The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  In October 1827, when negotiations between the contending parties were already under way, a fleet of twelve British, eight Russian and seven French ships standing off Navarino became entangled almost by accident with an Ottoman fleet of about sixty vessels drawn from Turkey, Egypt and Tunis, including three large battleships (their opponents possessed ten). Despite an armistice, the Turks refused the allied fleet entry into Navarino Bay. The allies decided that a show of force was needed, and this developed into a full-scale battle within the bay, in which the Turkish fleet was smashed to pieces. Some Turkish boats escaped towards Alexandria; others were scuttled. The allied fleet, especially the British, Russian and French flagships, suffered damage too, and 182 men were killed. The allies did not quite know what to do with their victory – the Ottoman sultan riposted by declaring holy war against the unbelievers, and the British and the French, aware of chaotic infighting among the Greeks, sent their own ships against independent-minded Greek captains who continued to make a nuisance of themselves.44 But the battle of Navarino was a vital step towards securing a treaty in which the independence of southern Greece, under loose Ottoman suzerainty, was recognized in 1828. Muhammad Ali now realized that the best hope for the future lay in the reinvigoration of trade with Britain and France through Alexandria, so in the next few years he improved the shipyards and capitalized on the Mahmudiyya canal linking Alexandria to the Nile Delta. It had been constructed ten years earlier.45 Now it was time to enjoy its benefits.

  VI

  The French invasion of Algeria was also the result of unpredicted events, at the heart of which lay not, as might be expected, the activities of the Barbary corsairs, but the finance house of the Bacri. The French had never taken much interest in the accumulated arrears in payment owed for Algerian grain, which had fed the French army since the start of the Revolutionary War. By 1827, the Bacris were short of money and insisted that the Algerian government should cover their debts until the French paid what was due. The dey was convinced that the Bacris and the French were colluding in an attempt to squeeze money out of him.46 Recent history showed, of course, that the deys were much more enthusiastic about squeezing money out of other people. The dey was also suspicious of the French because they had started to fortify two of their trading stations in Algeria. So on 29 April 1827 an argument between the dey and the consul broke out, during which the dey became so irritated that he hit the French consul in the face with a fly-swatter. The French reaction was to demand a gun salute in honour of the French flag, but the dey was unwilling even to contemplate this symbolic act, and unleashed his privateers against French shipping. By summer 1829 the French were blockading the port of Algiers. Even so, they did not see the conquest of Algeria as the obvious solution to their problems, thinking at first that it might be best to let Muhammad Ali take charge, in view of his pro-French leanings.

  The merchant community of Marseilles pressed several commercial arguments in favour of the conquest of Algiers: during the blockade trade with Algeria suffered, while the Greek rebellion against the Turks had interfered with French business in the Levant. The Marseilles businessmen wanted a safe and secure trading partner, lying under French control. It was obvious that Algiers, due south of Marseilles, should be the target. And it proved a very easy conquest. The dey went into exile in Naples in July 1830, though he had to leave most of his money behind. The lesser cities of the Algerian regency, Oran and Constantine, were assigned to friendly Tunisian princes – after nearly 300 years of occupation, the Spaniards had decided that Oran was too expensive to hold, selling it to the Muslims in 1792.47 Still, the French were far from clear in their own minds about what they wanted to do with Algeria. They found themselves attacking targets in western and eastern Algeria: the ruler installed in Constantine had his own ideas about how his town could develop as a centre of trade with the Europeans, and there was trouble in Annaba, east of Algiers. In the 1830s, they were being dragged deeper into Algeria than they had anticipated. The Ottomans were unwilling to offer any comfort to North African rulers who appealed for support, partly through lack of resources and willpower. And yet, despite endemic conflict in several provinces, Algeria attracted colonizers from France and Spain: in 1847 there were nearly 110,000 settlers, and they did not simply hide themselves in the cities, for many hoped to acquire estates carved out of the state lands of the old regime.48 The cities themselves saw massive construction projects throughout the next decades, and Algiers was transformed into a new Marseilles with broad streets and solid, stately buildings. The conquest of Algiers was the first phase in a series of colonial conquests that divided up many of the key strategic positions in the Mediterranean between France, Great Britain, Spain and (though it was still unborn in 1830) Italy.

  The history of the Fourth Mediterranean had begun in an era when Venetian, Genoese and Catalan galleys had breasted their way across the sea to reach Alexander’s city. It ended as Egypt became the gateway to the East in ways of which past rulers had only dreamed. By the time the last dredging machines had finished their task and the Suez Canal was opened not just to sailing ships but to steamboats, a new era in the history of the Mediterranean had also opened: the Fifth Mediterranean had come into being.

