In the middle of the nineteenth century, as the demand for cotton kept growing in industrialized countries, the French authorities sought to develop its cultivation in Algeria. In this context, the company Malavois, de Rochemur and Savignon applied in 1856 for a concession of 5000 hectares of land in the province of Oran. Its plan was to import indentured labor from India and China to grow cotton. This proposal was favorably received by and discussed among the authorities, settlers, and industrialists. Criticized by influential publicists such as Jules Duval, it was intensely discussed in the years 1856-60, and then in 1862 with the U.S. Civil War. The proposal was finally abandoned, however, in 1871, before any concrete step toward its realization was ever taken. Yet it illustrates one of the many ways conceived of by French colonizers to improve the land within Algerian territory, and testifies to the multiplicity of settlement plans they dreamt up. Its originality in an array of projects primarily focused on European immigration points to the necessity to go beyond the French-Algerian “face-off” in the historiography, while placing Algeria in the broader context of the French Empire, linking it to Asia, Reunion and the West Indies.