Sinews of War and Trade. Laleh Khalili
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them again. The age of steam only reinforced the process.
Steamships changed the face of navigation and the pathways of trade. Ships were no longer bound to the seasons and winds. Even more important, the provision of fuel for oceangoing ships – first coal and, in the twentieth century, oil – spread the tentacles of empire to numerous ports around the world. The earliest steamships required vast amounts of coal and, when traversing open seas, their boilers encrusted with sedimented and corrosive salts and their inner machinery required all-too-frequent lubrication.14 But the navigability and power of steamships made them an irresistible weapon in the strategic and commercial contestation between European empires. The French colonisation of Algeria in 1830 stoked British fears that the Mediterranean was becoming a French lake in the same way the Black Sea had become a Russian lake. British imperial officials thought the consolidation of their control in South Asia could prove advantageous against France and Russia.15 But to reach South Asia profitably, more powerful, faster ships were needed.
The British East India Company’s conversion of its fleet to steamships in the 1830s marked the ascendance of steam, though it took decades before all the oceangoing ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope to India were converted. The East India Company’s turn to steam spurred the Government of Bombay to find a coaling station on the route from Bombay to Suez (and from there overland to Alexandria), resulting in the occupation of the island of Soqotra in the Indian Ocean in 1835. Soqotra’s harbours, however, did not provide good shelter, and the islands did not have the necessary infrastructure to support a coaling station. This led to the British abandoning Soqotra and bloodily conquering Aden in 1839. As a historian of the Suez Canal writes, Aden was ‘the first territorial acquisition of the Red Sea route and the first coaling station annexed to any empire’.16 The governor of Bombay, Sir Robert Grant, justified the conquest of Aden thus:
The establishment of a monthly communication by steam with the Red Sea, and the formation of a flotilla of armed steamers, renders it absolutely necessary that we should have a station of our own on the coast of Arabia, as we have in the Persian Gulf … As a coal depot, no place on the coast is so advantageous; it divides the distance between Bombay and Suez, and steamers may run into Back Bay during the night and unload at all seasons in perfect security.17
Distance and suitability as a halfway house went hand in hand with the possibilities both of trade and strategic access. Aden remained a fuelling outpost for the British Empire in the Indian Ocean even after petroleum displaced coal, until the British were driven out of Aden in 1967 by the anticolonial struggles there.
By the 1840s, the British Admiralty had also begun converting its naval vessels to steam, further intensifying the need for imperial coal depots. Between 1850 and 1869 alone, the net tonnage of British goods transported by steamships had increased from 168,474 to 948,367.18 Steamship technologies and imperial expansion were mutually reinforcing. The imperial steamships trading around, policing, and fighting upon the Indian Ocean required frequent and high-volume replenishment of their fuel coal. This, in turn, led to the conquest of new colonial beachheads along trade routes. These strategic outposts themselves generated additional trade, required a great deal more administrative information and communication, and necessitated more capital investment, more intensive exploitation of labour, and ever-expanding knowledge and intelligence about local conditions. In his account of the age of coal, On Barak explains the prevalence of British coal by the fact that products mined in Wales or Northern England could be exported to the colonies in ships that would otherwise have been in ballast (or not carrying cargo). The vast trade in British coal overseas encouraged industrialisation at home, while the rise of mass democracy in Europe resulting from the materialities of coal mining was accompanied by the projection of authoritarian power over colonies overseas.19
British control over much of the coastal areas in West, South, and East Africa translated into British supremacy over the Cape route to India. Britain also controlled the coal supplies, since ‘coal from Bengal was being used in steamers in the 1830s, from Borneo in the 1840s, and from Natal in the 1860s. Though not as good as Welsh coal, they gave Britain a near-monopoly of the world’s steamer coal supplies’.20 The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made Britain’s imperial coaling stations – and the routes that were strung between them – still more significant to Britain’s dominion over the oceans. Even as the British feared the French mastery in the Mediterranean and controlling shares in the Suez Canal, British primacy over the sea routes of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Cape were never in doubt. And that was owed to coal.
But steam was not the only technology that reinforced the mapping of routes and the importance of ports as landing stations.
‘The Seas Inlaid with Eloquent, Gentle Wires’ 21
The handsomely moustachioed Syrian American writer Ameen Rihani was an ardent supporter of Arab reform and an observer of the region. A 1931 review in The Geographical Journal lamented his ‘malevolence towards British policy and British officials’ in the Arab world, just as they commended the ‘charming’ and ‘vivid and attractive’ ethnographic accounts of ‘mysterious Arabia’. Rihani visited the Arabian Peninsula in the 1920s and became friendly with Abdulaziz ibn Saud, who shortly thereafter became the king of Arabia. In his travels in the Peninsula, Rihani was particularly impressed with Aden Colony, which was a central hub in the global network of colonial communication that ran on the ‘modern magic’ of the telegraph:
There are certainly bigger telegraph offices in the world than this of Aden, but they are not more important. Abolish the colony on that height, silence the hundred instruments which buzz and click night and day, cut the cable which connects the Orient and the antipodes with Europe and America, and lo, the oceans will be plunged again in gloom, distance will revert to its ancient tyranny, and the continents will become insular with nothing to connect them but steam and the sail. That colony of telegraph operators, therefore, is one of the living centres of the intelligence and progress of the world.22
Before the advent of the telegraph and for a long time after, packet-ships carrying postal cargo were necessary for the transmission of information across the oceans. Merchant vessels and specialised ships carried the post from Europe to Asia and back; postal contracts given by governments were the best conduit for state subsidies to shipping companies. Then telegraphic communication came about. The first telegraph lines were laid across the Atlantic, but the next two were planted between France and Algeria and between Britain and India. The technology was crucial to the control of the colonies. Historian Douglas Farnie goes so far as to argue that in India, communication by cable was more pivotal to the maintenance of British economic and political power than railways or steamships because it stitched the internal Indian information-gathering systems onto overseas networks and thus centralised the state’s ability to collect strategic intelligence and expanded its capacity to project state power.23 Telegraph consolidated British control over the interiors of the places they colonised in the nineteenth century. They also facilitated the creation of world markets by rapidly transmitting commodity prices and market information from port to port.24 The telegraph also directly affected the shape of the shipping market, encouraging tramp shipping (shipping between ports without a fixed schedule or itinerary) over established charters or routes: