Suez Canal, How Early?

While I have my suspicions, I'd be very interested to know why.

Why would someone go to the trouble of constantly dredging the Suez Canal if there were no large vessels to use it?
Suspicions? I agree that if some future catastrophe makes unable to keep the Suez open international shipping is already in trouble but abandonment is too strong a word. For instance, what if some hypothetical nuclear exchange in the ME badly irradiated the area?

There are old routes around Africa of course, and in the future climate change will probably make cross-Arctic routes easier from east-to-west via the polar sea. Plus you can also go from Asia to Europe via Panama Canal which while the longer route, is much more of a straight shot.
 
Even without referring to the Chinese Grand Canal, a number of artificial waterways were built in Europe during the Middle Ages, for irrigation and transportation of goods. The two main example - out of the top of my mind - would be the Naviglio Grande, 30 miles long between the Ticino river and Milan, and the Stecknitz canal, 60 miles long between Lubeck and the Elbe.
The Naviglio construction started in 1180, the Stecknitz almost two centuries later. These are just two examples: artificial waterways were pretty common in Flanders, Northern Germany, France and Northern Italy, and normally were equipped with locks (flash locks were known from classical times; mitre locks - which allow to overcome greater raises and falls - were invented by Leonardo da Vinci at the end of 15th century). The great Canal du Midi was completed in France in 1681, providing a waterway connection between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; the artificial portion was 150 miles long.

This should prove the fact that a canal connecting the Mediterranean and the Red sea would be feasible before the age of steam (and as a matter of fact this connection existed, at various times, starting with Darius and ending a couple of centuries after the Arab conquest). Manpower to build the artificial portion of this canal would also be available: fellahin cultivating land in the delta of Nile, who would work on the canal as corvee during winter time. It would not be as large and deep as the modern Suez canal: I guess that 12-15 meters wide and 2 meters deep at low tide would be abundant for the ships of the time.There might be some kind of transhipment (the Bitter Lakes would be the best spot), but I would believe that the carracks of the Indian trade could easily go through the canal (if the wind is not convenient, they can be towed by light galleys): since the length of this canal would be around 100 miles, it would take two-three days for a ship to navigate it. Note that the traffic would be seasonal, to take advantage from the monsoons.
The ships for the Indian trade would be carracks (or naus if you prefer the Portuguese name), with a tonnage between 250 and 500 tons - 35 to 40 mt. long and with a beam of 8-9 mt. - and a complement of 300-400 men. Warships would be at the top of the range, and possibly even larger (up to 1,000 tons), but are not likely to be employed before the late 16th century. For comparison, note that the ships used by Magellan for his circumnavigation of the globe were naus, with a tonnage of 90-100 tons. (see here: http://nautarch.tamu.edu/shiplab/Index-virtualnau02.htm for a virtual reconstruction of a nau).

Building such a canal would not be a minor undertaking: at a guess, the construction would take 20 to 30 years at least and the manpower would be possibly as large as 20,000 man. On the other hand it might be started at both ends, and the benefits would be significant (the alternative would be a land transhipment, probably from Aqaba to Suez). Such a canal would also require constant maintenance to fight silting (which I guess is the reason for which the former incarnations of the canal were let go to waste) but the value of the India trade should be able to pay for maintenance.
 
How early can you feasibly dig a Canal at the site of TTL's Suez Canal?

The question is how rearly was a Suez Canal dug as there were several in the past

History of Suez Canal
Main article: Canal of the Pharaohs
Ancient west-east canals have facilitated travel from the Nile to the Red Sea.[8][9][10] One smaller canal is believed to have been constructed under the auspices of either Senusret II[11] or Ramesses II.[8][9][10] Another canal probably incorporating a portion of the first[8][9] was constructed under the reign of Necho II and completed by Darius.[8][9][10]
[edit] 2nd millennium BC

