Abstract
When natural ice entered the markets of colonial Algeria during the nineteenth century, it connected ecologies, people, and things. From the 1880s an inflow of Norwegian ice accentuated this process, linking Nordic lakes to African cafés and confronting European and Maghrebi ideas of civilization. Besides conveying cold, the cold chains that carried the ice also transported ideas of purity and European superiority. The cold chains engaged humans, horses, and material agents such as ships and trains. Among these agents, ice itself stands out as a protagonist. This article will use a neomaterial perspective on how the thing-power of ice worked to construct an economic-ecological niche through a two-way street of domestication between ice and humans. The pull of ice as a commodity seduced urban European colonizers into a dependency on cold, soothing their hot bodies and easing their homeland nostalgia. The case of Norwegian ice in Algeria suggests that economic commodity chains can be productively rethought as ecological links, that the niches they constitute in a shared economy and ecology are a product of mutual domestication between humans and things, and that these connections allow us to rethink the socio-natural entanglements of comfort, hygiene, and colonialism.
In October 1895, a short announcement in a local newspaper gave a glimpse of the craving for cold that existed among the colons, European settlers, in the Algerian city of Oran: “Oran, deprived of natural ice for several weeks, will finally be provided. A sailing ship coming from Kragero, loaded with ice ordered by Glacière Oranaise, arrived in our port yesterday. This boat has been anticipated in Oran for more than a month. Its delay is due to the influence of contrary winds.”1 The Kragerø ship was running the main stretch of what might be called the Norwegian-Algerian cold chain,2 and this brief glance into a major hub along the cold chain illustrates the challenges of motion, timing, and waiting that was tied up with ice as a commodity in this period.
Between 1884 and 1901, thousands of tons of natural ice traveled by sea from Norwegian lakes to this French colony along a cold chain driven by wind or steam. During each of the peak years 1886 and 1892, more than three thousand net register tons of ice were exported to Algeria, according to consular reports and export statistics. Ice was Norway’s third largest export product at the time, with the most important markets being Great Britain and other countries bordering the North Sea. In the Mediterranean the largest market for Norwegian ice was Algeria, where the ice entered a climatic, political, and cultural realm that was clearly distinct from northern Europe. The flood of Norwegian ice into Algerian seaports (fig. 1) propelled the transition from a modest consumption of locally harvested snow ice to widely available artificial ice.
Albeit a highly time and temperature sensitive commodity, ice left a footprint on both the physical and sociocultural colonial landscape. It could do that by merit of its manifold properties, some of them inherent and physical, others attributed and symbolic. Some of these properties had an ambiguity to them that allowed ice to mutate, as it were, according to the shifting and sometimes contradicting needs of the colons, spanning modernity and nostalgia, craving for cold and hygienic exigencies. Ice helped the colons to carry on and democratize among themselves the metropolis bourgeois practices of drinking, eating, and sociability while reinforcing associated mental concepts of colonist superiority over the colonized.
The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai famously urged scholars to explore the “social life” of commodities, their unfolding biographies on their journey from production via distribution to consumption, and their reshaping of the societies they circulate in.3 In the case of cold a “follow-the-thing” approach entails following ice along the cold chain from the ice harvesting site to the consumer or following perishable ice-chilled food along the cold chain.4 This is what the environmental historian William Cronon did when he followed American beef from the cattle to the consumer. Skillfully tracing the railway cold chains of the nineteenth-century meatpacking industry, he revealed how these cold chains transformed American cattle farming, the prairie ecosystem, and American consumption practices.5 Recently the geographer David Atkinson has followed Norwegian-British cold chains into the faraway British inland, where Norwegian ice was pivotal in making fish and chips a fast food of economic, social, and political significance.6 The historian Effie Dorovitsa’s research on northern France has unveiled imprints of Norwegian ice onto yet another cultural, economic, and environmental setting.7
The case of Norwegian ice in Algeria is particularly rich because it ties up colonial dynamics with consumerist and medical developments. Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart has made an exemplary study of the social and cultural context of imported ice to another colony, Hawaii.8 But the logistics, marketing, and consumption of a rapidly melting commodity in a hot colonial market invites to take one step further than the above mentioned studies, toward an ecological, more-than-human analysis. This article is an endeavor to do such an analysis. I will start by looking at the Algerian cold chains with their stations and the actors that kept the chains running, before scrutinizing the properties of ice itself. I will apply the conceptual tools of domestication and niche construction in order to bring the power of things to the fore and explain how ice exercised its power in Algeria.
Algerian Cold Chains
While the Spanish had shipped snow ice from the Sierra Nevada in Spain to their enclave Oran for centuries,9 the cold chain supplying Ottoman Algiers was operated by local tribes in the high Djurdjura massif. Snow gathered naturally in karst pits was transported on muleback down to Algiers, where the only known ice consumers were the dey (the Ottoman governor) and his circle.10 The Ottomans had brought their snow ice dependency with them from Turkey, where it had been used for centuries.11 But its use remained limited to the elite.
