Plants As Pawns: The Colonial Impact of Cash Crops in North Africa

posted on: Oct 7, 2026

By Jahnvi Chopra / Arab America Contributing Writer

Colonial powers didn’t just draw borders across North Africa. They manufactured wealth inequalities, social dynamics, and entire economies based on what colonies could produce. They took control and maintained their power by making native populations almost entirely dependent on single-crop production, also known as monocultures. 

After rewiring entire economic systems around these crops, native groups’ sole source of income and financial stability was mainly pursued through the cultivation and export of these monocultures, which did irreparable damage to natives as well as their land. Egypt, Algeria, and Tunisia each show a different version of the same pattern: a colonizer picks one export crop, reorganizes the land and labor around it, and leaves behind an economy that struggles to produce much else.

The Cotton Industry in Egypt

Egypt’s cotton economy began before British occupation during the rule of Muhammad Ali, the new Egyptian ruler. During his reign, he encouraged cotton cultivation in the early 1800s, which ended up being a result of the American Civil War.¹ When the war cut off US cotton exports, British mills turned to Egypt instead for their cash source, resulting in Egyptian cotton exports more than doubling between 1861 and 1863.²

Britain formalized its control after occupying Egypt in 1882. From that point, cotton stopped being just a profitable crop and became the organizing principle of the entire economy, and by 1914, cotton made up 90% of Egypt’s exports.³ British banks financed cotton cultivation, British firms controlled the ginning and export process, and British trade policy blocked the tariffs Egypt would have needed to build its own textile industry. Egypt grew some of the best cotton in the world and still had to ship it abroad to be turned into cloth.

The human cost showed up in food security, as the colonial emphasis on crop exports forced previously fertile ground into desolate fields of monocultures. Land that once grew grain and vegetables went to cotton instead, pushing up food prices for ordinary Egyptians. The debt side mattered just as much because cotton directly financed Egypt’s loans to European banks, and those loans gave Britain the leverage it needed to dictate Egyptian policy well before the occupation technically began. The whole industry created and backed a cycle of dependence on colonial rule.⁴

French Wine on Stolen Land

After France annexed Algeria in 1830, the French army forcibly displaced rural communities and confiscated hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland, directly resulting in brutal land seizure. Between 1830 and 1851 alone, the French government claimed roughly 364,000 hectares from Algerian farmers.⁵

Wine didn’t become the dominant use for that land right away. In reality, it took the Great French Wine Blight of the 1870s and 1880s, which destroyed vineyards across southern France, to send French winegrowers across the Mediterranean looking for new fields. They found them in Algeria, and land that had grown grain for Algerian populations was converted into vineyards instead.⁶ 

The result was jarring on more than an economic level, but a social and religious one as well. Algeria’s population was overwhelmingly Muslim, meaning the crop its land was being forced to grow was one most residents couldn’t legally consume. Human health declined here as well, as the wine replaced the nutritious native grains that were able to sustain enormous communities and last them through periods of agricultural difficulty. This was another case of colonial industry taking priority over the wellbeing of native groups.

By the 1930s, Algeria was producing more wine than any country besides France and Italy, and right before independence in 1962, European settlers owned 90% of Algeria’s 400,000 hectares of vineyards.⁷ When French settlers left after independence, the market for that wine mostly left with them, and Algeria spent decades converting vineyards back into cereal and food crops.

Tunisia and its Ongoing Olive Economy

Tunisia’s story is the clearest example of a colonial cash-crop economy outliving the colonizer. France established its domain in 1881, and colonial administrators, including Director of Agriculture Paul Bourde, pushed hard to expand olive cultivation in the region, justifying it as reviving a lost commodity.⁸ By 1892, French settlers already owned 20% of farmable land in northern Tunisia⁹, and by the end of World War I, that number had grown to 20% of all cultivable land nationwide.¹⁰ 

What makes Tunisia distinct is what happened after 1956, because contrary to popular belief, its independence didn’t dismantle the monoculture. The new Tunisian state kept intensifying olive production on land reclaimed from settlers, largely without diversifying into other crops.¹¹ This prevented other native, nutritious crops from growing and supporting the people in the land. Today, olive groves cover roughly a third of Tunisia’s agricultural land, and the sector still operates on an export-first model that limits how much olive oil ordinary Tunisians can actually afford to consume.¹² Cheaper imported vegetable oils have filled the gap instead, in a country that’s one of the world’s top olive oil producers.¹³

The Common Thread

These are three different crops and three different colonial administrations, but the underlying mechanism is almost identical. Land gets reorganized around a monoculture, native agricultural infrastructure shrinks to make room for it, processing and manufacturing power stays in the colonizer’s hands, so the colony exports raw material instead of finished goods. And debt, whether from loans or simply from a single-crop economy’s vulnerability to price swings, becomes a tool for maintaining control that leaves a shadow over formal independence.

As previously mentioned, these colonial industries and their long-term use of the land have had a permanent effect. Monocultures deplete soil in ways mixed farming doesn’t, and all three countries have dealt with some version of that practice. None of this is just history, as the oppressive colonial influence reaches into the modern day through the forms of trade dependencies, the land-use patterns, the gap between what these countries produce and what their own populations can access, and cultural dependence on the notion that decolonization has already occurred all trace back to the ghost bodies of the colonial system. Ultimately, independence changed who was in charge, but it didn’t automatically change the economic architecture itself.

Want more articles like this? Sign up for our e-newsletter!

Check out our blog here! 

1. OER ↩︎
2. Smithsonian Magazine ↩︎
3. Country Studies ↩︎
4. Smithsonian Magazine ↩︎
5. MERIP ↩︎
6. Wine Enthusiast ↩︎
7. Wine History ↩︎
8. Wikipedia ↩︎
9. War on Want ↩︎
10. Wikipedia ↩︎
11. War on Want ↩︎
12. Network Siyada ↩︎
13. Network Siyada ↩︎