The Colonial Aftertaste: Algerian Wine, the French Appellation of Origin and the European Sovereignty-Property Complex in International Law

Abstract The French wine laws of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of which were internationalized during the interwar and post-World War II eras, have been a vivid manifestation of European ‘state capitalism’ as evolving from the ‘immature’ independence of the economic sphere from the political sphere and the persistence of ethno-national boundaries. French wine laws specifically reacted to the extension of colonial viticulture to Algeria in the post-1848 era, paralleling France’s own state-led transition to agrarian capitalism, followed by the startling rise of Algerian wine that required the French legislature to insulate the metropole’s winemakers from global competition. In parallel, the French government sought the international protection of its wine names, joining hands with other European countries in the post-1945 era to delink the continent’s colonial and migratory past from its post-war trade landscape through international law. Undermining neoclassical economics, these laws revolved around the ‘particularization of the land and the product’, the state’s ‘very visible hand’ in supply and demand and the making of ethno-national imaginaries for that purpose. As such, they present an alternative view of international economic law that does not merely encase ‘global economic integration’ but is also employed against it. This article takes a historical materialist and post-colonial approach to French ‘viticulture protectionism’, zooming in on Algerian wine and the legal transformation of land and labour in the colony, followed by the legislation of the Third and Fourth Republics that influenced European-style ‘geographical indications’ as well as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. The article argues that the century-long political interventions in support of national viticulture in Europe should be understood in the context of the distinct configuration of sovereignty and property in state capitalism as it reacts to Anglo-Saxon liberal capitalism and its policy of ‘fair field and no favour’.