After the French seized power in 1830, colons established new and shorter cold chains, with lower-lying starting points in the Atlas mountains near Blida, at an altitude of a mere one thousand meters. Snow was amassed in ice depots (glacières), in effect roof-covered pits, and these structures made such an imprint on the landscape that a whole mountain area was named after them. Scenic views from “Les Glacières” figured on early twentieth-century postcards. The location of these glacières in the vicinity of military installations bears testimony to the close link between cold chains and the French colonization project.12
Among the French colon families that established these colonial cold chains, there were ice cream and lemonade makers and beer importers, and their cafés made up convenient stations along the cold chain.13 In 1850, the Atlas of Blida cold chain employed two to three hundred workers for a season of forty to fifty days and engaged twenty to thirty mules for the transport down to the city of Blida, where the ice would be loaded on to carriages for Algiers. Additional workers were engaged in the ice trade in towns at ice storages (dépôts), ice cellars (caves), and ice shops (boutiques). Hundreds of Maltese immigrants prepared and sold ices in open air along the streets of Blida and Algiers or distributed the products in the vicinity.14
The Norwegian block ice from lakes was of a very different type, and the new transnational cold chain engaged a series of new actors. In Norway, men cut ice blocks out of lakes and loaded them onto sledges; horses pulled the sledges to a chute or directly to the quay, where men stowed the ice blocks into the hulls of ships and insulated them with sawdust; ships aided by seamen and driven by wind or steam carried the ice along the coasts of Europe and into the Mediterranean (fig. 2). As soon as the icy cargo had been unloaded at the quay in an Algerian port, other workers took over: men would store it in an insulated ice depot or they would ship it inland using colonial infrastructure, mostly railways, in trains powered by steam, to be deposited in other ice depots in inland towns.
Although a first shipload of Norwegian ice arrived in Algiers as early as 1839,15 establishing a Norwegian-Algerian cold chain proved difficult without appropriate storage facilities and a reliable trade liaison. In 1884, the Norwegian bark Bravo set a regular cold chain in motion, landing an ice cargo in Algiers that was destined to maintain freshness in the cellars of the brand new brewery Brasserie-Malterie Algérienne.16 The brewery, which itself produced artificial ice and in times of surplus would sell ice from its own large depot, evidently needed the Norwegian ice as a startup help and a backup.17 Three years later an ice depot named Glacière Norvégienne was in place in one of the vaults in the city wall running along the quay,18 and from this depot Norwegian ice would be shipped far inland. In 1896 a newspaper notice proudly announced that ice from Glacière Norvégienne had arrived safely at the city of Biskra with a loss of only one-sixth after three days of fighting against a violent sirocco, a southerly wind from the Sahara.19 Biskra was situated some six hundred kilometers away along the railway line. Clearly this cold chain rolled along the newly constructed railway line (fig. 3).20 Other cold chains also branched off to locations not connected to the railway, most likely using local boats.
For the very last stretch of the cold chain—the delivery rounds to hotels, restaurants, cafés, and households—horse-drawn carriages or handcarts would be used.21 If the end point of the chain was a café table the ice required a cool cellar and utensils such as carafes and ice cream–making implements. If the end point was the dining table or a sickbed in a city household, the ice required, at the very least, a vase and an insulating cushion to keep the heat out.22
When a Lyon ice manufacturer in 1899 made plans to establish a large ice factory in Algiers,23 the end of the epoch of Norwegian ice in Algeria was nigh. It had taken artificial ice several decades to mature as a commodity, but by the turn of the century it had evolved into a product that could rival Norwegian natural ice—possibly in quality, certainly in hygiene, and above all at a price that swept away every competition.24 The Norwegian-Algerian trans-European cold chain was replaced by a cold chain a few hundred meters in length. The last known Norwegian ice cargo arrived in 1901.
Properties of Ice
Ice possesses indisputable powers, some constructive, others destructive. Think of the iceberg that sank the Titanic or alpine landscapes chiseled out by glaciers. Think of the polar ice caps that keep the sea levels from rising, of hares and foxes dressed in white or skiers, skaters, and sledge riders. All this has come about thanks to the properties of ice.