The legendary Sesostris (likely either Pharaoh Senusret II or Senusret III of the Twelfth dynasty of Egypt[11][12]) is suggested to have perhaps started work on an ancient canal joining the River Nile with the Red Sea (1897 BC–1839 BC). (It is said that in ancient times the Red Sea reached northward to the Bitter Lakes[8][9] and Lake Timsah.[13][14])
In his Meteorology, Aristotle wrote:
One of their kings tried to make a canal to it (for it would have been of no little advantage to them for the whole region to have become navigable; Sesostris is said to have been the first of the ancient kings to try), but he found that the sea was higher than the land. So he first, and Darius afterwards, stopped making the canal, lest the sea should mix with the river water and spoil it.[15]
Strabo also wrote that Sesostris started to build a canal, and Pliny the Elder wrote:
165. Next comes the Tyro tribe and, on the Red Sea, the harbour of the Daneoi, from which Sesostris, king of Egypt, intended to carry a ship-canal to where the Nile flows into what is known as the Delta; this is a distance of over 60 miles. Later the Persian king Darius had the same idea, and yet again Ptolemy II, who made a trench 100 feet wide, 30 feet deep and about 35 miles long, as far as the Bitter Lakes.[16]
French cartographers discovered the remnants of an ancient north-south canal running past the east side of Lake Timsah and ending near the north end of the Great Bitter Lake in the second half of the 19th century.[17] (This ancient, second, canal may have followed a course along the shoreline of the Red Sea when the Red Sea once extended north to Lake Timsah.[14][17]) In the 20th century the northward extension of this ancient canal was discovered, extending from Lake Timsah to the Ballah Lakes,[18] which was subsequently dated to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt by extrapolating the dates of ancient sites erected along its course.[18] However it remains unknown whether or not this is the same as Sesostris' ancient canal and whether it was used as a waterway or as a defence against the east.
The reliefs of the Punt expedition under Hatshepsut 1470 BC depict seagoing vessels carrying the expeditionary force returning from Punt. This has given rise to the suggestion that, at the time, a navigable link existed between the Red Sea and the Nile.[19][20] Evidence seems to indicate its existence by the 13th century BC during the time of Ramesses II.[8][21][22][23]
[edit] Canals dug by Necho, Darius I and Ptolemy

Remnants of an ancient west-east canal, running through the ancient Egyptian cities of Bubastis, Pi-Ramesses, and Pithom were discovered by Napoleon Bonaparte and his cadre of engineers and cartographers in 1799.[9][24][25][26][27]
According to the Histories of the Greek historian Herodotus,[28] about 600 BC, Necho II undertook to dig a west-east canal through the Wadi Tumilat between Bubastis and Heroopolis,[9] and perhaps continued it to the Heroopolite Gulf and the Red Sea.[8] Regardless, Necho is reported as having never completed his project.[8][9]
Herodotus was told that 120,000 men perished in this undertaking, but this figure is doubtlessly exaggerated.[29] According to Pliny the Elder, Necho's extension to the canal was approximately 57 English miles,[9] equal to the total distance between Bubastis and the Great Bitter Lake, allowing for winding through valleys that it had to pass through.[9] The length that Herodotus tells us, of over 1000 stadia (i.e., over 114 miles), must be understood to include the entire distance between the Nile and the Red Sea[9] at that time.
With Necho's death, work was discontinued. Herodotus tells us that the reason the project was abandoned was because of a warning received from an oracle that others would benefit by its successful completion.[9][30] In fact, Necho's war with Nebuchadrezzar II most probably prevented the canal to be continued.
Necho's project was finally completed by Darius I of Persia, who conquered Egypt. We are told that by Darius's time a natural[9] waterway passage which had existed[8] between the Heroopolite Gulf and the Red Sea[31] in the vicinity of the Egyptian town of Shaluf[9] (alt. Chalouf[32] or Shaloof[14]), located just south of the Great Bitter Lake,[9][14] had become so blocked[8] with silt[9] that Darius needed to clear it out so as to allow navigation[9] once again. According to Herodotus, Darius's canal was wide enough that two triremes could pass each other with oars extended, and required four days to traverse. Darius commemorated his achievement with a number of granite stelae that he set up on the Nile bank, including one near Kabret, and a further one a few miles north of Suez. The Darius Inscriptions read:
Saith King Darius: I am a Persian. Setting out from Persia, I conquered Egypt. I ordered this canal dug from the river called the Nile that flows in Egypt, to the sea that begins in Persia. When the canal had been dug as I ordered, ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, even as I intended.[33]
The canal left the Nile at Bubastis. An inscription on a pillar at Pithom records that in 270 or 269 BC it was again reopened, by Ptolemy II Philadelphus.[34] In Arsinoe,[9] Ptolemy constructed a navigable lock, with sluices, at the Heroopolite Gulf of the Red Sea[31] which allowed the passage of vessels but prevented salt water from the Red Sea from mingling with the fresh water in the canal.[9]
[edit] Receding Red Sea and the dwindling Nile

