Ottoman History Podcast - Life and Labor on the Suez Canal

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

with Lucia Carminati hosted by Susanna Ferguson | The Suez Canal was one of the largest infrastructure projects in the late Ottoman world. Built to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the canal construction's lasted from 1858-1869 and mobilized tens of thousands of workers from across Egypt and the broader Mediterreanan. Those workers' lives and labor transformed the canal zone and Egypt at large, and their stories, travels, pleasures, and challenges reveal the networks that knit the late-nineteenth century Mediterranean together from below.   « Click for More »

The Suez Canal is a vast waterway that connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea through the Isthmus of Suez. It stretches from Port Said in the north to the city of Suez in the south, and it offers ships an easier way to get from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean without having to pass all the way around the southern tip of Africa, the Cape of Good Hope. It shortened the shipping time from India to London by over 5,000 miles, and in 2022, over 20,000 vessels passed through the canal. That's about 55 a day. I'm Susie Ferguson, and you're listening to the Ottoman History Podcast.

There's a story about Suez that we think we know. How French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps created one of the great infrastructure projects of the late 19th century world, and changed the pathways of global commerce and global capital. But today, we'll hear a different kind of story about the men and women who moved or were forced to move to the Canal Zone starting in the 1860s. Their labor, their ties to each other and their homelands and the way they spent their time made the Canal Zone just as much as or even more than the grand dreams of men like Ferdinand de Lesseps. Our guest today is Dr. Lucia Carminati,

associate professor of history at the university of Oslo and the author of a new book just out from university of California press called seeking bread and fortune in Port Said labor migration and the making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906. Lucia, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Susie. It's wonderful to be here with you and everyone. So I thought we could start our discussion by asking you to introduce the workers whose life and work on the Canal Zone is really at the heart of the book. and work on the canal zone is really at the heart of the book. So you write at one point that it was said that at any given time, up to 20,000 workers were on their way to the canal zone, 20,000 were working there, and 20,000 were on their way home. I think this really gives us a sense of the kind

of scale of human infrastructure that was required to build the canal. So who were these workers? And where were they coming from? Yeah, and to add to those numbers you've mentioned, I want to remind an observation that Gamal Abdel Nasser himself uttered in July 26 of 1956, when he argued that up to 120,000 workers had died in the undertaking of the Suez Canal. But the reason why I'm mentioning this number is not because we need to take these figures for granted. It's just an indication of the sheer volume, but also it's an indication of how politicized numbers would become, especially later in the 20th century. So my book does not really make an effort to pin down exact numbers, but it does try to sort of create a picture of how many

and from how multiple, how many different places these workers came. Not only from the rest of Egypt, that's where at first most Egyptian forced workers were recruited, both southern provinces and the delta provinces. But also we see how the Suez Canal Company actually reached to other parts of the Ottoman Empire trying to recruit, for example, Syrian workers, especially Christian Syrian workers who could easily replace Muslims during the Ramadan fasting period. But the recruiting efforts went even beyond the southern Mediterranean coast and attracted people from all over Europe, not just southern

Europe, but we see, I found in the archives, traces of Austrian-Hungarian immigrants, for example, to Egypt, as well as other locations further up in the hearts of the European sort of geographic entity. So I'm trying to sort of tackle this narrative that we can mostly find in the available histories of the Suez Canal, according to which it's the Suez Canal that made this region, that created these cities, without really mentioning the flesh and blood people who inhabited these places and actually excavated the ground that made the canal possible. So it's notoriously difficult to track

down the kind of nitty gritty details of the lives and experiences of working people. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the kinds of sources that you used to do this work. And if there are ones that particularly stick out to you as sort of critical to the kinds of arguments you were able to make in the book. Well, out of the many different kinds of sources that I tried to piece together to sort of create this choral picture of life on the Suez Canal worksites, taken from several different countries and several different archives,

and even different types of archives. I think that the letters that migrants themselves wrote, where the sources mostly struck me in a way, because of how emotional often the contents of these sources could be. Migrants were describing the suffering, they were describing how their plans went awry when they found themselves staying in the isthmus much longer than planned, when they expressed, for example, their longing for their home, for their family, how they felt abandoned by their families even.