Cold, slippery, bulky, and heavy—everywhere, the cold chains were defined by these physical properties of ice. It needed insulation to keep cold and minimize melting, and the sheer bulk of it called for powerful means of transport and spacious storage facilities. Nowhere would these properties be more defining than in a hot environment such as Algeria. In addition, a singular ambiguity lies in its molecules, as it is occurring in two states: solid below and melting above 0˚C, and in two appearances: white and transparent. Created in clouds, it forms white fragile star-shaped crystals that fall down to make a soft carpet on the ground. The immaculate purity of snow was associated with Our Lady of the Snows, a well-known apparition of the Virgin in Mediterranean mountains. By contrast, created on the surface of lakes and ponds, it freezes to a hard, thick, transparent layer that in the French Mediterranean came to represent quality and know-how.25 In Norwegian it was labeled “steel ice.” Allegedly its transparency made it possible to read a letter through the ice block.26
Ice’s key physical property as a commodity was its coldness. It was the desire for cold that led humans to domesticate it—that is, to take it home. In North Sea countries and the United States ice was used for cool conservation of perishable food such as meat, fish, and dairy products. But in the Mediterranean people would buy fresh produce every day or use traditional conservation methods such as drying or conservation in oil, so natural ice was sought after for three main purposes: as a refreshment, for medical use, and, for a brief period, in beer production. It was in the luxury sector that Norwegian ice came into its own. Ice would be mixed with water, liquors, and other drinks, provide cool storage for beer and wine, and act as a helping agent in the making of ice cream and sorbets.
In all this, cold was the key. But ice as a commodity held other essential properties as well. Hard and slowly melting, Norwegian lake ice both marked a technological step forward compared to traditional, local snow ice and, for a long time, far surpassed artificial ice in quality.27 Norwegian lake ice excelled in limpidness. To nineteenth-century people transparency was a proof of purity,28 and to the colons purity and coldness surely equated hygiene. The splendid Norwegian block ice was vested with a power to safeguard people’s health and well-being.
In addition to these perceived physical properties, ice also held important symbolic properties. It acted as a carrier of a French urban bourgeoise lifestyle just before the dawn of the Belle Époque, a time of celebration of a middle class that had flourished during the nineteenth century. The Norwegian ice flowed into the market precisely at the moment when things Nordic were à la mode in France. In short it was a marker of modernity with the power to demarcate the fragile boundary between French and Indigenous worlds.
Cold, durable, bulky, hard, limpid; hygienic, modern, French, Nordic—ice was empowered by these inherent or attributed properties. In Algeria ice worked as an agent of refreshment and hygiene and, in a wider context, an agent of colonization—and, in a wider context still, as a niche construction agent. We will explore how ice exercised these agencies by merit of its thing-power, a term coined by the philosopher Jane Bennett.29
Thing-Power: Domestication and Niche Construction
In order to fully appreciate the thing-power of ice, we can use the concepts of domestication and niche construction. Domestication is the process that takes place once humans start to manage plants and animals. The archaeologist Ian Hodder makes the observation that as humans gained control over plants and animals that were useful to them, they simultaneously developed a dependency on them, committing themselves to extra work in order to take care of them.30 Domestication is always a two-way street, as the historian Timothy LeCain eloquently phrases it.31 In LeCain’s use of the term, domestication happens not only with plants and animals but even with “things” such as raw materials. He takes up the case of the domestication of copper. In the nineteenth century, while humans were busy pulling it into electricity and telegraph wires, the metal was domesticating humans back. The “material pull” of copper seduced humans into a dependency on its ability to convey energy and information instantly across vast distances, erasing time and space, as it were.32 Copper exercised its thing-power on humans.
In evolutionary biology, niche construction theory emphasizes the capacity of species to modify the environment, which in turn affects their own and other species’ evolution.33 Birds’ nests and spiders’ webs are some obvious examples of niche construction. Recognizing the particular potency of niche construction made by humans, the biologist Jeremy Kendal, the social anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani, and the evolutionary anthropologist John Odling-Smee take the theory one step further. By using the concept human niche construction, they attempt to reconcile social, human, and natural sciences.34 This particular kind of niche construction happens through social transmission of cultural knowledge and material culture. Agriculture, tool making, house building, and, less evident but no less influential, writing are examples par excellence of cultural inventions that have profoundly modified the physical and cultural environment and thus the evolution of genes and cultures.35
Acknowledging the power of things and applying a more-than-human lens on human niche construction, niches can be co-constructed by humans and things, such as ice. Once constructed, such niches then shape cultural and economic histories. Things—both natural and human-made—have this niche-constructing capacity, not because they are willful but because of their inherent or attributed properties. This capacity of things is also apparent in animal niche construction in the wild. Dam building by beavers is a particularly conspicuous instance of animal niche construction. The dam is a habitat and the materialization of a niche, offering ecological roles—ways of subsistence—where beavers and a range of species of amphibians, fish, birds, plants, and others fit in. In the beaver dam wood is a thing, a construction material that may be seen as a cocreator of the niche of the dam.
