Peanut butter can usually be found on the regular shelves of larger French supermarkets, but typically only one kind is offered, of a brand unknown to any American (although it will usually have a large American flag billowing across its label). A tiny jar can cost four euros, a painful toll for homesick expats. The French have not really embraced peanut butter, which is a shame considering how lovely their jams and breads are. Peanut butter sales amount to only $30 million a year, compared to more than $300 million in annual revenue in the United States.1
But curiously, the French consume more peanut oil than virtually any other country in Europe. In part, this is because it is especially suitable for deep frying—crucial for producing those popular frites—but the French also use peanut oil in light vinaigrettes and dressings (except in the southern reaches of France, where olive oil still reigns supreme). This atypical affinity for peanut oil has deep historic roots in the second major era of colonial expansion, when France sought to cement its great power status with a global empire.
As we have seen, the French participated in the first European rush to empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but with mixed results. France was never the naval power that Britain and Holland were, and its rulers tended to be more preoccupied with continental affairs than far-flung possessions. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many colonies were surrendered to other European powers after French defeats in war. Haiti was lost to rebellion and Louisiana sold to the United States. Throughout the world, the British Empire was in the ascendancy.
But a second wave of empire-building commenced in the nineteenth century, focused especially on Africa and East Asia. France began its conquest of North Africa by taking Algiers in 1830, and under Napoleon III a massive effort to enlarge the French empire was undertaken. New colonial armies were formed, and the expansion and modernization of the French fleet made France the second greatest naval power in the world. The colonies became ever more entwined with the economic and political affairs of mainland France (also known as Metropolitan France, or la Métropole). They provided vast amounts of food and natural resources, as well as soldiers and laborers, and a “colonial lobby” gradually became more influential in French domestic politics. At the same time, French interests dictated the development of each colonial territory. Local political, social, and economic patterns that had endured for centuries were swept aside by whatever best suited France, whether that meant replacing hostile leaders, enforcing the planting of particular crops, or drawing boundaries that ignored ethnic and tribal divisions. The human costs of imperial despotism were staggering and continued well beyond the colonial era, as the now-independent nations of the developing world struggled to escape the ties of dependency so carefully constructed by the colonial powers.
This pattern of displacement and exploitation was evident in the French subjugation of Senegal, one of the earliest targets of colonial expansion in the nineteenth century. France had first established trading posts on the Senegalese coast in the early seventeenth century. It captured the island of Gorée, well known today for its haunting memorial to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, from the Dutch in 1677. The slave trade in West Africa preceded the European presence, but it had traditionally flowed north, across the blazing Sahara. When the Europeans arrived, seeking vast amounts of labor for their American colonies, captives from the interior were increasingly diverted to trading posts on the western coast of Africa. The Senegal River was a key transit route, and the slave trade became one of the most dominant economic activities in the region.
The slave trade began to decline in Senegal in the late eighteenth century, and France formally abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. This necessitated a turn to alternative commodities and trade, at the same time that France was keen to enlarge its territorial reach in West Africa (as always, in competition with the British). Over the next few decades, France gradually expanded its presence from the Senegalese coast. French governors constructed a series of forts on the Senegal River and built roads and railroads inland so they could directly control economic activity in the interior rather than relying on local traders. Kingdoms that had existed in the area for hundreds of years were forcefully subjugated if they could not be co-opted. A large new port was built at Dakar, which became one of the most important cities on the African coast and the capital of French West Africa.
Undoubtedly, French military might and violent coercion were a decisive factor in its expanding control of Senegal. But French commercial interests also played an important role, as the economic hegemony they helped establish for France in the region bolstered its political control as well. This is perhaps best illustrated by examining the history of Senegal’s most important crop: the peanut.
Peanuts are actually legumes and grow below ground beside the roots of the peanut plant. Native to South America, peanuts were introduced to West Africa by Portuguese traders as early as the 1500s. Because they were similar to the Bambara groundnut already grown in the region, but more nutritious and easier to harvest, they were accepted rather easily and cultivated widely. They became a staple ingredient of West African cuisine, often ground into a paste used in soups, stews, and sauces. But they were not of much interest to European traders, as they were grown mostly in the remote interior and still primarily a basic food crop.
