Dan Snow's History Hit - The Suez Canal

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

The creation of the Suez Canal was the culmination of a dream stretching back to the pharaohs of connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, but why is it so important? Right now with the canal is blocked and more closely resembles a traffic jam rather than the vital trade artery connecting the trade and the Mediterranean basin with that of the Indian Ocean and Asia it is. The canal reduces the journey between the Arabian Sea and the North Atlantic by around 5000 miles saving the massive modern cargo vessels hundreds of thousands of dollars and tons of fuel by avoiding the long route around the Cape of Good Hope. This massive shortening of the route was even more vital in the days of sail and steam. On this podcast, Dan is joined by Zachary Karabel, author of Parting the desert: the creation of the Suez Canal; who discusses the history and construction of the canal, its lavish opening and how its existence led to imperialist expansion. Dan also talks to Kate Jamieson a maritime historian and part of the Operations team at MNG Maritime about the current implications of the closure.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. The Suez Canal is blocked everybody. The sea level waterway, with no locks in it, that joins the Mediterranean to the Red Sea through the Isthmus of Suez is currently a gigantic traffic jam, as that big ship is wedged across it. The Suez Canal was dreamed of by potentates stretching as far back as the pharaohs. In fact they may have even constructed some kind of canal there, possibly one linking it with the Nile. Cleopatra may have journeyed across this part of the world on a canal. The reason everybody

has wanted a canal there is to access both the trade, the wealth of the Mediterranean basin, and of the Indian Ocean world, the Far East, both at the same time. Taking the Mediterranean basin and of the Indian ocean world the far east both at the same time taking the Suez Canal means you can reduce the journey between the Arabian Sea and the North Atlantic by around 5,000 miles something like 9,000 kilometers today going around via the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of South Africa costs an extra $350,000, assuming around 100 tonnes of fuel per day. So the Suez Canal is cheaper and it shaves about seven days off that trip. And you can imagine in the days of sale or primitive steam engines, rather, that the savings would have been considerably more. On this podcast, I'm talking to the excellent Zachary Carabelle.

He wrote Parting the Desert about the construction and history of the Suez Canal. And his next book is Inside Money, Brown Brothers Harriman and the American Way of Power, which I'll be getting back onto the podcast to talk about soon. He taught me through the history, the construction of the Suez Canal, how it led to financial crashes, indebtedness, grandiose parties with star-studded royal guest lists, and the cold, hard extension of imperial power. It really is an amazing story of which this blockage is just the latest little chapter. After that I want to talk to the brilliant Kate Jamieson. She's worked with us at History Hit before.

She's an 18th century historian but her day job is getting ships and crews through the Suez Canal. So I'll catch up with her at the end to find out exactly what's going on in her world. If after listening to this you want to come listen to some more of our podcasts you can do so without the ads at historyhit.tv. Please head over there there and do that you also get the world's best history channel by the way when you do that hundreds and hundreds of documentaries up there we're making new stuff all the time we got alex richie's series on poland at war she is a historian that's taking us through some of the more remarkable episodes in poland's brutal wartime experience that's taking us through some of the more remarkable episodes in Poland's brutal wartime experience. That's going up today on the channel. And we got everybody's favourite medievalist, Eleni Janega, with her new series coming up as well. So please go and check out History Hit TV.

But in the meantime, everybody, here is Zachary Caramell and Kate Jamieson. Enjoy. enjoy. Zachary, thanks so much for coming on this quick emergency podcast. My pleasure. Much easier to have me on the podcast than it is to dig a 1300 foot ship out of a canal. Turns out that that's true. Turns out that's true. But tell me about the canal because we shouldn't be surprised things go wrong. It's an artificial construct. For how many generations were people dreaming about a canal that would cut this narrow isthmus of land? in the golden age of transatlantic travel and trans oceanic travels. So the idea that like human beings can, should, will,

must manipulate, transform, alter the physical environment to suit human needs. That's time immemorial. So in terms of the Suez canal alone, the ancient Egyptians, the Pharaohs, there's some evidence we're digging something, either a canal or a trench, just to make it easier to transport from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea through the deserts. But that moment where we build these really, really massive earth projects, other than like the Great Wall of China and some other things, that's a really a mid-19th century, we're going to conquer nature. It's such an extraordinary impulse that those generations felt. Strategically, how important is it? What's the big deal with creating this