The word niche also has economic connotations as the market segment for any given product. An intriguing take on this is offered by the environmental biologist Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, the economist Roger Koppl, and colleagues. Drawing on both ecological and economic theory, they compare the development of new goods in an economy to the evolution of new species in an ecosystem. Both goods and species tend to grow ever more diverse and complex over time, and goods create and fill economic niches analogously to the way species create and fill ecological niches. From this Gatti, Koppl, and colleagues infer that “evolutionary process of technological change is not something we do; rather, it happens to us.”36 This conclusion may be easy to relate to in our age of AI, but this particular effect of thing-power has been at work all through history, maybe even in prehuman history.
While Gatti, Koppl, and colleagues are drawing parallels between economic and ecological niche construction, I am proposing a more literal entanglement of economic and ecological niches. Going back to the ice, the cold chain can be rethought as an economic-ecological niche insofar as the commodity modifies the environment and offers subsistence and jobs to humans, horses, and mules. I will come back to that next.
The Thing-Power of Ice
Ice, as a thing, became a transformative agent for refreshment, hygiene, and colonization. In the Latin Mediterranean traditional snow ice, commonly simply called snow, held other qualities than block ice from lakes and invited other practices of cold comfort. Less hard and durable, it dissolved easily into a slush and made a delicious blend with, for instance, lemon, which was a Neapolitan favorite back in Goethe’s day, and still is, under the name granita.37 In the nineteenth century durable block ice drew scant interest among Neapolitan city dwellers, who held that snow was colder than ice.38 Snow ice had exercised its power on the Neapolitans.
When Norwegian block ice started flowing into Algerian ports, ice vendors played on the other face of that cold, ambiguous mineral. Opaque and easily dissolvable snow ice proved no match to the limpid, hard, and durable Nordic variety. Glace à rafraîchir (ice for refreshment) for water and other chilled drinks was served with meals even in modest restaurants and households in Algiers, and for this, natural ice was the preferred choice.39 Parisian-style cafés glaciers (cafés run by ice cream makers) and brasseries (cafés serving beer) abounded with people savoring frozen desserts or beer brought up from cool cellars. On the terraces the clinking of ice cubes in drinking glasses and calls for waiters to fetch more ice were heard everywhere. Urban colons were well and truly domesticated by ice, and Norwegian ice had become the epitome of quality—but also, for a surprisingly long period, of hygiene.
NATURAL ICE AND MANUFACTURED ICE
Natural ice from the lakes of Norway is as pure as the finest rock crystal, like the wave of the lake which has shaped it; it is completely devoid of indigestible and poisonous detritus, which means that it can be mixed with drinks and food without altering or contaminating them with foreign matter which is detrimental to the health by harmful molecules, such as those generally found in natural ice harvested in various regions, and especially in artificially manufactured ice.40
This 1886 newspaper advertisement by an ice vendor in the city of Bougie (today Béjaïa) paints a flattering portrait of Norwegian ice while simultaneously revealing the challenges it faced in Algeria. The competition between natural and artificial ice followed a similar trajectory in Bougie and in Algiers: First a depot for Norwegian ice was set up. After a while an ice factory was opened, which in turn set off price competition and a virtual publicity war. Newspaper ads put out by the vendors praised the merits of their own ice product. Responding to the brand name “Norwegian natural ice,” ice factories increasingly branded their product “hygienic ice.”41 Eventually a merger between the two ice vendors took place, yet the two types of ice continued to be sold as distinct products.42
The term hygienic ice was echoing the heated French hygiene debate around ice. Hygiene, signifying “health,” was a buzzword in nineteenth-century Europe and a keyword in ice publicity campaigns. But when it came to ice, hygiene was yet another ambiguous quality. The two qualities, purity and hygiene, blurred into one another, each lending meaning to the other. The superb visual purity of Norwegian ice vested it with powers as an agent of hygiene.
In Mediterranean France ice had for centuries been used as a remedy against fever and other ailments. Right up to the era of the railway, which opened new cold chains running from faraway alpine regions, and until the emergence of ice factories, local ice from dubious sources was deeply trusted as hygienic. The citizens of Arles, for example, had their ice harvested right outside the city walls, from the murky lower reaches of the Rhône, its canals and flooded fields.43 Such was the power of ice in Provence that an “ice famine” in 1686 caused violent turmoil, followed by another in 1696–99 triggered by ice fraud.44
As for Algeria, as late as in 1890 ice supply to an Algiers hospital was safeguarded through a concession system on a par with other essentials such as fruits and vegetables, coal and articles for lighting, wool, and straw.45 People might contract diseases after ice consumption, yet ice was not suspect. Soothingly cold and limpid, how could it possibly carry disease?