The Red Sea is believed by some historians to have gradually receded over the centuries, its coastline slowly moving farther and farther southward away from Lake Timsah[13][14] and the Great Bitter Lake[8][9] to its present coastline today. Coupled with persistent accumulations of Nile silt, maintenance and repair of Ptolemy's canal became increasingly cumbersome over each passing century.
Two hundred years after the construction of Ptolemy's canal, Cleopatra seems to have had no west-east waterway passage,[8][9] because the Pelusiac branch of the Nile River, which had fed Ptolemy's west-east canal, had by that time dwindled, being choked with silt.[8][9]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suez1856.jpg
Topographic map, northern Gulf of Suez, route to Cairo, 1856.


[edit] Old Cairo to the Red Sea

By the 8th century, a navigable canal existed between Old Cairo and the Red Sea,[8][9] but accounts vary as to who ordered its construction—either Trajan or 'Amr ibn al-'As, or Omar the Great.[8][9][9] This canal reportedly linked to the River Nile at Old Cairo[9] and ended near modern Suez.[8][35] A geography treatise by Dicuil reports a conversation with an English monk, Fidelis, who had sailed on the canal from the Nile to the Red Sea during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the first half of the 8th century [36]
The Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur is said to have ordered this canal closed in 767 to prevent supplies from reaching Arabian detractors.[8][9]
[edit] Repair by Tāriqu l-Ḥākim

Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah is claimed to have repaired the Old Cairo to Red Sea passageway,[8][9] but only briefly, circa 1000 AD,[8][9] as it soon "became choked with sand."[9] However, we are told that parts of this canal still continued to fill in during the Nile's annual inundations.[8][9]
[edit] Napoleon discovers an ancient canal

Napoleon Bonaparte's interest in finding the remnants of an ancient waterway passage[37] culminated in a cadre of archaeologists, scientists, cartographers and engineers scouring the area beginning in the latter months of 1798.[38] Their findings, recorded in the Description de l'Égypte, include detailed maps that depict the discovery of an ancient canal extending northward from the Red Sea and then westward toward the Nile.[37][39]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suez_Canal_Ismailia2.jpg
The Suez Canal at Ismailia, c. 1860. The Ismailia segment was completed in November 1862.


Napoleon had contemplated the construction of another, modern, north-south canal to join the Mediterranean and Red Sea. But his project was abandoned after the preliminary survey erroneously concluded that the Red Sea was 10 metres (33 ft) higher than the Mediterranean, making a locks-based canal too expensive and very long to construct. The Napoleonic survey commission's error came from fragmented readings mostly done during wartime, which resulted in imprecise calculations.[40]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suez_Canal_drawing_1881.jpg
1881 drawing of the Suez Canal.


Though by this time unnavigable,[9] the ancient route from Bubastis to the Red Sea still channeled water in spots as late as 1861[9] and as far east as Kassassin
 
This should prove...


All that proves is that you don't quite yet understand the situation.

I've stated repeatedly that the Pharaohs, Ptolmeys, Romans, and others had both the physical labor and political stability available to dig a trans-Sinai canal. Those powers chose not to dig a trans-Sinai canal, however, and the reason they decided not to dig a trans-Sinai canal wasn't because they were stupid.