  PART FIVE

  The Fifth Mediterranean,

  1830–2010

  1

  Ever the Twain Shall Meet,

  1830–1900

  I

  The English poet of empire Rudyard Kipling penned the much quoted lines, ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. Even if, by the early twentieth century, European observers had become overwhelmed by what they saw as fundamental differences between attitudes and styles of life in East and West, this was not true of the nineteenth century. Then, the ideal became the joining of East and West: a physical joining, through the Suez Canal, but also a cultural joining, as western Europeans relished the cultures of the Near East, and as the rulers of Near Eastern lands – the Ottoman sultans and their highly autonomous viceroys in Egypt – looked towards France and Great Britain in search of models they could follow in reviving the languishing economy of their dominions. This was, then, a reciprocal relationship: despite the claims of those who see ‘orientalism’ as the cultural expression of western imperialism, the masters of the eastern Mediterranean actively sought cultural contact with the West, and saw themselves as members of a community of monarchs that embraced Europe and the Mediterranean.1 Ismail Pasha, viceroy of Egypt between 1863 and 1879, always dressed in European clothes, though he would occasionally top his frock-coat and epaulettes with a fez; he spoke Turkish, not Arabic. Equally, the Ottoman sultans, and more particularly their courtiers (like Ismail, frequently Albanian), often sported western dress. They would, of course, be selective in their use of western ideas. The Egyptian viceroys were happy to send clever subjects to study at the École Polytechnique in Paris, a Napoleonic foundation; at the same time they discouraged excessive mixing in the French salons: they wished to import radical ideas, but about technology, not government. What had almost entirely disappeared by the early nineteenth century was the idea of the Ottoman realms as the seat of conquering warriors of the faith. Having lost their military and naval superiority in the East, the Ottomans were no longer the subject of fear but of fascination. Traditional ways of life caught the attention of western artists such as Delacroix, but other westerners, notably Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, were keen to promote modernization. The Egyptian rulers themselves were anxious to bring Egypt into Europe. They saw no contradiction between its location in an African corner of the Levant and a European vocation: Europe was (and is) an idea and an ideal rather than a place.2

  Napoleon’s campaigns in the East had already aroused enormous interest in Egypt among the French: just as ancient Egypt had been the seat of a magnificent and wealthy empire, modern France was now equipped to play the same role in Europe, the Mediterranean and the wider world. The underlying concept was that of ‘civil
ization’, a concept that still maintains a hold on how the French think of their place in the world. This fascination with ancient Egypt began with the careful recording of ancient monuments by draughtsmen in Napoleon’s army; far from being a luxurious indulgence, this was a task which expressed the central aims of the French enterprise in the eastern Mediterranean, in which France posed as the heir to the empires of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. Egyptian motifs did not lose their fascination after the first Napoleon: under the rule of his nephew, Napoleon III, between 1848 and 1870, the ‘Second Empire style’ canonized Egyptian decorative forms in elegant furnishings and architectural details. The difficulty in making contact with the mental world of the ancient Egyptians was that their scripts were unreadable. But even this problem was eventually resolved, once French troops had uncovered an inscription in hieroglyphics, hieratic script and Greek at Rosetta, which Napoleon appropriated (though it now rests in the British Museum). The decipherment of the Egyptian scripts by the young French genius Champollion, in 1822, opened new windows on to ancient Egypt and was as important as the acquisition of Algiers, a few years later, in convincing France that it possessed a mission in the lands of Ottoman allegiance within the Mediterranean.

  There were enthusiasts who were obsessed by the attractions of the East. Around 1830 Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin became the self-appointed prophet of a new sect dedicated to the creation of a link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. This was not simply a question of trade and engineering. Enfantin saw in the physical meeting of East and West the creation of a new world order in which the male principle, embodied in the rationally minded West, would enter into union with the female principle, embodied in the mysterious life forces of the East: ‘to make the Mediterranean the nuptial bed for a marriage between the East and West and to consummate the marriage by the piercing of a canal through the isthmus of Suez’. Out of this intercourse a world of peace would emerge in which the semi-divine Enfantin would be acclaimed as the heir to St Paul, not to mention Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. This was only one feature of his thinking that attracted attention. His insistence on showing proper honour to women puzzled many in Constantinople and Cairo; his bizarre sky-blue costume with flared trousers might easily have made him a figure of fun in Paris. Yet he gained entrée into French salons, and he surveyed the terrain between the Mediterranean and Suez before he was received by Muhammad Ali, who listened politely to his plans for a canal linking East and West.3 The viceroy of Egypt was as enthusiastic as anybody about the need to bring economic improvement to his land, but he saw a canal through the desert as a drain on his resources, not as an asset: he suspected that a canal would divert trade past the Egyptian heartlands, bringing no benefit to Alexandria or Cairo (now linked by the Nile and the Mahmudiyya canal), but plenty of profit to western European businessmen attempting to trade between France or England and India.

