The Suez Canal and Its Global Image

This paper will examine the surveying, dredging and construction of the Suez Canal as a key event in the history of global visual culture. The creation of the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, is typically considered through the prism of its self-evident political and economic aspects and not for the ways in which its impacted the broader geopolitical understanding of an interconnected world system through images, maps and the canal’s architectural program. Lithographs, photographs, postcards, and images reproduced in newspapers and volumes in dozens of languages, not only served to visually link Europe and the Mediterranean with the Indian Ocean world, it also served to define and divide distinct metageographic boundaries, most prominently that between Asia and Africa, a boundary which remains to this day. Drawing upon primary sources stemming from the canal’s construction and through the analysis of numerous buildings and visual materials, this paper will make the provocative argument that it was infrastructure, not world exhibitions, that could most effectively catalyze an emergent “world image” in the nineteenth century.

The paper will subsequently evaluate this “world image” in the imperial, colonial and semi-colonial contexts in which it flourished, analyzing how infrastructure, whose visual aspects were rarely conceived in the same visual terms as art and architecture, had a psychic effect both similar and divergent from art and architecture. In the process, this paper will suggest ways in which the historical and visual analysis of infrastructure may draw on the methods of art and architectural history while also developing some of its own.