Thread by @aaronjakes

With the Ever Given wedged in place, bad histories of the #SuezCanal are piling up about as quickly as the container ships in that giant maritime traffic jam. I'm hoping to do some writing on the Canal's history soon, but in the mean time, here are some reading recommendations:

On the Canal as an exemplar of the pattern of predatory international lending that was crucial to the workings of European imperialism in the late nineteenth century and that led directly to British occupation of Egypt, read Ch. 30 of Rosa Luxemburgs "The Accumulation of Capital"

For a carefully researched challenge to the silly and still-ubiquitous notion that globalization--aided by infrastructures like the Canal--entails a uniform acceleration in the movement of goods and people, see Valeska Huber's "Channelling Mobilities"

For a delightfully provocative account of how the spread of coal-powered steamships led to the build-out of a global network of refueling stations--Port Said among them--that became crucial sites of imperial control, read On Barak's "Powering Empire"

Barak's book and Rebecca Woods's "The Herds Shot Round the World" also tell the story of how the opening of the Canal together with the use of coal power for both faster shipping and mechanical refrigeration contributed to the meatification of metropolitan diets.

Lastly (at least for now), on Britain's involvement in the Tripartite Aggression/Suez Crisis in 1956, read Steven Galpern's magnificent book "Money, Oil, and Empire in the Middle East." Surprisingly, this is one instance where the history in Netflix's "The Crown" is not terrible

The key thing to understand about British foreign policy in the Middle East after WWII is that under influence from bankers in The City, the Foreign Office was determined to do whatever it could to support the value of the pound.

Given the dismal condition of Britain's domestic economy, the purchase of Iranian oil was crucial to this monetary policy because the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's oil was bought in sterling, not dollars.

It was the fear that Egyptian control of the Canal would endanger the movement of tankers from Iran and thereby cause European buyers to turn to dollar oil instead that loomed large in the minds of the British officials who helped plan the botched attack with Israel and France.

I'll try to keep adding to this list in the days to come, and there's a lot more to be said here. But so many of the primers about Suez on major news sites right now are so bad that I thought it worth alerting the Twittersphere that there's a lot of great writing about the Canal.

I need to sign off for the night, but I can't let this slide before I do. What this account leaves out of its very brief history of the Canal is at least as important as what it includes.

nytimes.com/2021/03/25/wor…

The process by which the Suez Canal was financed and actually constructed offers a key example of how European imperialism worked in the nineteenth century.

The Canal was financed through an issue of shares on European markets at a moment--following the economic crises of 1847-48--when investment in colonial infrastructures was increasingly appealing.

Beyond their status as the "emerging markets" of the day, what made the colonies so appealing to investors in Europe was the kinds of incentives and guarantees that colonial governments offered at the expense of colonized populations.

Most of the railways in India, for example, were financed through shares that carried a special credit enhancement in which a minimum return on investment would be guaranteed against the tax receipts of the Government of India.

In other words, through these financial instruments, taxes in the colonies could be transformed into subsidized profits on financial investments in the metropole.

The Suez Canal was constructed through a modified version of this arrangement. In this case, the concession that De Lesseps received from Egypt allowed his company to subsidize its operations through taxes not in money but in human labor power.

Much of the work of digging the Canal was performed by peasants who, in return for the right to cultivate the farmland that they occupied, were subject to conscription by the Egyptian government for a certain amount of time each year.

The Suez Canal Concession gave the Company the right to employ massive numbers of peasant laborers through this institution of the corvée. So in this instance, a tax in Egyptian labor power would subsidize the costs of actually making the Canal.

Despite the benefits this arrangement conferred on the Canal Company's shareholders, De Lesseps had difficulty finding buyers for his shares on European markets, so Said Pasha's government ended up having to buy the remainder and borrow money from European banks to cover the cost

Those loans were a major contributing factor to the escalating public debt crisis that eventually caused the Egyptian government to default in 1876, inaugurating one of the first major instances of financial austerity. That debt crisis eventually led to British occupation in 1882

Along the way, in its scramble to outpace its debts to banks in Europe, the Egyptian government was forced to transfer its shares to the British government. For decades afterwards, the British Treasury was the single largest shareholder in the Suez Canal Company.

So by this arrangement, the revenues of the British government were being augmented by receipts on fees for traffic through the Suez Canal even as taxes (now in cash) on Egyptian farmers were being directed to repay loans to British (and French and Austrian and Italian) banks.

This could create awkward and complex conflicts of interest between different capitalist constituencies across the British Empire. Meat producers in Australia and New Zealand, who wanted transport costs as low as possible, were constantly lobbying for lower Canal dues.

But one key takeaway here--and a central argument of the new project on Suez that I'm just now starting on--is that Canal makes it easier to see just how murky and unstable distinctions between tax, rent, and profit can be once we start following revenue streams around the globe.

Okay. Now I'll really stop for the night.

Since this thread has morphed into a commentary about the many ways we can think about the Suez Canal as something more and more complex than an infrastructure for speeding and evening global flows of goods and people, I’ll try to keep adding to it.

For starters, it’s worth considering the many ways in which the Suez Canal has been both ecologically transformative in its own right and directly implicated in the geopolitics of climate change.

On the first count, the most obvious impact of connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is the process of biotic movement usually called “Lessepsian Migration.” No Suez Canal, no lionfish infestation off the coast of Lebanon.
al-monitor.com/originals/2019…

But because the building of the Canal also required the creation of urban spaces where large numbers of people could live in formerly arid environments, the routing of Nile water toward the Red Sea coast also inaugurated a wider ecological transformation of the Canal Zone.

Starting in the 1920s, as economic nationalists in Egypt began to build the case for diversification (away from heavy reliance on the cultivation and export of cotton), farmland in many parts of Egypt was devoted to new uses, including fruit cultivation.

In this era of experimental fruitification, “reclaimed” (or newly irrigated) farmland east of the Delta became the site for the import of mango saplings from India. So the wide availability of delicious mangoes in Egypt owes a good deal to the ecologies produced around Suez.

Lastly (for now), the blockage this week has made all the more apparent the ways in which climate change is intensifying competition and struggles for control over global shipping routes.

Russia and a number of other northern countries have been for several years now expanding the use of thick-hulled, nuclear-powered icebreakers to chart new shipping routes through northern channels opened by the rapid melting of polar sea ice.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians have been quick to seize upon the debacle in the Canal to tout the virtues of their northern routes.

thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-an…