And that was owed to coal.
But steam was not the only technology that reinforced the mapping of routes and the importance of ports as landing stations.
‘The Seas Inlaid with Eloquent, Gentle Wires’ 21
The handsomely moustachioed Syrian American writer Ameen Rihani was an ardent supporter of Arab reform and an observer of the region. A 1931 review in The Geographical Journal lamented his ‘malevolence towards British policy and British officials’ in the Arab world, just as they commended the ‘charming’ and ‘vivid and attractive’ ethnographic accounts of ‘mysterious Arabia’. Rihani visited the Arabian Peninsula in the 1920s and became friendly with Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who shortly thereafter became the king of Arabia. In his travels in the Peninsula, Rihani was particularly impressed with Aden Colony, which was a central hub in the global network of colonial communication that ran on the ‘modern magic’ of the telegraph:
There are certainly bigger telegraph offices in the world than this of Aden, but they are not more important. Abolish the colony on that height, silence the hundred instruments which buzz and click night and day, cut the cable which connects the Orient and the antipodes with Europe and America, and lo, the oceans will be plunged again in gloom, distance will revert to its ancient tyranny, and the continents will become insular with nothing to connect them but steam and the sail. That colony of telegraph operators, therefore, is one of the living centres of the intelligence and progress of the world.22
Before the advent of the telegraph and for a long time after, packet-ships carrying postal cargo were necessary for the transmission of information across the oceans. Merchant vessels and specialised ships carried the post from Europe to Asia and back; postal contracts given by governments were the best conduit for state subsidies to shipping companies. Then telegraphic communication came about. The first telegraph lines were laid across the Atlantic, but the next two were planted between France and Algeria and between Britain and India. The technology was crucial to the control of the colonies. Historian Douglas Farnie goes so far as to argue that in India, communication by cable was more pivotal to the maintenance of British economic and political power than railways or steamships because it stitched the internal Indian information-gathering systems onto overseas networks and thus centralised the state’s ability to collect strategic intelligence and expanded its capacity to project state power.23 Telegraph consolidated British control over the interiors of the places they colonised in the nineteenth century. They also facilitated the creation of world markets by rapidly transmitting commodity prices and market information from port to port.24 The telegraph also directly affected the shape of the shipping market, encouraging tramp shipping (shipping between ports without a fixed schedule or itinerary) over established charters or routes: because it expedited transmission of up-to-date information about the availability of commodities to be shipped, the telegraph allowed more flexibility in shipping routes and vitalised ‘ship to order’. Laying telegraph cables bound ports across the sea to one another ever more closely, while at the same time bringing the ports closer to their hinterlands.
It is no surprise then that the British attempted – and succeeded in – monopolising the most extensive communication networks between Asia and Europe. These undersea networks closely followed the shipping routes that had become such standard cartographic imaginaries. The cables’ landfall sites were often major ports and their routes traced the journeys of ships, since they were inevitably laid by ships that were themselves subject to vagaries of wind, waves, and weather. These cables also added a concrete weight to the British Empire’s claims to rule the waves and transformed the less visible pathways of its dominion into materially substantial subsea passages.
But the process was not all smooth sailing. The first set of cables laid down the length of the Red Sea were catastrophically faulty: the sea floor had not been sufficiently or effectively surveyed and, in places, the profundity of its depths meant that cables could not effectively follow safer topographic contours. In those early days, the cable-laying machinery was also crude and incapable of regularising the tension of the cable. In some places, where the cable lacked slack, it snapped. But, perhaps most importantly, the cable itself – a thin copper wire laminated with gutta-percha and swathed in hemp – proved vulnerable to the warm salty water of the Red Sea, to the naval shipworms who found the covering irresistible, and to the scabrous layer of barnacles that weighed it down and sometimes made it split. It took several tries before a line was laid from Constantinople to Alexandria and from Suez onwards to Aden and Karachi. These networks could not have been completed without lavish subsidies from the British government.25
The routes that the telegraph cables of old mapped at the bottom of the sea were, in the twentieth century, followed by copper telephone cables, and now map closely to the pathways of fibreoptic internet cables. Like undersea telegraph and telephone cables, internet cables require landing stations and amplification points (power repeaters under the sea).26 The location of such intervening points is determined as much by geopolitical calculations as they are by geographic or commercial ones. Whoever rules the seas and the coastal areas flanking it always has more access to such landing stations and the subsea cables themselves. The expanse and reach of British and later the US mastery over a great many islands in the Pacific and Caribbean transformed ports there into landing points and nodes of imperial communication networks. Where whaling ships had gone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cable-laying vessels followed.
What is most striking about the maps that chart the routes of internet cables is the extent to which the density of cable internet corresponds to the weight and volume of shipping in a given geographic area.27 The Arabian Peninsula is flanked by a rainbow of colourfully mapped cable networks. Some are owned by consortia of national telecommunication companies along a route from Hong Kong to the ports of the Mediterranean. Others are owned by private firms headquartered in Mumbai or Hong Kong, or the famously powerful and astronomically rich Tata and Ambani families of India inter alia. One such network, the Falcon, is a subsidiary of the Ambani-owned Indian conglomerate Reliance. Falcon has Suez as one terminus and Mumbai as another, but it weaves all around the Arabian Peninsula and lands at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Hodeidah and Al Ghaydah in Yemen; Manama, Bahrain; Doha, Qatar; Dubai in the UAE; Al-Safat in Kuwait; Iraq’s Al-Faw Peninsula; Khasab and Seeb in Oman, and two ports on the Iranian shore. The cable goes ‘from port to port around the Gulf like a packet ship’.28
Cable networks are heavily subsidised just as imperial mail ships were, protected by their national states and crucial in determining the significance of the ports along their routes. I shall only mention Al Ghaydah here. A small port deep in the Mahra governorate of eastern Yemen, it has, since December 2017, become a base for the Saudi-led coalition that has waged war on Yemen since 2015. The port can accommodate dhows and other boats with smaller draughts, but not larger freighters or tankers. Yet its location on the Indian Ocean, and its hosting the landing station for Falcon, have given the port an importance incommensurate with the volume of the goods traded through its harbour.
While steam and subsea cables were crucial to the designation of sea routes, pilgrimage was pivotal in transforming Jeddah into a major Red Sea port, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. Jeddah has long been the main port of Mecca, which is a little under
