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 or less an extension of British imperial interests abroad – were wary of letting ships carrying US oil through. The fear was that Standard Oil would bring oil to the East and monopolise the markets there, then use this monopoly to import petroleum from the West Coast of the US, shutting out British firms. The canal authorities’ fealty to Britain and concern about the Pacific trade in oil bypassing the canal led them to grant Shell permission to steam Murex through the canal. For the canal officers, ‘to allow the passage of British tankers, carrying Russian oil with the object of building up, instead of destroying, the oil trade between Batumi and the Orient, was obviously to the advantage of the Canal’s finances. The Authorities would naturally be sympathetic to any such proposition.’42 The plan was a success for Shell, which eventually merged with Royal Dutch (an oil-production firm operating in Southeast Asia) to become Royal Dutch Shell.
Within a few short years, tankers became the standard vehicle for petroleum transport and their widespread adoption enormously increased canal traffic. The ease of transporting petroleum by tanker was one factor in the eventual displacement of coal as the fuel of global economies.43 A drop in the southbound transportation of coal through the canal was eventually balanced by a massive increase in the northbound traffic of petroleum. While in 1910 crude oil constituted only 1 per cent of the total northbound tonnage of oil through the canal, by 1960, petroleum’s share of tonnage travelling northbound through the canal had increased to nearly 82 per cent.44 This was two-thirds of all the petroleum transported from the Middle East to Europe.45 The surge in extraction and trade of oil in this fifty-year period also had seismic effects in the making of the politics and social relations of the Arabian Peninsula and the world.
The closure of the canal – first for eight months after the 1956 tripartite invasion of Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel, and again for eight years after the 1967 War – had its own extraordinary effect on global shipping. The closure of the canal proved a boon in the construction of very large crude carriers (VLCCs) and ultra-large crude carriers (ULCCs) that could round the Cape of Good Hope with notable economies of scale. In 1971, 80 per cent of all tanker orders were for such supertankers.46 After the canal was cleaned of the debris of the 1967 and 1973 wars, dredged, deepened, and reopened in 1975, it saw the return of much of the freight it had lost – but not the VLCCs and ULCCs, which were now too large to pass through. The additional flow of traffic, along with the post-1973 surge in construction in the oil-producing countries of the region, saw a deluge of building goods and consumer products imported into the ports of the Arabian Peninsula via the canal.
In the intervening years, the business of the canal has flourished or diminished not only in accordance with volumes of cargo passing through it but also as refracted through political calculations near and afar. Most recently, in 2015, the canal saw the opening of a bypass channel along its middle third. The project has in part been General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s attempt to replicate the glories of early postcolonial mega-infrastructure construction. It involved excavating a parallel canal for thirty-five kilometres and dredging the already operational channel. It was said to have cost US$8.2 billion and, although the regime claimed that public subscriptions had financed the construction, there were always rumours that the Saudi state had poured money into the canal as a means of encouraging trade for its Red Sea ports.47
The captain of Callisto told me that the expansion of the canal was the fastest maritime construction project he had ever seen. When I first steamed through the canal in February 2015, one could see bulldozers and earth-movers on the Sinai shore of the canal. By August 2016, the second channel of the canal had opened between the top of the Great Bitter Lake, all the way up to Qantara, thirty kilometres short of Port Said at the northern end. Though the top and bottom thirds of the canal are still one-way, the newly dug bypass allows for a shorter travel time, as a convoy can make it halfway through the canal and await the passage of the convoy coming from the opposite direction before proceeding apace. The new channel reduces the passage time through the canal; dredging and deepening mean that tankers heading north along the canal need not be in ballast.
Although many economists in Egypt are sceptical about the wisdom of expanding the canal,