So these, of course, are letters that got stuck in the archives, that were never actually sent, that were never actually reaching their destinations. So in a way, it's a paradoxical kind of source that remained silent in history, but it's so evocative for the historian today. I still sort of value them as very evocative and sort of as something that really gives a picture of how life could be on the work sites, notwithstanding the narratives of technological triumph or diplomatic victory that have prevailed later on in especially 20th century historiography. What do we learn from the letters and the other kinds of sources that you work with about what it was like to work on the canal? I mean, what was the work like? What were the conditions of work? What did people find, you know, most onerous? What did people find, you know, most onerous? How did people engage the, how they were trying to protect themselves from the heat,

or how they were trying to sleep at night. The very first years of the Suez Canal excavation, of course, saw some kind of logistical effort on the part of the Suez Canal Company that had to house and protect these workers, but was often also failing to do so. So there were not shelters, there were not enough shelters for everyone. When a cholera outbreak happened in 1865, there were no sufficient measures in place. So we see how workers were still attracted to the Swiss con work sites because of of gain, either real or imagined. But at first, life was really, really hard.

And it was not just a male struggle. We see how women were present on the Swiss column worksites since the very early beginning of the enterprise, of the undertaking. of the enterprise, of the undertaking. And what the book also tries to show is that there was excavation work proper. So different kinds of workers were taking care of different tasks, mainly related to earth removal away from the planned trajectory of the canal. But then the presence of so many people also engendered different kinds of works and different sort of required different services to be in place. And so we see how hotels

and taverns were in place and often managed by women, for example, who were also taking care of laundry work or domestic service. So other kinds of professions were also present on the Suez Canal worksites, going beyond the sheer task of removing dirt from the ground. So I'm curious, you have a situation with a very heterogeneous workforce coming to sort of take up root in the Suez Canal zone. We've got folks from Italy, from Austria, from Syria, and of course from Egypt itself. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit

about how the Suez Canal Company and the people who are in charge tried to manage labor on the canal zone, and particularly how Egyptians fit in in comparison to other groups. Yeah, there's a story that I'm particularly fond of, which is the story of an Egyptian doctor in the hire of the Swiss Canal Company, and his presence is visible in the archives. As many details as I decided to include, unfortunately, it doesn't really give us a

full picture of this man's life. But I think it's important to sort of point out how, on the one hand, the company claimed that each race, each nationality, was particularly apt at carrying out a certain task. And, of course, there was a racially informed and a sort of a value-laden hierarchy of people on the Swiss-Columbian worksites, as I try to show. But then at the same time, I think it's also worth highlighting how the task of earth removal, for example, included many different individuals who had different nationalities. And then at the same time, as I mentioned, doctors could be French, but there could be Egyptian doctors as well.

doctors could be French, but there could be Egyptian doctors as well. So one thing is the narrative of national and racial homogeneity that we find in the sources. But then on the other hand, there was a reality of mixing that was sort of also very much interesting and worth highlighting. also very much interesting and worth highlighting. And in this regard, I would love to mention the fact that there are traces of a pidgin, of a specific language that was spoken on the Swiss-Canadian worksites. There was a mix of Arabic, of Italian, of other sort of technical terms that were being used by Mediterranean sailors at the time. But this unique language was associated through the Suez Canal worksites. And what I tried to hypothesize is that even if it's hard to see instances of actual cooperation and solidarity among workers of different nationalities or of different sort of racial

belongings. I think that the existence of a mixed language actually shows how workers were interacting on the Swiss-Columbian worksites, were rubbing shoulders every day and sort of looking at one another or at the very least trying to find ways to communicate with one another. So this is a work site where at once we have elites, company officials, you know, Ottoman and Egyptian statesmen of various kinds making arguments about racial hierarchies of labor, right? That this kind of person is suited to do this kind of work.

