Undeniably, however, much of the land colonised by the pieds noirs had been carved out of insalubrious wilderness, some of which may have been used as migratory grazing grounds, rather than grabbed directly from Muslim farmers. This was especially true of the mosquito-ridden marshes of the Mitidja, inland from Algiers. Its reputation in the early colonial days was so bad that anyone with a face rendered sallow by fever was said to have a "Boufarik complexion", but under French expertise it was rapidly to become Algeria's richest farming area. In 1843, Trappist monks introduced the vine to the Mitidja; thirty-five years later the coming of phylloxera to France launched the Algerian wine industry, and by the mid-twentieth century it had grown to be one of the Mediterranean's biggest producers. Thus in the all-important realm of agriculture, as indeed in that of industrial development later, the colons could reasonably claim that they had created the country out of virtually nothing. But it was the old, old story of the Europeans with their superior technique, resources and aggressive vigour progressively assimilating the best lands, while at the same time the more numerous indigènes were being pushed out on to the more peripheral lands.

XREF: Connects to broader colonial land-dispossession patterns across French North Africa and settler colonialism more generally.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 89