Inventing space in the age of Empire: planning experiments and achievements along Suez Canal in Egypt (1859–1956)

Frémaux, Céline; Volait, Mercédès

doi:10.1080/02665430902734350

Cited by 4 publications

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“…These scholars acknowledge that the Canal cities brought multiple actors together into the city‐building process (Crosnier‐Lecomte et al., 2006, p. 15; Frémaux, 2011, pp. 156–73; Frémaux & Volait, 2009, p. 260). However, they tend to approach these locales as yet other places “where Europeans built many notable buildings” (Frémaux, 2011, p. 157).…”

Section: The Suez Canal As a Void Backdrop For Technology Business And Architecture Historiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suez: A hollow canal in need of peopling. Currents and stoppages in the historiography, 1859–1956

Carminati

2021

History Compass

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Since its excavation took off in 1859 in Ottoman‐Egyptian territory, the Suez Canal has conveyed much more than armies or cargoes. This essay dives into the currents and stoppages in the historiography of the Suez Canal and its brand‐new cities between 1859, when the project began, and 1956, when the Egyptian government nationalized this waterway. Writings on the 19th and early 20th‐century history of the Suez Canal have followed a course of their own, quite divergent from mainstream historical scholarship on modern Egypt. The Suez Canal has funneled political aspirations ranging from the colonial to the semicolonial and the nationalist, ideas on its built environment, utopias about a cosmopolitan society, and experiences of actual social dystopias. This essay suggests that scholars need to pay attention to labor and migration in order to people the history of the Suez Canal and its surrounding region, for this waterway not to remain the hollow ditch it has been so far in most of its pre‐1956 historiography.

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