But then when you actually dig down into the kind of heterogeneous historical record of this experience, what you find is something much less ordered, much more marked by kind of mixing and sort of surprising cross-pollinations, it sounds like. Yeah, correct. That's exactly what I found to be the most exciting sort of discovery when doing this work. So another thing that the book really asks us to do is to rethink some of the sort of central categories that we use when we're thinking about something like labor, right? And this is the difference between sort of free labor and coerced labor. And one of the things that I think the story of the canal can really help us to see is

how these two categories might not actually be as binary or as opposed as we might initially believe. Could you talk a little bit more about how you see those categories of free labor and coerced labor in the canal zone? This was also something challenging when writing the book, because on the one hand, the least thing I wanted was to deny the actual circumstances, the actual challenges of forced laborers and what it meant for Egyptian workers to be drafted against their volition and how hard it worth what the Swiss-Canada worksites showed is that there was definitely an overlap of different labor regimes. At the very same time, there were different labor arrangements that coexisted on the worksites. So especially between 1861 and 1864, there were Egyptian forced laborers on the worksites. 1864, there were Egyptian forced laborers on the worksites, we also see so-called free and so-called Arab workers. And the reason why I'm using sort of these bracketed labels is that it's really hard

at this time to actually pin down what Arab actually meant. But the sources mention free Arab workers as well as free European immigrant workers. So at the very same time, we see different categories of workers, again, working side by side, often employed in the very same tasks. interesting to point out is that the Swiss-Canada worksites are helpful to understand how transitions from one labor regime to another, for example, in and out of forced labor, is also really hard to track down. So the official dates for the Courvet, the forced labor system on the Swiss-Canada worksites, are 1861 as the beginning of this system and 1864 as the end of this forced labor system on the Swiss-Columbian worksites are 1861 as the beginning of this system and 1864 as the end of this forced labor system. But what sources reveal is that even before 1861, there were instances of forced labor

and how even after 1864, sort of the transition was a little bit more muddled and gradual. was a little bit more muddled and gradual. So the book does describe how life circumstances and work circumstances for forced laborers were particularly dire. And also the book connects the end of forced labor with heightened or stronger recruiting efforts abroad, internationally, to attract the labor force that the canal still needed. But at the same time, it tries not to set up sort of two strong benchmarks when talking about different labor regimes. And by putting these labor regimes together in the space of

the canal zone, right, and in the actual sort of experiences of workers in the canal zone, you also pose the question of sort of like, what did it mean to come so-called freely to work in the canal zone from a place like Algeria or Syria or Southern Italy in the 1860s, right? And helps us to sort of think about the different layers of kinds of coercion that are at stake in the production of, you know, a major infrastructural development like this one. Thank you very much, Susie, for this question.

And that's absolutely also one of the goals of the book, problematizing a little bit what we think of in terms of free migration. What does it actually mean in the end of the day to migrate freely if you're sort of pushed out because of poverty or because of environmental reasons. Or there's a vast array of reasons for migrating that I also try to embrace in the book to show how there could be gradients and nuances in pushing people to decide to migrate or to adopt this life choice.

So in terms of migration history, what the book also tries to contribute to is by combining different scales of analysis and embracing both the individual life choices and how complicated they could be with the scale of broader changes or more sort of encompassing changes on the national and the transnational level. And how, basically, how we cannot really keep these two separate at all. This was one of the goals as well as one of the challenges in writing this book, how to make sense of a myriad of different life choices with changes happening at the national or imperial level. I also just think, you know, it's really interesting in the sort of realm of migration history to think about a book that puts migration to Egypt rather than migration from Egypt or the

rest of the region to, say, Europe or the United States at the center, and to kind of recast a place like Port Said as a place forged by in-migration, as well as at different points in its history, you know, as a place where people left from. And to reimagine a place like Egypt in the 1860s, and particularly Port Said, as a place where people were coming to, as you say in your title, to seek bread and fortune. as a place where people were coming to, as you say in your title, to seek bread and fortune. And I think this is a really nice companion to books that really focus on sort of the out-migration of folks from the Arab world to other places, you know, seeking economic opportunity. So it reminds us that historically, this process has not been unidirectional from the Middle

