Steven Solomon
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The revolutionary effects of the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, with its main channel reserved for steamships and only a small freshwater side channel for sailing vessels, intensified the interlinking of this colonial world order. British steamboats using the canal could travel to India in only three weeks compared to the three months it took a generation earlier to sail around Africa’s Cape. As a result, within a year of the canal’s opening, Indian wheat was being exported in large volumes to England. British manipulation of land tax policies in India helped maintain wheat exports even during the acute Indian famine of 1876–1877. By the 1880s, some 10 percent of the world’s grain exports were coming from India. Thanks to Suez and steam railroads, England became the first power in history to unite the entire Indian subcontinent. To consolidate its grip on its export breadbasket, England did as ruling powers have done throughout history by expanding irrigation investments. Old Muslim hydraulic works, such as the Cauvery Dam in South India and the Jumna canals near Delhi were restored, followed by the enlargement of the footprint of irrigable cropland along the Indus River. To defend the Suez Canal, British engineers who had been trained in India transferred their expertise to the Nile after the establishment of unofficial British rule in Egypt in 1882.
The opening of the Suez Canal loosed the full force of Europe’s superior steam and iron navies upon the rest of the world. The ensuing clash of civilizations rendered transparent the West’s rise to dominance that had begun with the Voyages of Discovery. Within Europe, England rose to unchallenged primacy through the wedding of its steam-powered industry and naval leadership. Its global economic, colonial, and naval Pax Britannica lasted nearly a century. As early as 1824–1825, British steam gunboats sailed up the Irrawaddy River to subdue Burma. Design improvements over the following two decades transformed such steamboats into lethal, iron-hulled river armadas that could penetrate deep into the heart of enemy country, where previously sailing ships had been confined to bombarding from the shorelines. Just as China had been rudely awakened to its relative decrepitude after four centuries of somnambulant isolation by the appearance of invincible British gunboats sailing up its rivers to impose free trade in Indian-cultivated and British-transported opium in the first Opium War of 1839–1842, American gunboats forced open long-internationally sealed Japan to free trade on Western terms when Admiral Matthew Perry’s “black ships” steamed into Tokyo Bay in July 1853. Japan’s response to this national trauma was the catch-up industrialization of the Meiji Restoration. The dramatic superiority enabled by Western industrialism posed traumatic, long-term challenges for subordinated Islamic societies, whose leaders were left to ponder whether to respond by trying to imitate Western ways at the one extreme, or to seek renewal by turning inward to religious neofundamentalism at the other.
Maintaining naval superiority was the central focus of British policy throughout the Pax Britannica era. By applying steam and iron innovations to design, warships in the early nineteenth century quickly evolved into speedier, heavily armed carriers for ever-more powerful and accurate long-distance artillery. From a matter of yards at the time of the Armada, English warships’ gun ranges reached three miles by 1900; by World War I, the distance had trebled to nine miles. With the advent of aircraft carriers by World War II, missile ranges were extended to hundreds of miles and guided by mobile bombers. An earlier innovative vessel, the submarine, first used through oar propulsion by the Dutch as early as 1620 in the Thames, became a lethal weapon by World War I from the combination of the invention of the torpedo (1866) by British engineer Robert Whitehead and the design integration of electricity and iron. Torpedo ranges multiplied tenfold to over one mile in the nearly forty years from 1866 to 1905 and nearly tenfold again to almost 11 miles less than a decade later. By the late twentieth century, guided intercontinental ballistic missiles launched from submarines could span several thousand miles—literally crossing oceans—and were capable of delivering civilization-incinerating nuclear warheads.
