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

Abstract

Velvet Empire is a compelling read. It draws upon an impressive array of sources to offer a sweeping perspective of France’s rising global economic influence over the nineteenth century. In addition, Todd does an especially impressive job of showing how French intellectuals and statesmen theorized and formulated French economic activity as a kind of imperialism that allowed them to hold their heads high in relation to Britain. In the end, though, even Todd seems to hesitate on whether these rhetorical flourishes and economic practices truly constituted a form of imperial domination distinct from the complex workings of global finance capitalism. Though he ostensibly offers the case study on Egypt to prove his argument, Todd nevertheless plants seeds of doubt even as he seeks to persuade readers that this is, in fact, imperialism. The evidence he offers in the final chapter does not always quiet these doubts. Part of the issue is that Todd needs both a more robust theorization of capitalism and imperialism to make the argument that distorted economic exchanges backed by imposed legal codes and military authority that unequally benefit merchants and financiers is something more than the mundane operation of nineteenth-century bourgeois capitalism on a global scale. Todd’s work thus raises two additional questions: How does defining activities as imperialism the way he does expand our understanding of empire as a system of control? Similarly, how does defining these activities as imperialism expand our understanding of how French capitalism and global capitalism developed over the nineteenth century? In leaving the reader with such questions, Todd’s book complicates rather than resolves the riddle and paradox with which he begins, but does so in a way that ought to continue the discussion and debate that inspired the writing of A Velvet Empire.