East to Europe or the United States, and that it's been shaped in many ways by infrastructure, by capital, and that it's been shaped in many ways by infrastructure, by capital, and also by states. And in this case, we have state and non-state actors, including the Egyptian state, obviously the Ottoman imperial framework, and then also the Suez Canal Company itself, shaping how labor is moving to this region. Yeah, you've highlighted both the regional focus of the book and the transnational focus of the book. And I think that the coexistence of these two can help us rethink the national in a way. Because by focusing on the Suez Canal region, I can show how this became a sort of a relatively independent circuit of mobility for people who would leave Port Said and go to Ismaili and then leave Ismaili and go to Suez to maybe seek out different job opportunities or for many different reasons. At the same time,

this new circuit of mobility centered on the Suez Canal became connected to Cairo and Alexandria and sort of refashioned internal connections to Egypt in a different way. But then at the same time, by looking at, for example, the Syrian Ottoman province from the Suez Canal region, I can show how these different areas within the Ottoman Empire were actually connected by human mobility in different directions. And so I think that by incorporating this regional focus, as well as this transnational focus, we can actually rethink what Egyptian boundaries

meant, how they came to be. And by rethinking these connections, we can also maybe de-center Egyptian historiography and de-center what the national histories of Egypt should look like. So we've talked a little bit about how the migration to the Suez region shaped these transnational flows and Mediterranean circuits. And I'm curious if we could dig a bit more into this category or idea of migrants as a group, or even labor migration as a coherent category. Because one of the things I think a fine-grained social history like this book shows us is that it becomes difficult to see migrants as some kind of homogenous group that we can talk about in the abstract. So I wonder if you could speak a bit about how the

book sort of helps us to think against this sort of category, homogenous category of migrants, and asks us to attend to relations of power within that group as well. Another contribution to migration history that the book tries to bring to discussion is the idea that, yes, this was a time of heightened mobility, of migration, migratory choices and opportunities. But at the same time, what Port Said and the Suez Canal project witness is the mobility of many different kinds of people who had unequal kinds of access to this mobility. So as I've mentioned, there were forced workers who did move against their will. There were people who were perhaps actively choosing to leave home,

and yet others who were pushed out for a number of reasons. What the Suez Canal Society became was really the embodiment of this inequality that was first and foremost expressed in these different kinds of movement, different kinds of access to mobility, that later also translated into the urban space itself. So different immigrant groups came to inhabit different parts of the city. And to give a more concrete example, these different parts of the city had drastically uneven kinds of infrastructure, for example, something that my next research will delve more into.

So, for example, things may have looked really different for different workers who were toiling together at the same worksite. For example, in 1861 at a worksite called Al-Firdan, the sources reveal how a few workers who were presumably Egyptian or Arab workers, they resented the ill treatment, which is a wonderful example of one of the many different strategies that workers could implement to protest work conditions. And in particular, we know that this group of workers had been instigated by two brothers who were particularly influential with them. The problem, though, is that the fugitives, who, again, because it was 1861 and because they were Egyptian, were forced workers. They were apprehended and brought back to the work sites, presumably against their will. But to add insult to injury, what happened is that the Italian, Spanish and Arab workers toiling on the same site.

So, again, we see them working together. These other workers declared that these indigenous fellah workers, so forced laborers, forced Egyptian laborers, had never lacked anything and had only received good treatment. So in the end of the day, they tried to escape. They were brought back. They had to endure the insults of working next to these other workers who had not shown solidarity. And the French foreman was eventually exonerated from any accusations of any wrongdoing. any accusations of any wrongdoing. Yeah, I think that example really sums up what you're talking about in terms of not only the unequal access to migration, but also the unequal sort of effects of that once they reach the worksite. So even as they entered this heterogeneous and

sort of full of potential in some ways world of Port Said, people really struggled to stay in touch with the people that they had left behind, right? So they did not come to this place reborn. They came with all of the ties and all the responsibilities that they had had at home or in their previous place of life and work. So could you talk a little bit about how people in the Canal Zone and in Port Said struggled to maintain those ties, right? How they sort of related to the people that they had left behind, people in places that they had left behind. Through some of the sources that got stuck in the consular mesh, in the consular archives, and that never really reached their intended recipients, and that never really reached their intended recipients,

we see glimpses of what both migrant life looked like, but also what life looked like on the shores from which these migrants had departed. And often it's women, it's wives who had been left behind, who write to their mobile spouses asking for money, for example, or expressing, venting their frustration and not making their ends meet. And when these women are not writing to their husbands, there are traces of women protesting with authorities so that authorities can actually help them ferret out their husbands and forcing them to actually send money home.

There's also family members. So it's not just women or sort of abandoned women who write. It's also family members who try to discover the whereabouts of the migrants who had left. Often we do not find the answers to these quests, but it's a very important historical fact. What's very meaningful is to see how people, both back home and in their new homes, were actually trying to actively maintain those links

by either writing, keeping in touch, or sending money, or failing to do so, for example. And there's evidence of migrant networks and how they operate it to actually, for example, make sure that these letters reach their destinations. So we've talked a little bit about how people work to maintain or to negotiate ties with the places that they came from. And I'm hoping to learn a little bit more about what their lives were like on the canal zone itself. So beyond the domains of labor and work that we've already talked a lot about. How did people's identities and communities shift or take new shape in the canal zone? These questions about sort of identity and change in a migrant's life have always informed my research.

And unfortunately, I don't think I've come up with good answers. But what I've tried to do was to look at how people not only worked, but also spent their free time. at how people not only worked, but also spent their free time. And I think that by studying the ways in which people had fun and mingled with one another, maybe we can get at some of these answers. A few pastimes in the Suez Canal region and in Port Saidim in particular had to do with the specific Isthmus environment. And so I can mention hunting and fishing and beach going, for example. Other pastimes instead were very much catering to the national identity of migrants, which often was also sort of romanticized and created and recreated on the spot through, for example, newspapers that

carefully targeted certain communities, through national or religious celebrations and days of festivities. So these were pastimes that attracted people along national lines. But what I also tried to talk about is entertainment venues, of which there was an array of different kinds. And I could mention gambling houses, for example, or brothels or small diving bars or larger venues where reading or gambling took place. And what I tried to show is that these entertainment venues, where alcohol was consumed in large quantities, often catered to many different kinds of people, notwithstanding their national belonging or religious belonging. So these were really more open venues for people to mix and mingle together. However, the very same consumption of alcohol often ended up fueling tensions and clashes could erupt where national identities would be claimed or reclaimed in antagonistic fashion. But I think that the value in showing that there were different entertainment options for workers opens up to the multiplicity of the ways in which

they felt or the loyalties that they cultivated. I just, for our listeners' benefit, I want to mention a detail that really stuck out to me from the book, whereas you note that in 1867 in Port Said, with a population of around 8,000 people, consumed 100 hectoliters of wine every day, not including fine wines and liquors. So we're talking about a place where, while it is a space of hard work, much of it coerced in one way or another, it is also a space where people are doing all of the other things that make up a human life. Labor was only one part, albeit a large part, of a very full human life in the canal zone. Do we know anything about what kind of time workers had for these pastimes? There are some indications on the number of hours in which different kinds of workers had to toil.

But you have to consider that alongside the rightfully employed individuals, there was also a population of others who were maybe intermittently employed or unemployed altogether or just playing around and searching for other opportunities in the urban space. So labor is really one part of the story here. It's a foundational one. It's work opportunities that mostly drove people to these places. But then there was much else going on. And that's what the title actually tries to capture. So people were seeking bread. They were seeking, but they were also seeking fortune in many different other ways. So it was because of a sort of economic opportunity. But economic opportunity doesn't really tell the full story of this chapter of Egyptian as well as Mediterranean and migration history. So work on the canal zone, or at least on the canal project itself,

concludes in 1869. The canal is dug, the great shortcut has been created. What happens next? What happens to all of the workers who had come to work in places like Port Said? And how did migrants adjust? 1869 remains a meaningful benchmark in my work, even if I try to overcome this and other temporal benchmarks in many different ways and try to show how continuities and ruptures may have been different from the ones we usually think of. But 1869 remains meaningful, even if, I think, a different history of 1869 can be written. A history that is much less festive and much less triumphant. So 1869 in this book is not the moment in which

