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  • Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal
  • Toby Jones (bio)
Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. By Zachary Karabell. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Pp. 310. $27.50.

In July 1956 Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser stunned the West and energized the Arab world when he nationalized the Suez Canal, wrenching control of the passageway from the clutches of Empire and European capital. Nasser's move provoked the ire of the British and the French, who, along with the Israelis, plunged the world into a short-lived war that forever changed the Middle East. In 1967 another brief but momentous war led Nasser to disable the vital waterway temporarily by sinking ships in its channel. In Parting the Desert, Zachary Karabell suggests that these events marked the twilight of the promise embodied in the canal, which nineteenth-century Europeans believed to be "a signal to the triumph of science, the creativity of mankind, and the beginning of a wonderful future." Today the Suez Canal is marginal to global trade, its insignificance underscored by rusting hulks along its margins. With the canal's descent into insignificance at the end of the twentieth century still in sight, Karabell narrates the triumphant story of the building of the Suez Canal the century before.

In its modern guise the idea of the Suez Canal originated with Napoleon's conquest of Egypt in 1798, when scientists accompanying his expedition outlined several possible canal routes. The canal did not open for business until 1869, but its planning occupied a cast of colorful characters from the time of Napoleon's odyssey to that date. Many tried and failed to accomplish the task, including the colorful Saint-Simonians. In the end, Karabell, writes, the Suez Canal "was the triumph of the mid-nineteenth century, a joint venture between the ruler of Egypt and an ambitious Frenchman" (p. 4). The yarn he unravels is the account of a dogged entrepreneur, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and his extraordinary efforts to overcome political rivalries between London and Paris, diplomatic challenges between Istanbul and Cairo, and nature itself to bring to fruition a technological marvel. The outlines of Karabell's tale will be readily recognizable to historians of technology: the system's builder, fellow dreamers, and benefactors believed the canal to be a symbol of progress and a tool for improving human relations.

Determined to include Egyptians in his story—and he writes admirably [End Page 871] about the local laborers who toiled to build the canal—Karabell depicts a world in which European dreams of progress also inspired the ambitious Egyptian ruler Muhammad Said Pasha, who came to power in 1854. Karabell carefully details the ways in which Lesseps manipulated Said into supporting the venture by linking the building of canal with the restoration of Egyptian greatness. His depiction of Said as a willing accomplice in the project is probably true, but it downplays or ignores the fundamental issue of power—the terms by which, as well as the context in which, European and non-European actors forged unequal relationships. The building of the Suez Canal was not an exceptional episode in the long history of European expansion and domination. As usual, imperial might followed capital in subsuming the "periphery." Karabell does not ignore the realities of European greed and ambition, but his decision that the details were not critical to his triumphal narrative is a detriment to the book.

Karabell's account fails altogether on another level. Himself inspired by the uplifting powers of technology in the service of a utopian vision, he stretches Said's support for the canal into something more culturally and historically profound. He writes that East and West were on "parallel courses" in the mid-nineteenth century, noting in particular that religion was in retreat and that political Islam had not yet emerged. Universal hope, he suggests, was bound up with the canal and the dreams that fueled its construction, but were lost in the political turmoil of the twentieth century, a failure that has had disastrous consequences. Karabell is on shaky ground here. There is no evidence that ordinary Egyptians saw the canal as anything other...

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