The Power of Ice Norwegian Cold in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Algeria

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 caf & eacute;s 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.