Harvard University Press, 2021).

White specializes in the history of modern France, including French colonialism, but when he began this project, he didn’t realize how far it would lead him through the world of viniculture— the growing of grapes to make wine.

“I’m not a wine connoisseur,” White said, “I think of myself primarily as a colonial historian, not a wine historian,” yet White’s work tracing the history of wine production in French Algeria has earned recognition by industry publications. The Blood of the Colony was reviewed by Wine & Spirits and quoted in Wine Enthusiast, among other mentions.

And, as a mark of his new expertise, White was asked to contribute the entry on Algeria to the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine (Oxford University Press, 2023), a comprehensive guide to winemaking throughout the world.​

At its height, French Algeria, which existed as a colony from 1830-1962, was the fourth largest producer and the largest exporter of wine in the world, with approximately 1 million acres of vineyards. Aside from a doctoral thesis from the 1940s, little scholarly information existed exploring this history in depth. “One of my aims … is to contribute to a burgeoning social history of French Algeria, whose historiography seemed fo​​r a long time to be dominated by discussion of its demise rather than the decades during which its existence appeared relatively settled,” White wrote in the book’s introduction.​

In January, The Blood of the Colony won the 2024 Eugen Weber Book Award in modern French history from the UCLA Department of History. The prize committee cited The Blood of the Colony for being “strikingly original and eminently readable… In this wonderfully rendered ‘total history’ of Algerian wine and its demise, the history of Algeria and its principal commodity acquire a very human face.”

Wine had been cultivated in Algeria during the Roman Empire, but there was little evidence of it by the time France invaded in 1830. Colonizers from France and other European nations spent the next several decades appropriating land and transforming the agricultural landscape. In 1892, a member of a delegation from the French Senate commission traveling through the colony noted that the neat rows of grapevines, the “most French” of all crops, perfectly symbolized the colonizers’ success.​

“The book shows that there are dimensions to wine production that you might not think about,” White said, “and this includes an untold story about complicated questions of power.” While most owners and producers were European, day laborers in the vineyards were primarily Algerian Muslims, whose religion required abstention from alcohol.

And, unlike most colonies, which took care not to compete with the mother country, French Algeria directly competed with, and at times contributed to, France’s wine industry.

White explores these overlapping tensions along with the impact of world events like the phylloxera epidemic, which decimated European vineyards, the Great Depression and world wars, and he explains how the protests that ultimately led to the Algerian War of Independence likely began as anti-colonist labor disputes rather than explicit anti-colonial resistance.​

Just as the story of winemaking in Algeria didn’t begin with the French invasion of 1830, it did not end in 1962 when Algeria won its independence. After the war ended Europeans fled the country, and Muslim leaders called for the destruction of all vineyards, but the newly independent Algerian government realized it would be financially disastrous to destroy the nation’s main export.

Still, the industry gradually declined and by 2015 Algeria was importing more wine than it exported, yet on a research trip in 2013, White visited the headquarters of the Office national de commercialization des produits viti-vinicoles (ONCV), Algeria’s state wine company, which is housed in an unmarked building in Algiers (perhaps to discourage protests), and explored wine-production facilities built in the colonial era that are now used by a private company in the west of the country.

ONCV produces Cuvée Monica, named for the mother of Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), the Catholic saint born in North Africa in what is now Algeria.

As White explains, Augustine’s writings reveal Monica’s struggle with early alcohol abuse, as well as his own “uncontrolled desire in eating and drinking.” Prior to converting to Christianity, which venerates the vine in symbolism, Augustine followed the ancient Manichean religion, which forbade alcohol consumption, an apt illustration of the region’s complicated relationship with wine production and consumption.

“Alcohol is always embedded in a broader culture, and culture will determine whether the Algerian wine industry has a future,” White said.

Owen White received the Francis Alison Society Young Scholar Award 2001 (now called the Gerard J. Mangone Award), and he won the University’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2020. His next project is coediting the upcoming Cambridge Companion to the French Empire.​

Art​icle by Megan M.F. Everhart; photos courtesy of Owen White

Published April 24, 2024