canal? What problem does it solve? So strategically, you would certainly say that it made a lot more difference transformatively to global commerce and trade and politics from like the late 19th century into the early to mid 20th century than it does today. I mean, it's not to say that the Suez Canal today is not a vital shipping lane. It is. It carries hundreds of billions of dollars of commerce through it. shipping lane it is. It carries hundreds of billions of dollars of commerce through it. But it's also true that these massive ships could go around the Cape of Good Hope. Yes, it would take more time, but it wouldn't take so much more time. It's not like it's that or bust. But in the 19th century, when you had much more flimsy ships, just the beginning of steam power,

so the canal is open in 1869, the shortening route, particularly for the British Empire, whose main focus was how do we get stuff back and forth from India? And then later on, how do we get back and stuff from India and Asia to the European continent? Cutting that journey of 10,000 miles, which you'd have to go to get around Africa into the Indian Ocean, that made a massive difference. And yet, the Brits were a bit worried about this at first, right? This was a French-led idea, was it? Yeah, I don't think the Brits would have been nearly as worried, and Lord Palmerston, who was first the Foreign Secretary

and then the Prime Minister in some of these years, would, I think, have been much more gung-ho about this had it been a British project and not a French project. So the concern is not that this canal would be amazing and would be transformative and would make it much cheaper to get goods back and forth. It's that the French would control it and thereby cut off the British from their imperial possessions, which in fact is why eventually the British do find a way to take the canal from the French and the Egyptians of course. Well they try that a couple of times so we'll come into that but

in terms of getting the thing built how did the French turn this idea into a reality? The Suez Canal more than most of these massive projects really is the visionary impulse of one individual, a man named Ferdinand de Lesseps, who was just one of these episodic figures in history who had a bunch of failed projects. Think of him like an upper middle class French Elon Musk. He had a dream, he had a vision, he had a bunch of projects that didn't pan out so well. He was looking for something to inscribe his name on the face of history. He was a man in search of a plan who found a canal. And he ends up being the driving force for this. And it's not like there was 20 other people clamoring to get this built unlike let's say the later panama canal

where there was no dearth of plans and projects and people the suez canal really was the product of de lesseps going i can do this this needs to be done i will do it and they raise a ton of money and then they get the job done and funny enough they raise a ton of money from French shopkeepers. It's one of the earliest versions of a shareholder funded project. There were a bunch of these starting around that time, 1830s, 1840s. But a lot of the money comes from middle class French citizens who are sold this dream by de Lesseps, that they can get a little piece, who are sold this dream by De Lesseps, that they can get a little piece, not just of a project that's going to change the world, but that's also going to make them a lot of money. And as it turned out, it didn't make them so much money, but it did change the world.

Sounds like the channel tunnel that my dad sunk his savings in the 1980s, because he believed in it, but he's still waiting for the big payout. Yeah, look, the legacy is most of the time when these projects are sold to the common man or the common investor, they get the common investor's money, the project gets built, and nobody sees any return on it except the people later on who buy the bonds or buy the debt when the project goes bankrupt. And the Suez Canal is no different than the Channel or the Transcontinental Railroads in the United States. The initial investors in these projects lost their shirts, but it got built. It got built. And at some stage, the Brits decide they're going to get involved, right? Is that when it looks like it's actually going to become a thing?

I mean, they are involved throughout because you can't really get this done without at least British diplomatic buy-in. So throughout the 1840s, even after the project gets commenced in 1859 into the 1850s, de Lesseps is shoveling in his own version of early shovel diplomacy between Paris, Istanbul, Cairo, and London to try to get buy-in from the major players. He has to go to Istanbul because Egypt is still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. He has to go to Cairo because it is actually really an independent country, even though it's nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. So he has to get the ruler of Egypt on board, and he has to get the British government on board. Because even though it's not their project, even though it's not their agreement with the ruler of Egypt or the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, if the British were adamantly

opposed to this being built, he could not have either garnered the diplomatic capital, the political capital, and probably not the actual capital to get it done. They do get it done. Eventually, some mechanical diggers come in. Eventually, they replace this kind of army of workers in appalling conditions with some heavy plant. planting a shovel on the ground and saying, you know, in the name of the emperor of France, and at the time it was Napoleon III, in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, the ruler of Egypt, and the Suez Canal Company, I begin this project. And then it's just tens of thousands of Egyptian laborers, the fellaheen, that are provided to the canal company by the ruler of Egypt. It's basically slave labor, although it's a somewhat different status. And they're just