the majestic canal of Ferdinand de Lesseps' brainchild is finally inaugurated. But 1869 is a sad moment when thousands lose their jobs and are left stranded, basically, not knowing what to do with themselves. Some of them will leave again. Some of those who leave will actually go to other places, to other destinations, which to me is interesting in plugging Egypt into more global migratory routes. But some of these former workers, former Kana'a company workers, they actually stay in Port Said, which again gives us an interesting idea of what later Egyptian society would look like. It's an important facet in the modern history of Egypt to show how many of these newcomers or foreigners, however we want to call them, immigrants, actually decided to stay on.

So what were the industries or the things that kept people going in Port Said after the completion of the canal? What kinds of work were people able to find in the years after 1869? Some maintenance over the canal would still employ workers. over the canal would still employ workers. So the Suez Canal company did not altogether cease to seek or to need manpower. But definitely the numbers had changed. But entertainment could have been a big draw and saw the employment of many people

because with the opening of the Suez Canal, now Port Said sort of metamorphosed from worksite to global stop or stop in global trajectories. And with later developments in shipping technologies, we see how ships needed to stop in Port Said to recall, to replenish their coal. So in some ways, the things that had been at the margins of laboring life in Port Said actually came to the center. That it could have been perhaps, you know, the bars and the taverns and the coffee houses or whatnot that really kind of took on more life after 1869. Yes, absolutely.

but not that really kind of took on more life after 1869. Yes, absolutely. You mentioned in the book that in many histories of Egypt, if Port Said makes any appearance at all, it's in 1882, which is the year of the British occupation of Egypt after the revolt of Army Colonel Ahmad Ordabi against the sort of ruling cadre of Egyptian elites and, you know, the British step in to preserve their interests and continue then to occupy Egypt until 1922. I wanted to ask you the story that you've told about the emergence of Port Said as an urban

space in the Canal Zone. What are the connections between that history and the moment of 1882? So from an infrastructural standpoint, the existence, the sheer existence of Port Said, of course, enabled the British army to start its occupation of the country exactly via these points on the northern shore. In terms of what the prior history of urban mixing and immigration, in terms of what the connection of that prior history to 1882, that's a good question. I haven't really thought about what potential connection could there be. But what I can say is that in terms of Egyptian national history, Port Said maintains a legacy of ambiguous loyalty. The way in which Port Said is seen from the traditional center of Egyptian power is that of an ambiguous sort of place within the Egyptian territory.

within the Egyptian territory. And this sort of is maintained even later, even beyond the final benchmark of the book. So we see how throughout the 20th century, Port Said, there are moments in Port Said's history where these sort of suspicions of mixed loyalty, this ambiguity between belonging and foreignness are maintained. So we see, for example, how in 1967, Israel occupied the Sinai and Port Said and many other canal cities had to be evacuated, its population stranded for years. And even in recent history, Port Said figures preeminently, but again, with a sort of an ambiguous kind of role, taking on an ambiguous kind of role.

Today's conversation casts the history of Suez in a less familiar light. What might first have appeared as a story of technological progress, of great men drawing lines on the map and finding ingenious ways for ships to carry cargo from the Indian Ocean to the North Atlantic, now appears to be something more ambivalent and complex. We heard today about the many men and women from Egypt and across the Mediterranean who lived and worked in the Canal Zone, and whose lives and deaths were the cost of its success. We learned about where they came from, the work they did, and the difficulties they

had maintaining ties with home. We also heard, however, about the communities they made, the things they enjoyed, and the solidarities they built across lines of race and nation. In the end, what we can see is a deeply human history of how the Canal Zone was made by people on the move. For our listeners who'd like to find out more, there will be, as always, a bibliography on our website, www.adamnhistorypodcast.com, where you can stay in touch with fellow listeners and keep track of new episodes. That's all for this episode. Until next time, take care.