Sinews of War and Trade. Laleh Khalili
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of up-to-date information about the availability of commodities to be shipped, the telegraph allowed more flexibility in shipping routes and vitalised ‘ship to order’. Laying telegraph cables bound ports across the sea to one another ever more closely, while at the same time bringing the ports closer to their hinterlands.
It is no surprise then that the British attempted – and succeeded in – monopolising the most extensive communication networks between Asia and Europe. These undersea networks closely followed the shipping routes that had become such standard cartographic imaginaries. The cables’ landfall sites were often major ports and their routes traced the journeys of ships, since they were inevitably laid by ships that were themselves subject to vagaries of wind, waves, and weather. These cables also added a concrete weight to the British Empire’s claims to rule the waves and transformed the less visible pathways of its dominion into materially substantial subsea passages.
But the process was not all smooth sailing. The first set of cables laid down the length of the Red Sea were catastrophically faulty: the sea floor had not been sufficiently or effectively surveyed and, in places, the profundity of its depths meant that cables could not effectively follow safer topographic contours. In those early days, the cable-laying machinery was also crude and incapable of regularising the tension of the cable. In some places, where the cable lacked slack, it snapped. But, perhaps most importantly, the cable itself – a thin copper wire laminated with gutta-percha and swathed in hemp – proved vulnerable to the warm salty water of the Red Sea, to the naval shipworms who found the covering irresistible, and to the scabrous layer of barnacles that weighed it down and sometimes made it split. It took several tries before a line was laid from Constantinople to Alexandria and from Suez onwards to Aden and Karachi. These networks could not have been completed without lavish subsidies from the British government.25
The routes that the telegraph cables of old mapped at the bottom of the sea were, in the twentieth century, followed by copper telephone cables, and now map closely to the pathways of fibreoptic internet cables. Like undersea telegraph and telephone cables, internet cables require landing stations and amplification points (power repeaters under the sea).26 The location of such intervening points is determined as much by geopolitical calculations as they are by geographic or commercial ones. Whoever rules the seas and the coastal areas flanking it always has more access to such landing stations and the subsea cables themselves. The expanse and reach of British and later the US mastery over a great many islands in the Pacific and Caribbean transformed ports there into landing points and nodes of imperial communication networks. Where whaling ships had gone in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cable-laying vessels followed.
What is most striking about the maps that chart the routes of internet cables is the extent to which the density of cable internet corresponds to the weight and volume of shipping in a given geographic area.27 The Arabian Peninsula is flanked by a rainbow of colourfully mapped cable networks. Some are owned by consortia of national telecommunication companies along a route from Hong Kong to the ports of the Mediterranean. Others are owned by private firms headquartered in Mumbai or Hong Kong, or the famously powerful and astronomically rich Tata and Ambani families of India inter alia. One such network, the Falcon, is a subsidiary of the Ambani-owned Indian conglomerate Reliance. Falcon has Suez as one terminus and Mumbai as another, but it weaves all around the Arabian Peninsula and lands at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Hodeidah and Al Ghaydah in Yemen; Manama, Bahrain; Doha, Qatar; Dubai in the UAE; Al-Safat in Kuwait; Iraq’s Al-Faw Peninsula; Khasab and Seeb in Oman, and two ports on the Iranian shore. The cable goes ‘from port to port around the Gulf like a packet ship’.28
Cable networks are heavily subsidised just as imperial mail ships were, protected by their national states and crucial in determining the significance of the ports along their routes. I shall only mention Al Ghaydah here. A small port deep in the Mahra governorate of eastern Yemen, it has, since December 2017, become a base for the Saudi-led coalition that has waged war on Yemen since 2015. The port can accommodate dhows and other boats with smaller draughts, but not larger freighters or tankers. Yet its location on the Indian Ocean, and its hosting the landing station for Falcon, have given the port an importance incommensurate with the volume of the goods traded through its harbour.
While steam and subsea cables were crucial to the designation of sea routes, pilgrimage was pivotal in transforming Jeddah into a major Red Sea port, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. Jeddah has long been the main port of Mecca, which is a little under a hundred kilometres inland. Many pilgrims bought and sold goods in Mecca in order to secure their passage home from Arabia; others used hajj as an occasion for profit-making trade. Braudel has described the hajj pilgrimage as one of the richest trade fairs in early modern times, but others have disputed its significance, given that the lunar calendar to which the hajj conforms cannot be made to agree with the monsoon schedules, which follow a solar calendar.29
The age of steam, which unshackled travel from the regularity of the monsoon winds, made the sea routes as important as land routes for pilgrimage. The expansion of maritime pilgrimage routes, in turn, proved a lucrative source of income for European shipping businesses. As early as the 1850s, European companies based in Asia (including the British India Steam Navigation Company) were chartering ships for pilgrims. The opening of the Suez Canal accelerated the trend of Europe-based firms getting into the business.30 For the vast majority of the period after the opening of the canal, and until aeroplanes overtook ships as the primary transport for pilgrimage, European shipping firms controlled the most profitable pilgrimage routes from India, Southeast Asia, and Egypt to Jeddah. This focus on hajj transportation intensified following World War I, when the US instituted quotas on the number of migrants, thus truncating the business of transatlantic shipping. European shipping companies thereafter focused on expanding (or creating from scratch) their Asian and Middle Eastern markets.31 Their success far outstripped that of local firms, not only because most state officials regulating the process were Europeans themselves but also because these shipping firms received major mail subsidies from governments and had far easier access to finance. Because of the regularity of the hajj pilgrimage and its vast scale, the logistics of pilgrimage travel on the sea was a microcosm of the global relations and local considerations that shaped the business, including the viability and transformations of sea routes over time.
Travelling to the hajj by sea was a matter of trial and tribulation. As one eighteenth-century pilgrim from India wrote, ‘During travel on sea, one is faced with shortage of space, problems of food and drink, stores which can only be obtained at distant ports, and the fear of drowning.’32 The ships were often dangerously and claustrophobically overcrowded.33 Disasters could easily result in hundreds of passenger deaths. If the sea routes were treacherous, arrival in Jeddah was not very pleasant either, all the way through the early decades of the twentieth century. This major port which had once been controlled by the Ottomans, came under the control of the British-sponsored Sharif Hussein after World War I. After the ascendance of Ibn Saud to the throne, Jeddah was eventually side-lined in favour of Riyadh, from which the Saud family hailed. Throughout this turbulent history, the rulers of Jeddah spent just as much as necessary – and no more – on dredging the harbour. A 1923 account by a pilgrim lamented the inadequacy of the port:
Jeddah Harbour is not like other seaports. Generally, the water is very shallow all along the coast. But the port authorities keep removing the sand (by dredging) so as to make the channel deep enough for passage of boats; this allows easy loading and unloading of passengers and cargo possible, if not at all times then at least at high tide. The Turkish rulers did not consider it essential to