Sinews of War and Trade. Laleh Khalili
probably did not have the required force for defending the harbour. They only made a channel for small boats that is marked off by pillars placed at many places. Since this channel is not too wide, boats also get struck up on the sand bars.34
Despite all this, until the early years of the 1950s, 75 per cent of pilgrims still travelled to Jeddah by ship. Several factors led to a dwindling of maritime hajj pilgrimage only twenty years later: new modes of transport and better infrastructures, paved roads and aeroplanes among them.35 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as anticolonial struggles forced European powers to abandon their colonies, European shipping firms also discontinued their pilgrimage services. The closure of the Suez Canal in 1956 was particularly significant as it put a stop to maritime journeys of pilgrims from the Mediterranean. Jeddah’s proximity to Mecca, however, encouraged its growth as a port of arrival and departure – by air or sea – for pilgrims, while its location in the vicinity of the Suez Canal guaranteed its significance as a commercial seaport for decades to come.
… the Suez canal initiated, open’d,
I see the procession of steamships, the Empress Eugenie’s leading the van;
I mark, from on deck, the strange landscape, the pure sky, the level sand in the distance;
I pass swiftly the picturesque groups, the workmen gather’d, The gigantic dredging machines.
Walt Whitman, ‘Passage to India’
Though the Suez Canal was not regularly incorporated in the journey from Europe to Asia until at least a decade after it opened, one cannot overestimate its subsequent effects on global trade. The opening of the canal encouraged the expansion of Aden and Jeddah, helped Britain consolidate its imperial power, facilitated the transformation of the petroleum industry (via opening markets in the East to Azeri oil), and accelerated the expansion of extractive industries in Asia and Africa.
The canal was a site of technological experimentation and innovation and an exemplar of capitalist infrastructural power and colonial expansion. Its construction followed hard on the heels of an Egyptian cotton boom in the early 1860s that spurred breakneck imperial investment in transport and extraction. The business device used for the construction and management of the canal had been the joint stock company, so crucial a form in the emergence and maintenance of capital-intensive infrastructures (such as railroads and ports). Joint stock companies had also been central to both maritime trade and the mercantilist colonisation of Asia and Africa. The canal was constructed with French capital and Khedival acquiescence, by Egyptian peasants pressed into corvée labour.36
The canal’s inauguration proved seismic in shaping routes of trade and facilitating the European powers’ strategic projection of naval force into Asia. An Admiralty warship, HMS Newport, was the first ship to pass surreptitiously through the canal on the eve of its official opening in 1869. On the ceremonial opening day, it was followed by the French royal yacht, the pleasure-boats of European royalty and industrialists, British gunboats, telegraph ships, and steamers owned by European shipping companies.37 Canal fees were extremely high, and the canal was fully operational only in 1871; therefore, its early years saw it primarily utilised by naval vessels and only a decade later by European packet-ships.38 In other words, the newly built canal was subsidised by European navies and, later still, indirectly by European states. The canal became the preferred route for Europeans regularly travelling to India, among them British colonial officials and military officers.
From the very start, the infrastructural effects of the Suez Canal on maritime trade were far-reaching. The canal allowed Britain to consolidate state power over its Asian colonies. It certainly worked to the detriment of Egypt itself. Rosa Luxemburg pointed out that the canal ‘deflect[ed] the entire trade between Europe and Asia from Egypt and would painfully affect her part in this trade’.39 When the loans borrowed to finance its construction became due, the British used the Egyptian debt along with the ‘threat’ of the Urabi revolt to occupy the country militarily. In so doing, Britain secured its hold over the entirety of the route to India. The British were not the only power to gain strategic advantage from the canal. European powers with colonies in Asia, East Africa, and the Pacific found the canal route most expedient. Even the Sublime Porte shipped its troops through the canal in order to reinforce its power along the Red Sea coast of the Peninsula, in Asir and Yemen.
The Suez Canal route, like so many other technological marvels of the nineteenth century invented to lubricate the machinery of empire, reproduced the empire itself through feedback loops and self-perpetuation mechanisms – popular revolts or starving labourers and peasants or indebted nations be damned. Because winds blew east–west across the Sinai – transversal to the canal’s north–south route – sailing ships could not navigate the canal. This meant that they were limited to the Cape route, and eventually the canal entailed the decline of oceangoing sailing ships in intercontinental trade.40 Like the railways crisscrossing colonies in Asia and Africa, the canal became an infrastructure constructed in service of further colonial extraction of commodities and capitalisation of global economies. The movement of capital in the era after the inauguration of the Suez Canal is stunningly instructive. In the period between the opening of the canal and the start of World War I, capital investment outside country of origin surged from US$9 billion to $44 billion. The vast majority of this capital was invested in mineral extraction in Asia and Africa.41
Suez Canal policies also influenced the spread of petroleum tanker ships. Perhaps the single most important ingredient in the transformation of oil into a globally tradeable commodity has been the invention of tankers to convey this liquid cargo more easily in bulk. Before tankers, oil was carried in barrels packed in regular sailing freighters (this explains the use of ‘barrels’ as the standard unit of measurement for petroleum). The Nobels of Sweden, who had major investments in Russia, and whose oil business was among the most powerful and influential in Azerbaijan, perfected the use of tanker ship steamers fuelled by oil itself (rather than the then-dominant coal) on the inland waterways Russia and the Caspian Sea. But for the tanker ship to become a global carrier, a different alliance was needed: that between a British mercantile house, Shell Transport and Trading Company, and a French oil firm based in Azerbaijan, the Rothschilds’ Bnito.
Marcus Samuel (1853–1972), the founder of Shell, is credited with showing that a tanker ship steamer was the most efficient mode of transport for petroleum. Samuel was an Iraqi Jew born in Whitechapel, London. Samuel, who in later life became the Lord Mayor of London, had worked in his father’s export and import business, which began by trading mollusc shells, used for interior decoration, as well as antiques imported from the Dutch East Indies, among other things. Samuel’s familiarity with the markets in Southeast Asia (after having lived there for a time) and a keen sense of which commodities were becoming more desirable directed him to oil. His decision to transport petroleum by ship dramatically changed the purpose and character of the family’s trading house. In 1898, Samuel decided to transport Bnito’s oil (extracted in Azerbaijan and piped to Batumi in Georgia) from the Black Sea coast to Southeast Asia. Instead of using the standard barrels, Samuel commissioned ships that could move the liquid in bulk, taking advantage of economies of scale in transport but also ease of loading and unloading via pumps and hoses.
Establishing the route of the first such ship, the Murex, required much backroom negotiation as well as the support of the British government. The latter hoped that, by helping a British business gain a head-start on transport companies carrying Standard Oil’s products, it could secure strategic advantage against the world’s largest petroleum producer. Suez Canal authorities – now more