set to work digging. That's effective because the Suez Canal is just a trench. It's basically slave labor, although it's a somewhat different status. And they're just set to work digging. That's effective because the Suez Canal is just a trench. It's just a 120-mile ditch between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with a lake in the middle and a minimal amount of complicated engineering work. There's a few cliffs and there are a few areas. So unlike the Panama Canal or other massive global projects where you have hundreds of feet differential between the oceans and you needed a whole complicated system of locks, you don't need any of that.

But you do need to dig the thing. And at some point, it occurs to the engineers of the Suez Canal Company and to Lesseps that mechanical dredgers, things that dig with machine and steam power, are faster and more effective. And you have to fuel them, but you don't have to feed them, you don't have to house them, you don't have to make sure they don't die of disease. So they start replacing the human labor with mechanical labor halfway to two thirds through. And then the opening 10 years later, it's one of those amazing moments of 19th century Victorian history where you just get a sense of this generation of people that almost can't believe what humanity is achieving.

It's kind of not unlike the huge scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. The self-congratulation was remarkable. So when the canal opens in 1869, it is inaugurated with a massive party. In 1869, it is inaugurated with a massive party, three days of parties that the ruler of Egypt spends, what I guess would be the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars on, to fete the royalty of Europe. The Empress Eugenie comes.

They commissioned Verdi to write Aida, which was supposed to be performed in the new Cairo Opera House, but they didn't actually finish the Cairo Opera House on time, so it ended up premiering elsewhere. But it's not just the party and the excess and the pageantry. It's the language and the vision, which even the English at the time, who were, as we talked about, somewhat ambivalent about a French canal opening in the waterway that connects the British to India. Even there, the rhetoric was the opening of the new water highway between the East and the West

will mark an error in the annals of humanity. The canal was begun in this also philosophical way. There was a whole group in France, philosophers following the theories of Saint-Simon, that the world had been rent asunder by geology and geography. And that if you could connect the waters of the planet in one ever-flowing connective body, that you would heal the wounds that had separated humanity since the time of the Tower of Babel, that the canal wasn't just a literal connection between two oceans and two seas. It was a metaphorical connection between East and West, between male and female, between parts of the world that had been sundered. And they really talked this way. I mean, this wasn't just a marginal thing. It was a real belief that you weren't just digging a trench. You were unveiling a new dawn of human progress.

Wow. Some of the luster came off that pretty soon. But anyway, in terms of the opening, in terms of the opening, grand procession, I mean, emperors and kings, French, Austrians, all kind of processing through at the first ship through, right? Yes. And they had these showboats. They actually built ships that were more like Mardi Gras floats than they were like actual ships to carry the dignitaries through the canal. And they dressed up. It was like a three-day ball and stops along the way on the canal, each of which was its own party. I mean, it was quite the thing.

A good ticket if you could get it. Hi, everybody. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We talk about the Suez Canal. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great

stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Ah, sounds fun. Were there any problems from the start? Was the canal built properly? Did people go aground? Was it deep enough? How did the canal work? It worked quite well. It actually worked better than people thought. I mean, it wasn't like there were no accidents and no groundings, but it was functional very quickly and it was viable very quickly. Certainly by the 20th century, as ships got bigger, the canal tended to lag the growth of shipping containers. And part of that was because by the time you had these massive

shipping containers like we have today, the canal had become less and less economically important just because global commerce started going in different parts of the world and you had air and you had different ways of getting stuff from point A to point B. And there wasn't always the money. The Egyptian government in the mid-20th century didn't have the money in time for the capital expenditure to expand the canal. So it did eventually continue to expand. Actually, it's two parallel canals in certain parts of it. But it was usually 10 years behind the evolution of the shipping containers. And despite all those glorious aspirations when it opened, quite quickly the canal becomes an absolute piece of meat that is fought over by the imperial powers. And rather

than heralding a new world, it's very much old world imperial rivalry, right? It's tragic for Egypt in the 19th century. Yeah, so the ruler of Egypt really believed that taking French money and French investment, and the rule of Egypt also paid for some of this, would also transform Egypt and make it first among the nations of the world. And instead, it became a source of debt servitude, because the amount of money that the ruler borrowed in order to invest in the canal and pay for the fellaheen and pay for those parties just wasn't recouped by any of the canal dues or anything actually happening in egypt and within 10 years the rule of egypt's in such debt