But scientific findings boded ill for natural ice. Already in the middle of the century, Louis Pasteur had proved the germ theory of disease, later to be followed up by the pasteurization method for killing germs in liquids. In 1891 a newspaper in Oran alarmingly reported that natural ice might be a vessel for typhoid fever and tuberculosis, based on experiments by Pasteur and Von Frisch which had revealed that freezing water even down to −120˚C would not kill the bacteria.46
For quite some time, Norwegian ice was able to maneuver between conflicting views on ice as an indispensable heat relief and medicine versus as a health threat and possible carrier of germs. Ailments caused by ice consumption continued to be treated differently from those caused by contaminated water, despite similar symptoms. Although Algerian medical doctors advocated a certain prudence vis-à-vis cold, their belief in ice did not easily falter. In an Algerian medical journal, Dr. A. Bertherand related the high number of deceased in 1820s France to the increased consumption of ice cream and sorbets, but he failed to identify the culprit. The killing agent was the cold, he concluded.47 An Algerian newspaper advised its readers: “Ice and frozen drinks taken quickly during digestion or when the body is sweaty, may . . . cause an indisposition having some resemblance to the most serious ailments; It is therefore necessary to make very reserved use of it.”48
But the scientific findings were not lost on Algerian ice manufacturers, who were lobbying to demonize all natural ice as unhygienic. In a newspaper article a manufacturer dubbed the suburban Parisian lakes from which ice was harvested “microbe parks,” and the melting water “a bouillabaisse of germs that would put off even a person from Marseille.”49 But Norwegian ice, harvested in the cold and distant North, did not lose its thing-power overnight. It still held its unrivaled quality of limpidness and freshness. If artificial ice was branded as hygienic ice, natural ice could still be portrayed as pure. Glacière Norvégienne fought back, claiming that its Norwegian ice was “fed by glaciers” (which it was not) and “not contaminated by any vegetation or detritus,” even “authorized and recommended by Health Commissions in all European countries.”50
But in the long run, it was a lost battle. Listen to the rant of an ice manufacturer in 1900: “Who knows where they come from, from what impure sources, . . . the ‘ice cubes’ that we call out loud for and the waiter brings us, casually as if they were a most harmless drug, while in fact they are a most dangerous poison!”51 When C. Gignoux, a Lyon ice manufacturer, decided to build a large Algerian factory in 1899, he tellingly named the company Compagnie Algérienne de Glace Hygiénique.52 At prices one-third or one-fifth of those twenty years ago, ice finalized its domestication of the colons, changing its status from a luxury to an everyday necessity.53
To think that I have drunk, in the desert, absinthe with ice at a temperature of 54 degrees in the shade! Leaving Saïda in the morning by a special train, we reached the extreme point of the line as quickly as possible: Oued-Fallet, where we were to have lunch. A serious question was worrying everyone: Had the ice, which had left Oran the day before, withstood the terrible heat along the route? Some said yes. Others said no. Still, the generals must have absinthe with ice at Oued-Fallet. They took it—hip, hip, hooray! This victory over nature was considered so beautiful that it compensated for all of Bou-Amama’s victories. A bright smile spread over the faces.54
This letter from a reconnaissance mission with three generals two hundred kilometers into the Sahara portrays the symbolic importance attributed to ice by the French colonists and the links that existed between ice and white hegemony. The cold chains running from frozen lakes to North African cities transported not only coldness but also European ideas of modernity and civilization.
Cafés were places which showcased European superiority. In the Orientalist gaze Muslim coffee houses, dubbed cafés maures by the colons, were backward places. At best they were exotic and mystical, as the café maure with live patrons exhibited at the Algerian pavilion at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. According to the French colonial doctor Adolphe Armand, “the idle Moor” spent four-fifths of his “dreamy existence” drinking coffee and smoking.55 The historian Nina Studer has pointed out how coffee, in the colon narrative, seemed to have opposite effects depending on who was drinking: drunk by Muslim men it was a sign of idleness; drunk by European men it was the drink of reason, industry, and civilization.56
In Muslim coffee houses ice had no place. In French-style cafés glaciers and brasseries, often carrying names evoking the metropolis—Café de Paris, Café de Bordeaux, Café Marseillais, Brasserie Lyonnaise, Café d’Europe—frozen desserts and chilled drinks told a subtle tale of the modern and superior.57 Paris, the city of cafés, was the epicenter of fashion. In the metropolis ice had long been an essential requisite for urban sociability and a symbol of comfort and quality of life.58 Ice was ubiquitous in the Parisian summer, to be found in virtually every café and restaurant. In the morning, Parisian citizens received home deliveries of carafes frappés, bottles with a chunk of frozen water inside, to be topped up with water or wine during the day.59 In Algeria, back in 1851, Café Perreau promised the ladies “all the comforts of Paris: ice creams and sorbets, premium drinks, all served with ice.”60 When huge cargoes of Norwegian ice started arriving, the market for cold comfort inflated while the admiration for everything Parisian continued unabated. The ice cream maker J. Messaut, for example, boasted of keeping himself up-to-date with the hottest Parisian craze.61
The Algiers brewery that received the initial shipload of ice from the Bravo was praised by a newspaper as an avant-garde example of modern technology, boasting ice-producing machinery comparable to Parisian ice factories. The article educated brasserie owners on correct storage of beer, advising them to arrange a cellar and supply it daily with ice. Otherwise, the journalist warned, people would render the beer mediocre by slipping ice directly into it.62
Modernity was a narrative that the Norwegian ice fitted neatly into. The sheer volume available of superior, affordable Norwegian ice domesticated ever more colons into practices mimicking France and especially Paris. This high quality ice symbolized Frenchness and Nordicness simultaneously. In Paris, Norway was à la mode. The Parisian newspaper Le temps made it sound as if Henrik Ibsen was promoting Norwegian ice, noticing that “although the literature of that country is unbelievingly fashionable,” Parisians consumed very little Norwegian ice.63 As Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, great distances between production and consumption of commodities allow mythologies to influence the market,64 and natural ice vendors did not fail to emphasize their ice’s Norwegian, even Arctic, origin. Glacière Norvégienne claimed that its ice came from Norwegian mountain lakes, when in reality it was harvested in lowland ponds.65 Ice from the faraway North held the power to invoke a dream of a sublime Nordic paradise of frost and purity.