  Enfantin’s eccentricities seemed more tolerable back home in France because he colourfully expressed an assumption that began to guide French thinking about society and the economy. Under the influence of Saint-Simon’s writings, Enfantin and his contemporaries insisted on the need for progressive improvement of both material and moral conditions. New technology, including railways and steamships, was beginning to transform the European economy, although the darker side of industrialization soon became visible in England. In the salons of Paris, however, theory reigned, and it continued to be nourished by the ethos of revolutionary France. Progress had become an ideal. Significantly, it had become an ideal in the Egypt of Muhammad Ali no less than in the France of Louis-Philippe. Transforming the ideal into reality, in the case of the Suez Canal, was the work of Ferdinand de Lesseps. He combined extensive diplomatic experience with mastery of the detail needed to form a Canal Company, to sell many (but not quite enough) of its shares, and, most importantly, to persist in his project until he had worn down the resistance of those who objected to his plans. His tireless travels back and forth by steamship between France and the Levant, as well as to Spain, England and elsewhere, even to Odessa, ensured that he was constantly in touch with developments throughout the complex network of politicians, investors and specialist engineers on whom the canal project depended. He had the great advantage of family ties to Louis-Napoléon, president of the Republic from 1848 and emperor from 1852 to 1870: his cousin was the empress’s mother.

  There were many who claimed that the canal was their idea, though there still remained, carved into the stony desert of western Sinai, traces of ancient canals built to join the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. In the third century BC, Ptolemy II Philadelphos extended what remained of a canal built by the Persians in the years around 500 BC. Links between the Nile and the Red Sea remained open, with interruptions, until the early Arab period. The aims, however, were quite limited: ‘Amr ibn al- ‘As, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, used the canal system to convey Egyptian wheat to Mecca.4 The idea that a canal might link the trade routes of the Mediterranean with those of the Indian Ocean was not seriously broached before the nineteenth century, for good reason: Egypt was to all intents the Nile waterway, and a parallel waterway through the desert would deprive its rulers of the tax revenues on which the Ptolemies, Fatimids and Mamluks had depended so heavily.

  There were other ideas about how to create a trade route linking the two seas. In the 1820s the young English entrepreneur Thomas Waghorn noticed the long delays incurred when sending mail from India to England, and saw the potential of a route from Bombay to Suez, which could also carry those passengers who were willing to endure the heat and discomfort of a journey by carriage across the desert from the Red Sea to the Nile. Relief at reaching the Nile was tempered by consternation at the plague of rats, cockroaches, flies and fleas that infested the steamers and sailing vessels that carried passengers up river. After that, it was reasonably easy to take passage to England, since a monthly steam packet service linked Alexandria to Malta and Falmouth in Cornwall – these steamship services will be discussed later.5 When de Lesseps met Waghorn, he was impressed, writing that ‘he served as an example’ – not merely of enterprise and courage but of the need to create an effective link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.6 The British position remained that a Nile route was preferable. Lord Palmerston, while he was prime minister, strongly opposed de Lesseps’s plans. There were technical problems that any number of land surveys failed adequately to resolve. Was the level of the Red Sea the same as that of the Mediterranean? The aim was to build a canal, not a cascade. The variety of soils – sandy desert, rocky desert, swamp – further complicated the operation. But the reasons behind Palmerston’s opposition were not simply technical. Should the project succeed, the French would acquire a passage to India, their prestige in Egypt would increase immeasurably, and British interests in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean would suffer.

  The Ottoman sultan was also far from convinced that he wanted a canal to the Red Sea to be built. In part this was a political issue. De Lesseps urged the viceroys to make their own decision about the canal, and to ignore those who argued that the canal required the permission of the Ottoman sultan himself. The first viceroy to be seduced by de Lesseps’s project was Said, the obese son of Muhammad Ali, who had despaired at his child’s inordinate love for macaroni. Said was in fact a canny politician who was willing to commission ground surveys, to invest heavily in de Lesseps’s shares, and even to pay for the newspaper of the Suez Canal Company. Said did, it is true, waver, but the more he became involved in the schemes the more obvious it became that the losses he would incur if it collapsed were intolerable. Money was, of course, the problem, especially after de Lesseps failed to agree terms with Jacob de Rothschild in 1856.7 De Lesseps turned to another source of finance, announcing a worldwide shares offer in which only the Egyptian viceroy and the French participated with any enthusiasm. De Lesseps was a persuasive man, as Said discovered when unsold shares had to be offloaded on the viceroy. There were rewards for Said: the new port at t
he northern end of the canal was named Port Said; even if at the start it was only a rough encampment, it grew rapidly as the canal progressed, and in time for the opening it acquired an impressive mole made of great concrete blocks dumped in the sea. By the time Said died, in January 1863, considerable progress had been made with the project, even if it was still far from certain that the target date of 1869 could be met: vast amounts of earth needed to be moved, and the higher ground along the designated route of the canal needed to be breached. So far, the solution was to rely on forced labour recruited by Said, corvée labour of the type that had been practised in Egypt since the days of the Children of Israel. The corvées aroused unease in Europe, because they seemed something like slavery, and because they were inefficient, with men constantly in transit from the Nile to the canal and back again.