particularly to british banks that the british take over the country and put egypt into first actually direct imperial rule but then financial receivership. So basically, the British government takes over the financial system of Egypt for the next 60 or 70 years, basically through World War II. Talk about the tail wagging the dog. There's meant to be a secure route to the jewel of the empire in India. It ends up being the kind of touchstone for Britain's African empire, right? Because once you've got Egypt, you've got to get Sudan, and then the French capture other bits. You're like, okay. So it kind of almost is the starting gun on the whole what we now call the scramble for africa yeah and not only that but it also becomes the reason for a lot of british

occupation or involvement in the middle east in jordan in palestine at the tip of the saudi peninsula what is now yemen and what was thenden. So you're entirely right. It not only becomes the reason for the expansion of imperialism, this thing that was supposed to make the British empire and the British Isles themselves more economically secure ends up being an incredible source of vulnerability and insecurity from the perspective of Whitehall, which basically now sees anything and anyone that could jeopardize the Suez through the 1950s as an excuse for, we have to go occupy the Himalayas because if something happens in China that then leads to India, that then cuts off Suez, that then imperils the British Isles, it becomes this domino effect that justifies

everything, but also makes London chronically paranoid that something is going to happen to cut off its route via Suez to Asia. I was reading an account from 1941 today, and we forget Winston Churchill was sending tanks against the advice of many of his military officers in England who were worried about invasion across the channel by Hitler in 1941, Churchill was overruling them and setting tanks to protect the canal zone in Egypt. It's extraordinary. You mentioned up to the 1950s, many Brits will know about the canal in the context of that so-called Suez Crisis, which has particular resonance in Britain because just as the opening of the Suez Canal marked the beginning of certainly empire in Africa, the Suez Crisis seems to have been the curtain call

for the British empire itself. It was our kind of DMBN fool almost. It's the same sort of thing going on, right? It's this received wisdom that the Brits need to try and protect this artery from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Yeah. And it was a kind of a concatenation of events where you had both the DNA of a hundred years years of we can't let the Suez Canal be controlled by anyone who might use it against the British Empire. And in this case, it was Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was charismatic and independent and clearly determined to restore or create an Egyptian state that was gloried and powerful. But it was also the sense memory of World War II and Chamberlain and appeasement to Hitler. So for Anthony Eden, who was prime minister in 1956, Nasser seizing the canal, nationalizing the canal, which he does in a very dramatic moment and actually uses, repeats the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps on the radio three times as the signal for the troops to occupy the canal. And for Eden and a certain

group of the ruling class in Britain at the time, Nasser is like Hitler redux. And the determination is, we didn't stand up to Hitler in 1938 when Chamberlain went and said peace in our time, and we're not going to do that again. So it was this combination of the imperial history, the sense that Suez is the vital artery, and the memory of what happened in World War II, combined with the fact that Eden himself had kind of lived in Churchill's shadow and wanted to make his own mark, right? I'm going to be the lion of England and not just Winston. And it didn't pan out that way. So the canal became a war zone and the Americans eventually forced the Brits to back down, hand it back to the Egyptians.

The Americans are outraged and they're partly outraged just because they weren't consulted. And this is also the rise of the United States. This is the uncomfortable part of the handoff from the British to the Americans as the appointed global hegemon. But for long periods from 1956, really through the late 1970s, particularly because of the various Arab-Israeli wars, for long periods of that, the canal is impassable. It's either a war zone in 1956, it's a war zone in 1967, again in 1973. At various points, the Egyptians sink ships in the canal to make it impassable, largely to try to hurt the Israelis. But the net result is for several decades, even though the canal is the vital artery

and this thing that Nasser had seized and that had toppled Eden and led to the kind of the closing of the British Empire. For long periods of time, the canal was untraversable because of political reasons and also because the Egyptians sank ships to make it untraversable. I visited the canal and seen the place where the Egyptians in 1973 carried out the devastating surprise assault on Israel in 73 and then where Ariel Sharon then counterattacked back across the canal, the most extraordinary drama. And again, you keep thinking this canal has become like a defensive strategic military site rather than the poor old shipping lane that the Lesseps must have been hoping for nearly a hundred years before.