You, and a few others in this thread, are making an anachronistic assumption. Because the amount and value of European-Asian trade in the 19th Century were high to "require" a Suez Canal, you're mistakenly assuming the amount and value of European-Asian trade in the 16th, 14th, 10th, 1st, or earlier centuries were high enough to to "require" a Suez Canal.

That was not the case.

The Suez Canal isn't a better mousetrap, you don't build it and they will come. You have to have a very good reason to build it before you build it. And then you have to have a very good reason to maintain it after you build it.

All the earlier powers built earlier smaller canals along the Nile-Bitter Lake/Red Sea routes. They built those canals because those canals met their needs. They also abandoned those canals, after decades or centuries or use, when those canals no longer met their needs.

They weren't stupid. They built what they did to meet the needs they had and not the needs you're assuming they had.

Is it possible for a power before the 19th Century to use slaves or a corvee to dig a trans-Sinai canal by hand? Sure.

Is it possible for a power before the 19th Century to use slaves or a corvee to maintain a trans-Sinai canal by hand? Perhaps.

It is plausible for a power before the 19th Century to need to dig and maintain such a canal? Most certainly not.
 
All that proves is that you don't quite yet understand the situation.
Just a nice and friendly suggestion to start: get down from your mighty high horse, and try to be less condescending when you discuss a topic. I have a feeling that it will help the discussion.

I've stated repeatedly that the Pharaohs, Ptolmeys, Romans, and others had both the physical labor and political stability available to dig a trans-Sinai canal. Those powers chose not to dig a trans-Sinai canal, however, and the reason they decided not to dig a trans-Sinai canal wasn't because they were stupid. .
The powers who build a canal obviously found that "smaller canals along the Nile-Bitter Lake/Red Sea routes" were suitable for their needs. The "downsized solution" would be quite suitable for the needs of 15th century: no one intends to send anything larger than then 500 tons ship across.

You, and a few others in this thread, are making an anachronistic assumption. Because the amount and value of European-Asian trade in the 19th Century were high to "require" a Suez Canal, you're mistakenly assuming the amount and value of European-Asian trade in the 16th, 14th, 10th, 1st, or earlier centuries were high enough to to "require" a Suez Canal.

That was not the case.
Just like that? The oracle has spoken? why the Persians, the Ptolemaic dinasty, the Romans and the Arabs embarked (successfully) on such a venture?

The Suez Canal isn't a better mousetrap, you don't build it and they will come. You have to have a very good reason to build it before you build it. And then you have to have a very good reason to maintain it after you build it..
The Venetian senate seriously considered a "lesser canal" to connect the Mediterranean and the Red sea: it happened after Constantinople was taken by the Ottomans, and in a period when the relation between Venice and the Mamluks were pretty good. One would think that Venice had a very good reason to embark into such a venture, wouldn't he?

All the earlier powers built earlier smaller canals along the Nile-Bitter Lake/Red Sea routes. They built those canals because those canals met their needs. They also abandoned those canals, after decades or centuries or use, when those canals no longer met their needs.

They weren't stupid. They built what they did to meet the needs they had and not the needs you're assuming they had..
Did anything in my post give you the idea that I was arguing for a Lesseps-type canal? For the avoidance of doubt, I take pleasure in confirming that all my arguments were referred to a "lesser canal", suitable for the ships of the age.

It is plausible for a power before the 19th Century to need to dig and maintain such a canal? Most certainly not.
What is the definition of "such a canal"? A canal like was built in the 1860s would be a huge and unnecessary overkill. A Ptolemaic-type canal would be most suitable and feasible. I will (again) mention the Canal du Midi which was a much greater undertaking and was done with pre-steam technology.
 
It is plausible for a power before the 19th Century to need to dig and maintain such a canal? Most certainly not.
Yes, it's not that it wouldn't benefit trade a lot, it's that before the machines, even that much benefit would not have been able to make creation and upkeep worth enough. I think there is a question if a Ptolemaic canal would be useful, but I'm not too optimistic on this regard.
 
Yes, it's not that it wouldn't benefit trade a lot, it's that before the machines, even that much benefit would not have been able to make creation and upkeep worth enough.