Through the late nineteenth century, British naval strategy was focused on maintaining superiority over the combined power of the Franco-Russian alliance, while still being able control the key points in the Mediterranean. That changed when newly militarized and industrialized Germany entered the naval armaments race. Britain’s response—its last hurrah as a naval superpower—was the 1906 Dreadnought. Fitted with oil fuel and huge turbine engines and fortified with alloyed steel, the Dreadnought-class battleship set a new world standard with its combination of speed—10 percent faster than any rival—and long-range, accurate, heavy firepower. Although the Dreadnought’s advantages were short-lived, they enabled Britain to control the critical Atlantic sea supply and communication lines that helped it win World War I. At the start of the war in August 1914, for example, British ships hoisted up and cut Germany’s five transatlantic cables, compelling the Germans to revert to wireless telegraph communication that was much easier for the British to intercept. One of those intercepted communications, the famous 1917 Zimmermann Telegram offering an alliance with Mexico, proved pivotal in bringing America into the Great War on Britain’s side. By World War II Germany’s Bismarck set the new leading technical standard in battleship power, armed with radar gunnery control; only an all-out, desperate British hunt in 1941 succeeded in sinking it at painfully high expense before it could tilt the balance of power in the open seas. Yet in World War II, even battleships like the Bismarck were being eclipsed by an altogether new class of naval weapon, the aircraft carrier, and a new superpower on the high seas, the United States.
The shift of naval superiority to America, the propitiously situated, continental-island nation whose navy sat astride Earth’s two largest oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific, represented the completion of the slow, fitful migration of history’s central naval axis from the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in ancient times to the Atlantic in Europe’s heyday, and westward again toward the Atlantic-Pacific bridge in the twentieth century, and finally to a truly world-spanning network in the twenty-first century’s integrated, global era.
History’s great hydraulic projects often heralded turning points of world power. So it was with each of the interoceanic canals built at Suez in 1869 and Panama in 1914. Both strategic waterways were civil engineering tours de force of their day, possible only with steam age machinery. Both had a world-changing impact on global commerce and balances of power. Suez proclaimed the apogee of the Pax Britannica. Panama signaled the transfer of leadership to America. In 1870, Britain accounted for some one-fourth of world commerce and 30 percent of total industrial production. Its wealth was reflected in its population, which had tripled in the century to catch up to its historically larger rivals France and Spain. By 1914, however, the United States and Germany both had caught up economically.
From the moment of its extravagant opening on November 17, 1869, the 101-mile-long Suez Canal directly linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and thence onward to the Indian Ocean, became the strategic aorta of the British colonial empire. Ironically, Britain had originally opposed the private, French-built canal project. After all, a mere three generations had passed since Nelson defeated Napoléon’s Mediterranean fleet at the Nile and with it, France’s bid to undermine Britain’s grip on its vital route to India. The British were still suspicious of French intentions, and they felt well-served by the status quo—travel time to India from London had already been reduced to less than a month by steamship and the steam railway link between Alexandria and Suez.
Napoléon’s engineers who inspected the ruins of Neko’s ancient “Suez” canal links via the Nile had abandoned their plans for a direct canal link between the Red and Mediterranean seas through a technologically simple, open cut channel when they erroneously measured a significant altitude difference between the two seas. In 1832, these old Napoleonic plans came into the hands of an experienced French diplomat in the region, Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps. He became seized by the vision of building the Suez Canal. Mor
e accurate surveys soon revealed that the sea levels were in fact similar and that an open cut channel without locks had been feasible all along.
De Lesseps plan originally got no traction with Egypt’s powerful, ambitious, modernizing, and militaristic-minded ruler, Muhammad Ali, who served as the Ottoman Turks’ viceroy but in reality was all but autonomous of Constantinople. A native Macedonian and small tobacco dealer who liked to boast he was born the same year as Napoléon, to whom he seems to have fancied himself a would-be Muslim counterpart, Muhammad Ali originally came to Egypt as part of the Ottoman force resisting the French general and himself was saved from drowning by British troops after being driven in retreat into the sea. Within a few years he consolidated political power; his signature act was the summoning together and ruthless mass murder of his Mamluk opponents. He schemed and adventured militarily, initially to ingratiate himself to his Ottoman suzerains, and ultimately toward his never-achieved goal of establishing his own sovereign dynasty, and regional empire, in Egypt. Muhammad Ali vehemently opposed de Lesseps’ canal because he foresaw, rightly, that it would entangle Egypt, and his dream of independence, in European great power affairs.