Yeah, no, it definitely, you know, it becomes a strategic point to contest. But as that increases, its economic viability decreased, right? Because shipping lanes and war zones are somewhat incompatible. Most shipping companies were like, look, if we go around the Cape of Good Hope and no one's going to fire on us and the canal is not going to be closed, we'll do that, even if it's going to take us longer. So in many ways, it became less and less relevant. It's become more relevant in the past 20 years, just because the vast expansion of global shipping and the rise of China, in particular, it's a route, obviously, from Europe into Asia,

and just the sheer volume of trade pouring into Europe from China. So the past 10 to 15 years have actually been really good for the canal economically and good for Egypt economically because it's basically the sole source of dollar exchange for the Egyptian government. It's billions of dollars of revenue for the Egyptian government. What do you think this latest grounding, the Suez Canal has had lots of problems, as you said, of all different kinds. Do you think this latest grounding is an existential threat or do capitalists have short memories, short time horizons? In a couple of years time, they'll say, hey, what's the quickest way of getting from China to Rotterdam? I think the fact is, part of what's so amazing about the story today about this massive ship, the Ever Given, is just how big the ship is.

We used to talk about super tankers and then super max and these large things. I mean, this is four football pitches. It's 1300 feet. It's a really big hunk of metal and a reminder of just the sheer volume of global trade these days because it's there. And then all these other ships are now lined up waiting to pass. And some of them are the same size. And even with the pandemic, maybe even because of the pandemic, we talk about is Europe and the United States going to stand up to China?

Has the pandemic ended globalization as we know it? I think part of what this is, it's in its own weird way, a touchstone for right now is a reminder of the sheer volume of global trade, even in the middle of a pandemic, is so massive that anyone who is sitting around going that it's done, the pandemic certainly messed up tourism, but the movement of goods around the world through all these different lines, now the Arctic with the melting of the polar ice caps, that has just gotten more and more and more every year. And that's going to keep going on. And they're clear of the ship. And then they're just going to increase the volume as much as possible.

Kate, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. How does the canal figure in your day-to-day work? So I work in maritime security. A lot of maritime security teams transit down through the Red Sea. So they will join vessels at the end of the Suez Canal usually, and then head down through the Red Sea. So they will join vessels at the end of the Suez Canal usually, and then head down through the Red Sea, picking up their weapons and equipment and down into the Indian Ocean and onto wherever that vessel is going. And that works in reverse as

well. So teams will drop off their weapons in the Red Sea and then head up to Suez, where they'll disembark the team. So it's pretty busy. Are there any challenges operating in the canal? I think there are lots of challenges operating in the canal and they're trying to make it wider for the entire length of the canal. They've managed to widen it in certain areas but I think there's a good 72 kilometers I want to say that's still only passable by single vessels. And at the moment what's going on in the shipping world today? And at the moment no one's going on in the shipping world today? And at the moment, no one's going anywhere through the Suez Canal. Yeah, so the Ever Given, which is a Suez Max vessel.

So the Suez Max vessels are designed to be the largest ships which meet the restrictions of the Suez Canal, really. So it was about 400 metres by 59, I read earlier. So the consensus in Port Said at the moment is that there was a power failure and the wind, which was about 30 knots, has just kind of forced it onto the bank at quite a significant angle. In your experience of working in it with the canal zone, the authorities, are they very effective at dealing with these kind of problems as they crop up or is this going to be a long one? I think we're looking at at least a good few days before they can work out how to get it free although I did see just before we started talking that they've

managed to get a bit of buoyancy out of her. Unfortunately the pilot obviously is responsible for the navigation of the canal. The Suez Canal Authority pilots are really well trained. They know the waters like the back of their hand but if there's a problem with the ship then that's beyond their control unfortunately. So they're trying to shift her with tugs at the moment and digging the bow out so fingers crossed it won't be too long but i think the delays are going to be going on for a little while for ships that are trying to head south or north what do those delays mean are we going to see shortages in the uk everything comes through there doesn't it i'd hope not i did see that the sewers canal authority have opened up an older section of the canal to try and ease the congestion

slightly, but it could potentially have huge ramifications, really. Well, thank you so much. I'm going to let you get back to your day job now. Very good luck with it. Thank you. I feel the hand of history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I've missed a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that

frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.