Exactly. The benefits were not there and could not be foreseen.

I think there is a question if a Ptolemaic canal would be useful, but I'm not too optimistic on this regard.
As I've explained, the earlier canals were "transhipment" canals and not "through ship" canals as with Lord Kalvan's, mistaken IMHO, suggestion.

Goods using those using those canals didn't travel between Athens and Aceh aboard the same hull any more than goods using the Erie Canal didn't travel between Calais and Cleveland aboard the same hull. Instead, goods were transshipped and in the case of those canals, usually transshipped multiple times. Normally, one vessel would handle the Med, another the Nile/canal route, a third the Red Sea, and a fourth the Indian Ocean.

The trade carried by this multiple portage model apparently paid well enough for multiple canals to be constructed and maintained at different times over several centuries. The trade carried by this multiple model didn't pay well enough for any of those canals to remain in constant operation however.

Another important aspect, and one many here are continuing to overlook, of the trade any alt-Suez canal would carry is how the winds all sailing vessels require enforce a seasonal nature to that trade. Even after the arrival of the Europeans in the Indian Ocean in the late 15th Century, the trade routes there operated in rhythm with the monsoon. The seasonal variation in the winds needed to pass though the Red Sea both north and south added yet another component to the movement of goods.

Without advances in sailing ships and/or the adoption of steam propulsion, the season nature of travel along the Red Sea/Indian Ocean trade routes means an alt-Suez canal is going to be used seasonally thus further limiting it's use and the possibility for it's construction.

Suggesting that Venice or any other late Renaissance/early Modern power could construct and maintain a through ship canal along either route ignores the geopolitical situation, the geophysical facts, and the levels of trade which would fund such an effort. If we want to through ship canal, or even a transshipment canal, to be constructed we need to change the geopolitical situation, the geophysical facts, and the levels of trade involved.

And no one has suggested any of those necessary changes beyond "Let's start digging..."

The Venetian Senate may have "seriously" discussed building a canal, but in the end they didn't survey a single inch of the route or move a single shovel of earth. There are reasons they didn't bother to fund the dispatch of a single explorer to examine any of the proposed routes, let alone begin any of the planning construction such a route would require, and those reasons don't involve the Venetians being stupid.

The fairly recent book A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped The World by William Bernstein contains nice explanatory chapters discussing Indian Ocean trade the canals proposed in this thread would be "plugging" into, the geophysical issues determining when ships could sail where in that trade, and also an overview of why the earlier canals built to facilitate that trade were all eventually abandoned.
 
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The seasonal character of trade to India and the Sonda islands is a reality and cannot be changed; however the trade routes circumnavigating Africs required about 8 months from Portugal to India; adding 4 months for trading and another 7 months for the return leg the round trade requires some 20 months. The Red sea - Indian ocean route could be covered in half the time: a very substantial benefit in terms of return on the investment (and I would guess a much higher rate of success, given the much shorter distance).

It is also a fact that Venice did not implement her "Eastern strategy": however the failure in implementing it is much more imputable to an internal division in the Senate (the old Constantinople vs. Alexandria quarrel) as well as to the distractions of the Italian wars and the Ottoman encroachment in the Aegean sea. I've not been able to find any reference to the canal project being dropped because it was flawed: as a matter of fact Venetian advisors in gunnery and naval matters assisted the Mamluks and the sultan of Gujarat in the first decade of the 16th century, and this makes me think that the Alexandria option was still considered viable.

It should also be noted that the Ottomans unsuccessfully contested the Portuguese penetration in India, and twice put the fortress of Diu under siege.
IMHO, the outcome of this struggle does not prove the inherent superiority of the Portuguese and their circum-African route, but rather shows that the Indian ocean was a secondary theatre for the Ottomans and that they (mistakenly IMHO) did not put all necessary efforts in the fight.
 
The seasonal character of trade to India and the Sonda islands is a reality and cannot be changed; however the trade routes circumnavigating Africs required about 8 months from Portugal to India; adding 4 months for trading and another 7 months for the return leg the round trade requires some 20 months.

