Moving Suez: Circulating Men through Egypt, 1860-1870

Abstract

The Suez Canal is well known as a means for circulating goods and men. Less well known is the role of the French navy and the Egyptian railroad network in transporting French personnel and materiel across Egypt in the decade before the canal's completion. In the 1860s, the French colony of Cochinchina was in its infancy and Egypt served as a vital means of circulating French naval personnel and materiel between Toulon and Saigon. The French navy is the oft-forgotten half of the ministry of navy and colonies, and its Division d'Égypte has been wholly forgotten in histories of France's role in nineteenth-century Egypt and by naval historians. The Division coordinated the movement of men and materiel over Egyptian rail lines between the Mediterranean and Red Seas in the decade before the opening of the Suez Canal. In its first four years of operation, it moved 15,000 men to Saigon, brought 10,000 men back, and shipped 4.3 million kilograms of materiel and baggage. This was the stuff of informal empire—a few men on the ground, close Franco-Egyptian coordination, but no formal occupation of the country. The Division's footprint was light: no more than a few hundred men, mostly clerks in offices scheduling ship sailings and coordinating food and fuel supplies, with others seeing men were properly transferred between ship and land. Examining the Division's papers, this paper calculates the total work done by the French Navy in moving men and materiel through Egypt, arguing that this was vital for the maintenance of French Cochinchina, then desperately losing men to disease and near-constant warfare (hence the lower number of men returning). In using naval history to enlighten colonial history and in connecting the French presences in Egypt and Cochinchina this paper is particularly innovative, as the these subjects have largely been considered separately in this period. Finally this paper briefly considers the idea of circulating large numbers of men across Egyptian rails, which France was the first European country to perform regularly. The idea of trans-isthmian transit itself transferred quickly. British officials were alarmed by the French success, but also saw in that success an argument for British use of Egyptian rails to send forces to Asia. The finance minister for India and the British military commander in chief at Bombay made both these points in 1862. Such concerns complicate the simplistic dichotomy of a French-favored Suez Canal and a British-supported Egyptian railroad system, suggesting instead that the Egyptian railroads were, as much as the Suez Canal, a site of competition between rival imperial powers, and the site of meaningful semi-imperial presences. Britain following France in using the Egyptian rail network to send troops to India in 1868.