De Lesseps finally got his chance in the mid-1850s when two of Muhammad Ali’s successors, Said and Ismail, inverted their forefather’s political calculus and endorsed the canal as a means to physically and legally separate Egypt from Ottoman overlordship and to relaunch Egypt’s imperial glory. De Lesseps set up a private company to build the canal and operate it for 99 years. English investors were offered shares, but without support from their government, refused to participate, leaving mainly 25,000 French investors with a majority and Egypt itself with 44 percent.
Any British government calculation that it could kill the project politically by its opposition proved erroneous when matched against the extraordinary organizing talents, energies, and determination of de Lesseps. Building the Suez Canal took ten years, nearly twice as long as de Lesseps had projected. The high cost nearly bankrupted the Egyptian government. As in ancient Egypt, coerced peasant labor was employed. Work was delayed by cholera outbreaks that killed over half the workers in the first few years, by labor unrest, and by the sheer inadequacy of the traditional hand tools of pick, shovel, and dirt-removal baskets to do the dry excavation. Only by calling in huge steam-powered dredges and shovels operated by imported, skilled European workers was the job finally brought to completion.
Its opening in November 1869 was one of the great occasions of the nineteenth century. Determined to show that Egypt belonged within modern European civilization, the Viceroy spared no expense from his depleted Treasury. Some 6,000 guests were invited, all expenses paid. The emperor of Austria and other royalty, artists such as Emile Zola and Henrik Ibsen, and other luminaries of the age were among the headline attendees. Thousands lined both sides of the canal to cheer the processional yachts. De Lesseps himself was hailed by all as the great “Engineer”—even though he had no technical background whatsoever and his great achievement was as an enterprising impresario. An opera house in Cairo was constructed and Giuseppe Verdi commissioned to write an opera for the opening—thus Aïda, although not performed until two years later, was conceived; its story of star-crossed love between an Egyptian officer and an Ethiopian princess to whom he betrays Egypt’s plan to invade Ethiopia tugged at the Egyptian nation’s historical nightmare about losing control of the waters of the Nile, some 85 percent of which originated in Ethiopia.
Britain recognized its strategic interest in the canal from the moment it opened. Thus in 1875, when financial burdens induced the Viceroy—who was then engaged in a costly and disastrous war of imperial aggression in Africa in which he would be humiliatingly trounced by Ethiopia—to offer to sell Egypt’s 44 percent stake in the canal company to England for the large sum of £4 million, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli acted swiftly to secure funding from the Rothschild banking family to buy it. Egypt’s financial woes continued, however. Political crises ended in a military coup by anti-European nationalists that seemed to forebode Egyptian foreign loan defaults, and threats to the physical welfare of 37,000 resident Europeans as well as to the control and operation of the canal itself. British prime minister William Gladstone, formerly an ardent critic of Disraeli’s canal shares purchase, ended up doing a total policy about-face. Acting diplomatically with France, and unilaterally by force, in the summer of 1882 he moved under the thin pretext of restoring legitimate order to suppress the nationalists. Alexandria was bombarded by British forces, while a surprise cavalry charge trounced the nationalists’ much larger army in just 35 minutes. The canal was secured. The occupying British forces, however, never left. Despite regular reassurances year after year that its occupation was merely temporary, Britain remained to unofficially rule the country through half the twentieth century.
