bought and sold goods in Mecca in order to secure their passage home from Arabia; others used hajj as an occasion for profit-making trade. Braudel has described the hajj pilgrimage as one of the richest trade fairs in early modern times, but others have disputed its significance, given that the lunar calendar to which the hajj conforms cannot be made to agree with the monsoon schedules, which follow a solar calendar.29
The age of steam, which unshackled travel from the regularity of the monsoon winds, made the sea routes as important as land routes for pilgrimage. The expansion of maritime pilgrimage routes, in turn, proved a lucrative source of income for European shipping businesses. As early as the 1850s, European companies based in Asia (including the British India Steam Navigation Company) were chartering ships for pilgrims. The opening of the Suez Canal accelerated the trend of Europe-based firms getting into the business.30 For the vast majority of the period after the opening of the canal, and until aeroplanes overtook ships as the primary transport for pilgrimage, European shipping firms controlled the most profitable pilgrimage routes from India, Southeast Asia, and Egypt to Jeddah. This focus on hajj transportation intensified following World War I, when the US instituted quotas on the number of migrants, thus truncating the business of transatlantic shipping. European shipping companies thereafter focused on expanding (or creating from scratch) their Asian and Middle Eastern markets.31 Their success far outstripped that of local firms, not only because most state officials regulating the process were Europeans themselves but also because these shipping firms received major mail subsidies from governments and had far easier access to finance. Because of the regularity of the hajj pilgrimage and its vast scale, the logistics of pilgrimage travel on the sea was a microcosm of the global relations and local considerations that shaped the business, including the viability and transformations of sea routes over time.
Travelling to the hajj by sea was a matter of trial and tribulation. As one eighteenth-century pilgrim from India wrote, ‘During travel on sea, one is faced with shortage of space, problems of food and drink, stores which can only be obtained at distant ports, and the fear of drowning.’32 The ships were often dangerously and claustrophobically overcrowded.33 Disasters could easily result in hundreds of passenger deaths. If the sea routes were treacherous, arrival in Jeddah was not very pleasant either, all the way through the early decades of the twentieth century. This major port which had once been controlled by the Ottomans, came under the control of the British-sponsored Sharif Hussein after World War I. After the ascendance of Ibn Saud to the throne, Jeddah was eventually side-lined in favour of Riyadh, from which the Saud family hailed. Throughout this turbulent history, the rulers of Jeddah spent just as much as necessary – and no more – on dredging the harbour. A 1923 account by a pilgrim lamented the inadequacy of the port:
Jeddah Harbour is not like other seaports. Generally, the water is very shallow all along the coast. But the port authorities keep removing the sand (by dredging) so as to make the channel deep enough for passage of boats; this allows easy loading and unloading of passengers and cargo possible, if not at all times then at least at high tide. The Turkish rulers did not consider it essential to make a deep-water jetty by straightening out the beaches, as they 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
