Uprooting what the French planted: Wine, culture and identity in colonial Algeria

Abstract

Abstract:This article serves as an introduction to the history of the establishment, development and eventual uprooting of French colonial vineyards in Algeria. French colonial sources presented a narrative of decline in their descriptions of the colonial vineyards in Algeria, believing that most of North Africa had been neglected or even infertile before the beginning of the military conquest in 1830. The hard work of French settlers, they suggested, restored a fertility to the soil that had been lost since Roman times. In their publications, they used the planting of vineyards as a symbol for this restoration of an allegedly formerly lost glory and likened the process of the colonisation of Algeria to the spread of the vines, with French culture literally taking roots in North African soil.