Britain quickly understood what all previous rulers of Egypt had learned: that to govern the country, one had to control the Nile waters. Accordingly, the British promptly focused on imposing their might over the length of the White Nile from its source near Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean. Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda were all subdued. British engineers were brought in from irrigation projects in India’s Punjab to help design waterworks throughout the Nile basin to maximize river water flow volumes and agriculture in Egypt. Reforms begun by Muhammad Ali in the first half of the 1800s came to fruition by the end of the century in a modernized network of dikes, sluices, and canals to provide Egypt with its first, fully operational system of perennial irrigation that yielded two and sometimes three harvests per year. It was the first significant change to the one crop basin agriculture that had existed since the dawn of Egyptian civilization almost 5,000 years earlier. Egypt’s population surged from four to 10 million, twice as many as its three-millennia ceiling. British engineers had less success in the backbreaking efforts made to augment the White Nile’s flow to Egypt by cutting through or diverting the meandering river through Sudan’s huge Sudd swamps, where so much water was lost to evaporation. All British hydraulic engineering efforts were dwarfed, however, by their momentous achievement in 1902 of the first Aswan Dam, then one of the largest and most sophisticated dams in the world. The low dam, as it is now called, was unique in water history in allowing the passage downstream of the river’s fertile silt during the early floods through low-level sluices. As a result of the dam, irrigated acreage and agricultural production in the Nile Valley and delta soared, feeding political stability and the continuous swell of Egypt’s population.
Britain’s seizure of the Suez Canal and the Nile basin also triggered a new phase of colonialism known as the Scramble for Africa. Across the continent, European powers engaged in a free-for-all military land grab. In 1898, England’s military campaigns in the Nile basin nearly led to comical war with France, known to history as the Fashoda Incident. Its genesis was an 1893 proposal made by a French hydrologist and former schoolmate of the president of France to erect a French dam on the White Nile at Fashoda in Sudan. On paper, the dam promised to deliver, in a single master stroke, control of the Nile and Egypt’s fate into French hands, while checkmating British expansion into East Africa as France completed its own Atlantic to Indian Ocean colonial run. The French establishment was smitten by the diabolical brilliance, and romantic flourish, of what would have been exposed by any realistic assessment as an utterly fanciful quest. For starters, there was hardly a stone within a hundred miles of Fashoda with which to build a dam. For another, also unknown to French hydrologists, the While Nile provides less than one-fifth of the Egyptian Nile’s water and almost none of its precious silt; thus impeding its flow, even if achieved, could not have had the intended dramatic effects. Nevertheless, in June 1896 an expedition was launched from Marseille and a tiny, intrepid band of French officers and Senegalese foot soldiers began their arduous 2,000-mile, two-year trek across Africa, up the Congo, and through the thick Sudd swamps to seize Fashoda. They carried with them 1,300 liters of claret, 50 bottles
of Pernod, and a mechanical piano.
The comical became a sublime farce when the British became so alarmed at the Frenchmen’s scheme that they deemed it an importance to conquer Sudan to secure the river. Thus they dispatched an army under General Horatio Herbert Kitchener. In September 1898, two weeks after destroying the Islamist Mahdi state near Khartoum, Kitchener arrived at Fashoda to face off against the Frenchmen. On the French side were a dozen officers and 125 Senegalese colonial soldiers; arrayed against them were no less than 25,000 British troops, artillery, and a fleet of steam gunboats. Kitchener advised the French to leave. No shots were fired. The two opponents fraternized, and even shared some of the French wine. Diplomatically, however, Fashoda ignited an explosive, several-month international incident that nearly triggered a wider war between the nations—a colonial-era Cuban missile crisis—due to the national humiliation France felt over the lopsided confrontation. In the end, the French discretely withdrew—while the British army band played the French national anthem—and with equal discretion the British removed the name Fashoda from African maps. Both sides put renewed cooperative emphasis on their mutual larger national interests, including the welfare of the Suez Canal. As if to symbolize their newfound comity, in 1899 a monumental, more-than-30-foot-tall statue of de Lesseps, with his right arm outstretched in welcome, was erected on a huge pedestal at the entrance of the canal at Port Said—making a towering impression, similar to that of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.