Suez a chokepoint of history
In our digital age, we can forget how fragile – and analog – the interconnected networks threading our world can be. But then there are moments when a faulty cog spins loose, the gears moving the heaving apparatus of the global economy shudder and we realise how suddenly things can go awry.
That’s what happened in the Suez Canal, where a container ship the size of a skyscraper was marooned. It had choked off a narrow artery that sees the passage of about a tenth of all global shipping. The ships that were blocked by the Ever Given are carrying everything from oil and cement to consumer goods and live animals.
The ‘‘latest blockage highlights the risks faced by the shipping industry as more and more vessels transit maritime choke points including the Suez, Panama Canal, the Strait of Hormuz and Southeast Asia’s Malacca Strait,’’ reported Bloomberg News.
It’s also a reminder of the deep and vital history of the canal. Long before the modern canal’s construction in the 19th century, the area where it now runs was ripe for transcontinental crossing. Fernand Braudel, the great French historian of the Mediterranean, observed how, thousands of years ago, ‘‘the lowlying isthmus of the Suez . . . (had) several times been flooded by the sea, turning Africa into an island.’’
In antiquity, potentates saw the utility of building a maritime link for their oared triremes to move from the Mediterranean, or at least the Nile River, to the Red Sea. The first was possibly the Egyptian pharaoh Necho II – identified as Necos by the ancient Greek chronicler Herodotus – who started a massive canalbuilding project in about the late 7th century B.C. ‘‘In the digging of this canal, Necos lost 120,000 Egyptians,’’ wrote Herodotus, who explained that ‘‘Necos was stopped by the opposition of an oracle – to wit, that he was doing work for the barbarian who would come after him.’’
Other ‘‘barbarians’’ would indeed come and apparently finish the work, including the Persian emperor Darius I and later Ptolemy from the line of Macedonian kings installed after the death of Alexander the Great. But the Red Sea receded in the centuries thereafter and the ancient canal, clogged with silt, faded into the desert. From mediaeval times to the end of the 18th century, schemers, from Arab rulers to Venetian traders to Ottoman pashas, contemplated or even tried to launch new canal projects, but their attempts all foundered.
The idea of the modern Suez Canal picked up steam after Napoleon Bonaparte’s quixotic invasion of Egypt in 1798. Dreaming of constructing a quick passage to India, the French general dispatched a team of surveyors to chart the course of a canal. But they incorrectly concluded that the latter was 10m higher than the former (their elevations are actually relatively similar) and that a canal would risk catastrophic flooding in the Nile Delta.
Decades later, the enterprising former French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps secured financing from the French government and the permission of the Ottoman viceroyalty in Egypt for his Suez Canal Company to begin construction of what would become the Suez Canal in 1859. The initial years involved a huge human undertaking, as workers removed and dredged many millions of cubic feet of earth. By one account, more than a million Egyptian peasants were forced into the project and tens of thousands perished, contracting diseases like cholera in circumstances likened to slave labour.
Conditions improved after local authorities intervened and heavy industrial equipment was introduced. In 1869, the canal was launched in a grand ceremony hosted by the Ottoman Khedive Ismail Pasha.
Six years later, with Ottoman Egypt saddled with debt, Ismail would sell off his shares in the Suez Canal Company to the British government, which had gone from being sceptics of the project to its greatest beneficiaries. The opening of the canal led to the heyday of European empires in Asia and Africa: Steam-powered warships and cargo vessels were able to skip the lengthy journey around the Cape of Good Hope.
The cultivation of oil fields along the Persian Gulf in the early 20th century only underscored the strategic vitality of the canal for European powers. It’s fitting, then, that the canal’s dramatic closing in 1956 is seen now as one of the death rattles of that age of colonialism.
The charismatic nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser opted to nationalise the Suez Canal Company’s holdings and Egyptian troops seized its facilities.
That prompted an invasion by a joint expedition of British, French and Israeli forces in a bid to overthrow Nasser. But it turned into a humiliating debacle, with the United States withholding support and global public opinion turning against the British and their allies.
For others, like the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis – who happened to have empty tankers languishing in Saudi ports just as the crisis hit, and then charged huge rates as they circumnavigated Africa with oil for the West – it cemented a fortune. The canal was reopened in 1957 but would be shuttered once more a decade later after the Arab-Israeli War. That closure lasted eight years. In 1975, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat heralded the resumption of shipping activities in the canal by releasing a flock of doves.