This all changed with the wide-ranging innovations of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, when peanut oil became a hotly demanded product. Europe’s ever-increasing mechanization required huge amounts of lubricants and industrial oils, and advances in chemistry revealed new uses for tropical oils in soaps, waxes, and other products. The legendary soap industry in Marseille, for example, preferred using peanut oil in its soaps because it did not affect their color. Peanut oil was increasingly used in French kitchens as well, supplanting olive oil in dressings and driving a new taste for fried foods.
At first, the peanut trade was controlled by local Senegalese merchants, who used their existing trade networks extending into the interior. France encouraged the export of unshelled peanuts by keeping taxes on them low, so that their processing into peanut oil mostly took place in the ports of Metropolitan France.2 This practice of restricting commodity production in the colonies to raw crops, while the processing that greatly increased their value was reserved for the colonial mainland, was common. Local oil mills in Senegal only began exporting small amounts of peanut oil in the late 1920s.
As French interest in the peanut grew, Senegalese farmers increasingly began planting peanuts to the exclusion of other crops. The creation of giant peanut plantations was actively encouraged and funded by French colonial interests, and gradually peanuts became the dominant cash crop in Senegal. As French control of the interior expanded, merchants from Bordeaux and Marseille gradually took over the peanut trade. In essence, French commercial interests drove the Senegalese agricultural economy in the direction most beneficial for themselves, and then reaped most of the benefits by monopolizing the trade of the most important commodity.
French economic hegemony in Senegal helped bolster its imperialist claims vis-à-vis its main rival in the region, Great Britain (which, incidentally, preferred the palm oil produced by its own West African colonies). The European competition for African colonies grew more and more intense throughout the nineteenth century, as industrialization and great power rivalry fueled an insatiable greed for resources and territorial expansion. Advances in transportation, communication, and tropical medicine rendered previously inaccessible regions of the continent open to European intrusion. For much of the century, what is sometimes called “informal imperialism” prevailed, whereby European powers enjoyed economic and military dominance over various African territories, but their direct governance was limited to coastal areas and trading centers. But the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, an attempt to regulate European rivalry in Africa, established a new principle of “effective occupation” that drastically transformed the continent. In setting out rules for the division of Africa, it was determined that states could only claim specific territories if they directly administered them. While interpretations of the rule varied, it is seen as a primary driver of the “Scramble for Africa,” the rapid colonization of the entire continent. By 1914, every African territory had been claimed, save for Liberia, Ethiopia, and part of modern-day Somalia. Most of the north and west of the continent was part of the French empire, now the second largest in the world.
The French established a colonial administration throughout West Africa that presumed Africans to be subjects, not citizens. The only exception was in Senegal, where residents of four coastal communes were subjected to a greater degree of enforced assimilation and given the same political rights as French citizens. While some effort was made to improve health and educational opportunities for local populations, there was never any doubt that France’s primary colonial incentives derived from political and economic self-interest. And so Senegal continued in its role as peanut provider to France, rather than developing a more diverse and robust economy that would benefit its own people.
This was more or less sustainable as long as Senegal was simply one part of French West Africa, but it created enormous problems once Senegal achieved its independence in 1960. It was now one of the largest peanut producers in the world, but it was almost completely dependent on this one cash crop. Peanuts did not command high prices, and demand fluctuated significantly, especially as the popularity of other oils grew. Meanwhile, Senegal had to import food that it used to grow itself, before the peanut had swept everything aside. It is a familiar story for many African states that have struggled to escape colonial bonds of dependency and exploitation.
Today, Senegal continues to try to diversify its economy, even as it finds major new markets for peanuts in China and India. It is an uphill battle: more than a third of the country’s arable land is devoted to peanut farming, which remains Senegal’s most important cash crop. France retained enormous influence in Senegal for many years after its formal independence, and it is still one of Senegal’s most important trading partners. So in the end, the French affinity for peanut oil is not that strange after all. It is yet another example of how conquest and colonization transformed the French culinary and economic landscape, and how enduring the habits of imperialism have proven to be.