As History Flows by

Two young men stare at the water flowing by. An only apparently bucolic scene: right away, cranes and heavy equipment peer out in the background. A rusty boat proceeds falteringly in the stream. The waterway that opens up in front of the two bystanders is the Suez Canal, inaugurated in 1869 with great pomp and circumstance. The shore on which they stand belongs to the municipality of Port Said, founded in 1859 as a worksite for the laborers who had gathered on the northern Egyptian shore to partake in the digging and earn their bread.

The history of Port Said is ironic. At first, a great flush of optimism invested the brand-new city. “It projected faith in the future,” some declared. It was bound to become the center of human solidarity, others proclaimed. Some swore that its prosperity was assured and that it was a commercial city called upon a great destiny. Others predicted that it would rival the main commercial cities of the Mediterranean and that it would undermine Alexandria’s trade. It should not be forgotten, someone wrote, that Port Said was “destined to become a big city of trade with a humongous circulation and high-rising buildings. And yet, tremulous doubts crept in, or perhaps were always there. Those who had flocked to the isthmus were said to have had their “extravagant hope for profit” frustrated, their enthusiasm dissipated, and their weariness made acute by the imposed solitude. Predictably, the city’s beginnings witnessed hard times and delays in the works. Storms ravaged the budding township and destroyed the ships that were its only source of provisions. Everything had to be rebuilt over and over again, often with materials that were not readily available.

A motley crew of mobile individuals passed by, moved to, and ultimately contributed in shaping Port Said: not just Egyptian officials, Suez Canal Company representatives, and European consuls, but also ordinary folks migrating from the rest of Egypt and from other Mediterranean shores. They comprised, in their midst, entrepreneurs, coal-heavers, inn-keepers, missionaries, and prostitutes. Moving away from the available diplomatic or business histories, my research digs out of the archives the histories of every-day life in this port-city. It is through mundane details that I highlight the historical role played by supposedly marginal individuals in a provincial town. I thus find importance in the trivial. And I value the life-stories of ordinary individuals, such as these two men just killing time one late afternoon, just as well as the more sweeping history of the background against which they stand out.

Commentary on Rachel Tanur's Works: GW Bridge at Sunset

“There is the great, brown, slow­moving strandless river of Everything, and then there is its tiny flotsam that has ended up in the record office you are at work in” (C. Steedman 2002). Social scientists work with the notes, the words, the traces people leave behind. Theirs is a huge responsibility, simultaneously heavy as the books they carry around and microscopic when transformed in words on a white page. Their fieldwork is a daily exercise in balance: bearing the weight of huge amounts of data, juggling different types of sources, reaching out to find irretrievable information, struggling not to drown in the whirlpools of Everything. And yet, the flotsam still begs for the attention it duly deserves. The juxtaposition of infrastructure and nature captured by Rachel Tanur’s lens evokes two different thoughts. First, it symbolizes the challenges faced by social scientists in their fieldwork that I have just described. Secondly, it sets up the same contrast that runs through my own work on the history of the Suez Canal and of the urban projects that rose along its course. In the mid-19th century, narratives emphasizing the isthmus of Suez as inhospitable and gloomy, as a desert inhabited only by pelicans and devoid of drinking water, grass, or even wood, were rife. Such narratives came to attribute to the Canal’s venture nothing short of miraculous characteristics. However, these narratives had other, perhaps unintended, consequences. When cities are described as if rising by magic from arid and swampy sites, in fact, the public is persuaded to no longer doubt the success of the urban planners that conceived them. It becomes arduous to criticize an enterprise when its realization is endowed with noble intents and useful purposes. In the Suez case, European men, goods, and technology thus appear as the sole agents for the prodigious realization of the dream of the French “father” of the Canal, De Lesseps. The migrants and laborers who actually performed the hard toil are left out of the picture.