Back in colonial Algeria, when settlers planted more vineyards, it actually brought more locals into the area instead of pushing them out.
March 27, 2026
Original Paper
Cash Crops, Settlement Patterns, and Indigenous Population Growth: The Role of Wine in Colonial Algeria (1900–1950)
SSRN · 6473528
The Takeaway
Contrary to the standard assumption that colonial cash crops drive locals off the land, the specific labor demands of wine—which requires year-round attention—acted as a 'population magnet.' This created a counterintuitive pattern where indigenous populations became more concentrated and less mobile in the very areas dominated by colonial agriculture.
From the abstract
This paper examines how export-oriented settler agriculture shaped the spatial distribution of indigenous populations in colonial Algeria. By the early twentieth century, Algeria had become one of the world’s largest wine producers and the principal supplier of wine to metropolitan France. We construct a commune-level panel dataset combining census measures of the indigenous population with indicators of viticultural intensity derived from agricultural reports. Exploiting variation in early expo