Absinthe was another increasingly popular part of French-Algerian drink culture. This strong alcoholic aperitif was thought to help digestion, was considered hygienic, and was frequently drunk under the pretext of health.66 The afternoon absinthe had become such an addiction among the colons that 5:00–6:30 p.m. was dubbed “the hour of absinthe.”67 Of course, ice was the preferred requisite. Half-drunk from heat and absinthe, it was easy to be overcome by homeland nostalgia, as it happened to this colon:
Here is the month of July again, with its procession of hot days, unnerving, as hard to endure at nine o’clock as at four in the afternoon. The privileged ones, the fortunate of this earth, have already made up their itinerary. . . . So long, happy holidays to those who can soon inhale the air of their childhood. . . . The rest of us remain here, sweating and gasping, mopping ourselves vigorously. Instead of shadowy avenues, we have the blinding road dust, the intense reflection burning our eyes, the heat of the sun boiling our brain. We consider us lucky if, late at night, we find . . . an ice cube for our absinthe. Melancholically, we finish the green liquid, dreaming of those who greedily drink the clear water off the fountain.68
The colon’s words resonate with the geographer David G. Dickason’s tale from British India from the time when Frederic Tudor conducted his ice traffic from Boston. Besides ice’s power of cooling feverish British heads and keeping English butter fresh, it was “easy and à la mode to feed implicitly or explicitly upon the beastliness of India’s climates and cultures over a chilled drink.”69 To colonists, ice was a remedy to restore some of the normal, hygienic, and sensible European order of things. Europeans facing a hostile colonial climate felt that they were running the risk of racial degeneration. The Algerian summer heat was thought by the French to have malign effects on the body, ranging from enlarging of the heart to excess of blood and anemia.70 Heat could have detrimental effects on morality and intelligence too: “It increases the lower faculties and diminishes the higher ones; horses, monkeys, men are more lewd; horses are more nervous, men more irritable; we read less, we think less, we are less intelligent and more talkative.”71
The flood of Norwegian ice set off a spiral of lower prices and higher demand for ice72 reminiscent of the trajectory of the ice trade in America earlier in the century, albeit with different effects. Jonathan Rees has demonstrated how ice made Americans drink more milk, eat more meat, and drink cocktails, consumption habits that come to be defining of what it was to be an American.73 In Algeria, ice helped demarcate the border between colonists and colonized, making colonists stand out flatteringly. Ice was among those items that highlighted the asymmetric binary between “modern” colons and “backward” Muslims. In the French colonial narrative the savage Arab tribesman was to be transformed into a sedentary and productive individual, helped by virtuous and hardworking colons on their civilizing mission.74 In Oran during the “hour of absinthe,” this virtuous image took on a peculiar aspect as absinthe drinkers thronged together on the terraces and pavements and the odor of liquor was hanging over the port area.75
The Norwegian ice traders operating the trans-European cold chain were supplying the colons with a material and cultural essential. Some of these traders invested heavily in Maghreb and established themselves among the white elite who were profiting from the colony. Empowered by Norwegian commodities, these Norwegians were serving the colonial order of white supremacy over Indigenous people without themselves belonging to the colonial power. They became what the social anthropologist Bjørn Enge Bertelsen has dubbed “noncolonial colonials.”76 A prime example of noncolonial colonials were the Norwegian family dynasty Henriksen, who were well and truly entangled in North African businesses. Georg Fredrik Henriksen founded the import-export company Algier Tunesiske Compagnie together with his daughter Louise and another partner.77 Georg’s son Olaf was consul to Tunis, where he started a flourishing timber import business, and also was looking to open an ice import business in Algiers.78 The Henriksen family joined forces with the Algiers brewer Kling, director of Brasserie-Malterie Algérienne, to set up the Norwegian ice house Glacière Norvégienne.79 Georg’s son-in-law Severin Houge, who took over Glacière Norvégienne, was consul to Algiers and likewise a trader of Nordic timber.80
