AHC: Caspian-Persian Gulf Canal?

A lot of the time, the solution was to build a railroad--one carrying river barges (look up portage railroads). But there's a reason I included the Main Line, since after all that went right through the Appalachians! Probably the best time for this to be built would be the equivalent of the late 18th or early 19th century, when canals were becoming quite sophisticated but railroads were still in their infancy and thus not clearly superior.


So what is needed is a strong and stable regional power that has a heavy interest in the Caspian, control over Anatolia and Mesopotamia, and a desire to use the Persian Gulf as a port, between say 1750 and 1850. But it is such a vast project! It combines problems of grade, with problems of scarce water supply, with sheer distance due to the tremendous switchbacking involved, so this power has to have prodigious development of industrial capability, as defined in those days, to be able to even contemplate it. Now didn't the French project span many centuries? The thing is, could some all-powerful Shah or Khan or Tsar or Sultan of this region even envision such a thing before the middle of the 18th century? If it could be done with classical technology, that is another story. The Persians certainly accomplished many great feats of engineering to be sure!

If it is possible to do, can it be done the hard fast way? That is, straight south out of the Caspian, up to the Iranian plateau and thence straight down to the Persian Gulf? That focuses the task on a more compact power, Persia. Also a poorer one than some potentiate capable of commanding Anatolia and Mesopotamia as well to be sure, but Persian dynasties have persisted for centuries while vast Central Asian empires come and go like dust devils, with no stable basis of permanence.

Hmm, if say the Mongols had had, or developed under later leaders, a different mentality and highly value the dream of connecting the Caspian to the south, could they have commanded sufficient concentration of resources to dig something on either route, zigzagging to the west or doing its switchbacks trying to go straight south?

Or in order to do it on either route, would we indeed require industrial era tech such as modern explosives? If so, even though you suggest there is a window of time in which big canal projects look feasible and worthwhile before railroads reveal their full capabilities, that window is not more than a generation wide; whereas such a big task could easily take 3 or 4 generations. If they can't start until tech equivalent 1800, then although that is plenty early for more modest projects like the Eire Canal or perhaps even a primitive Nicaragua crossing, the sheer size of this takes so long that before it is finished the ability of railroads to finish the job of enabling a commercial artery to exist would become painfully obvious.

Also what exactly are we talking about? You explicitly said, barge canal, meaning the utility is entirely a matter of providing commerce, circulating Central Asian goods that normally wold have gone over caravans somewhat faster and cheaper, causing an increment of prosperity, perhaps a large one due to diverting goods from alternative routes and thus concentrating them in the power that does this. In that case I vote Persia, since a power that controls even just eastern Anatolia has more of an interest to trade on the Black Sea than the Persian Gulf I'd think.
 
I'm not sure, Shevek, why you're insisting a Caspian-Gulf canal has to be a "big project," at least so big as you are saying. I am conceptualizing a canal that connects the upper reaches of the Aras with the upper reaches of the Tigris, thus allowing small ships (canal barges, as I said) to transit between the Caspian and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, as per the OP. While the challenges in building such a canal would be significant, they would not be "3 or 4 generations" significant, and it would be quite reasonable to expect such a canal, if construction was initiated at the right time, to be completed. Additional canals would probably be needed to enable navigation so far up the Tigris and Aras, but such parallel canals are easier to construct than canals connecting watersheds.

Also, the Canal du Midi was built in 15 years, from 1666 to 1681. Where did you get "many centuries" from?
 
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