We get a peek of some of these noncolonial colonials belonging to the Scandinavian colony in Algiers at a soiree held by a Swedish sea rescue company onboard their steamer Hermes in 1901. Norwegian entrepreneurs and diplomats were socializing with other colonial elite, notably French authorities and exotic celebrities. Among the guests we may discern Olaf Henriksen, the merchant from the Henriksen family who were living in the region. “Among the invited were ex-queen Ranavalo of Madagascar, the French Admiral, the President of the Chamber of Commerce, the Union’s Consul Mr. Severin Houge, the consular secretary Aubert, the Danish Consul Nielsen, the Norwegian merchants Henriksen, Lindseth, Johnsen, Brown, and Shellin as well as Dr. Nordlund. The party was very lively, and the dancing went on merrily into the wee hours.”81
The Scandinavian colony who blended so nicely in with the colonial gentry made a stark contrast to the world outside the privileged enclave. A newspaper notice offers a glimpse of the social reality surrounding Glacière Norvégienne’s ice vaults. It reports of an attempted robbery of the day laborer Elis Monton of Glacière Norvégienne. The assailants were caught by the police and identified as Edmond G . . . , mason, Victor C . . . , painter, and Mohamed bel Hacem, porter, all three without residence.82 This briefly sketched-out story may serve as a reminder that not all colons were middle-class consumers domesticated by ice. It makes a striking backdrop to the bourgeois colon lady delighting in her ice cream at a fashionable Paris-style café glacier and the colon gentleman enjoying his chilled beer at a brasserie, or the “idle” Muslim patron lingering over a cup of coffee at a cheap coffee house outside the realm of ice-power.
Conclusion: Ice as an Agent of Niche Construction
Opponents of niche construction theory, such as the biologist Manan Gupta and the archaeologist Robert N. Spengler III, claim that the term niche has inflated into an all-encompassing concept that has ended up explaining nothing.83 My own take on it is in line with the philosopher of science Efraim Wallach, who admits that niche construction theory is descriptive and heuristic rather than explanatory but still sees it as a fruitful philosophical framework.84 The merit of taking the niche construction perspective on ice in Algeria, in my view, is to highlight the agency of things in modifying both the physical and social environment.
In the hot colony Algeria, the European colonizers’ desire for cold vested ice with powers as an agent of freshness, hygiene, and colonization. By merit of its thing-power, its inherent and attributed, sometimes ambiguous properties as a mineral and a commodity, ice acted as a cocreator, together with humans, of the cold chain niches. The cold chains supplying Algerian colons with ice provided subsistence—that is, work—to ice traders, ice harvesters, sailors, railway workers, ice men, brewers, ice cream makers, waiters, servants, and even horses and mules. They handled carriages, sailed ships, loaded trains, and stored ice in ice houses and cool cellars, all stations along the cold chain that constituted the niche of the ice trade.
Classifying this niche as purely economic by nature makes it easy to disregard its impact on the physical environment. I propose to classify it instead as an economic-ecological niche, which would invite us to consider its modification of the environment and its sustainability in addition to its economic and societal effects. An economic-ecological niche would fulfill these criteria: (1) it provides subsistence to one or several live actors and the raison d’être for one or several commodities; (2) it develops through human, material, and possibly animal co-construction; (3) the co-constructors simultaneously fit into and modify the niche; (4) the niche extends physically over a certain geographical area; and (5) it modifies both the physical and sociocultural environment. But an economic-ecological niche may not fulfill the criteria of robustness, longevity, and sustainability that one would likely expect from a purely ecological niche.
The power of ice is a shining example of thing-power. Ice entrapped humans into a deep dependency on cold that transformed cultures and environments worldwide during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cold erased distances and seasons, allowing more varied and nutritious food to be put on the table, propagating more specialized crops that were yielding higher agricultural output. But these benefits came at a cost: burgeoning lifestyle diseases as meat became staple food; an enormous carbon footprint made by beef cattle and long-distance food supply chains; and dwindling biodiversity resulting from monoculture farming. Paradoxically, human dependence on cold has significantly contributed to warming our planet.
Acknowledgments
The research that underpins this article has been carried out as part of the research project “The Last Ice Age,” project no. 275188, funded by the Research Council of Norway. My participation in the project was supported by a scholarship from Stiftelsen Norsk Folkemuseum. The realization of this article is sponsored by a scholarship by the Norwegian Historical Association (HIFO)/Fritt Ord Foundation.
Notes
nv11543415C38L’impartial oranais, “Glace naturelle.” Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
Cold chain is a term borrowed from American refrigeration engineers, originally indicating the commodity supply chain both for ice and perishable food in need of cooling. Rees, Before the Refrigerator, 8.
For a general discussion of this approach, see Cook et al., “Geographies of Food.”
Bugeja, “Le Djurdjura,” 279; Trumelet, Blida, 404; Planhol, L’eau de neige, 318.
Planhol, L’eau de neige, 103–4.
L’Atlas, “Le sieur Valentin”; L’Algérie nouvelle, “Monsieur le Rédacteur”; Le Tell, “Vente aux enchères publiques”; Akhbar, quoted in Le tintamarre, “Avis aux amateurs de la bonne bière.”
Port calls (consular reports), 1839, National Archives of Norway, RA-S-1094/D/Da/L0005.
Le petit colon algérien, “Une petite mer de glace.” Although this source uses the term “brig,” the Norwegian sources classify it as a “bark.”
Le petit colon algérien, “Brasserie-Malterie Algérienne.”
Uddrag af Aarsberetninger1887, 441. This source does not mention the name of the ice house, but numerous Algerian newspaper ads identify it as Glacière Norvégienne (see La dépêche algérienne, “D’Argus”).
Le petit colon algérien, “Hier matin”; Le reveil de Souk-Ahras, “Pour boire frais.”
Le progres de l’Algérie, “Conservation de la glace.”
C. Gignoux, Letter: 1899, Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k858099j?rk=21459;2.
Journal général de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, “La consommation de la glace.”
Acovitsióti-Hameau, “Le commerce de l’eau gelée et les montagnards,” 71.
La dépêche tunisienne, “La glace à Tunis.”
Kendal, Tehrani, and Odling-Smee, “Human Niche Construction,” 785.
Kendal, Tehrani, and Odling-Smee, “Human Niche Construction,” 785.
Kendal, Tehrani, and Odling-Smee, “Human Niche Construction,” 790.
Cazzolla Gatti et al., “On the Emergence of Ecological and Economic Niches,” 99–100.
Morgenbladet, “Udsigter for norsk Is paa Verdensmarkedet.”
Uddrag af Aarsberetninger1885, 315.
L’avenir de Bougie, “Glace naturelle et glace fabriquée.” The text in this publicity was originally written about lake ice from Lake Sylans in the Jura massif in France (see nv11543415C50Ordinaire, Les glacières du Lac de Sylans, 31). Ice from this lake was shipped by train to French cities such as Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, and some also overseas to Algeria. This Algerian cold chain was more complicated than the one coming from Norway, and its impact in Algeria was not comparable to that of the Norwegian cold chain.
See, for example, L’Oued-Sahel, “Glacière modèle”; La démocratie algérienne, “La glace hygiénique algérienne.”
Le petit colon algérien, “Les glacières Réunies d’Alger”; nv11543415C51L’Oued-Sahel, “Avis”; La croix de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, “Glacières Réunies d’Alger.”
Le petit colon algérien, “Hôpital Civil de Mustapha.”
L’impartial, “La glace et la fièvre typhoïde.”
Gazette médicale de l’Algérie, “Hygiène algérienne.”
Le réveil de Souk-Ahras, “Boisson.”
L’éveil, “La glace.”
La croix de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, “Glacières Réunies d’Alger.”
C. Gignoux, Letter: 1899, Bibliothèque nationale de France, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k858099j?rk=21459;2.
Journal général de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, “La consommation de la glace.”
Le gaulois, “Lettre d’Afrique.” The ice likely originated in Lake Sylans in France. Bouamama was a tribe chief and resistance leader who fought against the French occupation.
L’Atlas, “Ouverture du Café Perreau.”
Le petit colon algérien, “Industrie algérienne.”
Le petit colon algérien, “Sain. - Avantageux. - Propre.”
See, for example, Le tirailleur, “Absinthine.”
L’avenir de Bayonne, quoted in Journal général de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, “L’Algérie en France.”
Le progrès, “Chronique.”
L’indépendant de Mascara, “Hygiène de l’été.”
L’impartial, “La chaleur.”
Journal général de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, “La consommation de la glace.”
L’avenir de Bayonne, quoted in Journal général de l’Algérie et de la Tunisie, “L’Algérie en France.”
Morgenbladet, “Konsul i 40 aar”; Uddrag af Aarsberetninger1887, 444.
Uddrag af Aarsberetninger1887, 441.
nv11543415C24La dépêche algérienne, “Monsieur Rédacteur en chef”; L’Afrique militaire, “Commerce de bois Severin Houge.”
Le petit colon algérien, “Agression.”
Gupta et al., “Niche Construction in Evolutionary Theory,” 491; Spengler, “Niche Construction Theory in Archaeology,” 947.