While those voyages were lengthy, they could be started at any time. The Portuguese could dispatch a ship every month and have it return 20 months later thus creating a constant flow of trade. Every month another shipment would arrive and another ship would be dispatched.

In contrast, the seasonal wind variations in the Red Sea shut down sea borne trade there for months each year. That's why caravan route cities like Mecca and Medina flourished even though trading ships existed, caravans could still move along the coasts of the Red Sea when the wind wasn't right.

When you factor the Red Sea cycle with the monsoon cycle, the trade cycle moving up the Red Sea, across Egypt and/or the Sinai, and into Europe was nearly as long as the Good Hope route. What's more, the glut/famine nature of that trade led to collapses and spikes in the price of the goods being handled.

Bernstein covers all this in the book I mentioned. Try to find it, it's well worth reading.

I've not been able to find any reference to the canal project being dropped because it was flawed: as a matter of fact Venetian advisors in gunnery and naval matters assisted the Mamluks and the sultan of Gujarat in the first decade of the 16th century, and this makes me think that the Alexandria option was still considered viable.

It wasn't dropped because it was flawed. It was dropped because it didn't provide enough of a benefit to make the effort worthwhile.

As I've repeatedly explained, the ancient canals, and the canal idea the Venetians toyed with, were transhipment canals and not through shipment canals. You proposed a through shipment canal because of your anachronistic knowledge about the utility of such a canal and your mistaken assumptions regarding the level of trade that canal would handle.

The Venetians of the period weren't thinking about sailing ships from Venice, through the canal, and on to Aceh. They were thinking about recreating the transshipment style canals which existed earlier. The same hull wouldn't carry goods the entire voyage, the goods would be passed between several hulls along the entire voyage.

When Venice looked at the cost of building/maintaining the canal and building/maintaining a Red Sea/Indian Ocean fleet and maintaining the goodwill of all the locals and defending the canal and it's entrepots and setting up/defending an armed entrepot at the mouth of the Red Sea and setting up/defending armed entrepots across the Indian Ocean, they realized the costs of the project outweighed the profits on the trade the project would bring in.

The proposed canal wouldn't pay so the proposed canal project remained a proposal.

It should also be noted that the Ottomans unsuccessfully contested the Portuguese penetration in India...

When you read the Bernstein book, you'll learn that the Ottomans didn't try as hard as you'd like to think they should have because the Portuguese didn't grab up all the trade for themselves or even come close to grabbing up all the trade for themselves.

Portugal wasn't entering a virgin field in the Indian Ocean. There was an ancient and robust trading system there which had been operating more or less smoothly for over a thousand years. Portugal grabbed a few armed points as a way to plug into that trade system, but they failed to seize any of the true choke points which would have given them control of that system. For example, Portugal repeatedly failed to seize a fortress at the entrance to the Red Sea that would have given them control of that body of water and the Sinai Route which used it and Portugal never came close to shutting down the Persian Gulf or "Sinbad" route to the north which the Ottomans used.

With the choke points still open, the Ottomans and other middlemen were still getting all of the goods they needed for their own domestic consumption. For a long period of time, all the arrival of Portugal and the other European nations did was slowly reduce the amount of goods passing through Ottoman and other hands for resale onward.

Putting it another way, the Ottomans still had all the pepper they could eat. They just had less pepper to sell.

The entire system continued to work until the early 1600s when the Dutch, and, to a lesser extent, other European powers began seizing the various sources of production directly. Before that, the Europeans had been content to plug into the existing system as other powers had done before them. With the production sources under control, the ancient trade system finally collapsed, Europe replaced all the middlemen, and the Ottomans and others found themselves buying from Europeans instead selling to Europeans.

When we look at suggestions like these, it is always necessary to avoid anachronisms. That is, we need to limit ourselves to what the peoples of the time knew and avoid inserting what we know into the equation. Venice made a determination regarding building a transshipment canal with the facts and suppositions available to it in the 1400s and we must examine any variants of that determination within the same context to avoid anachronisms. If we do not, we might as well be discussing ISOTs and ASBs.
 
You, and a few others in this thread, are making an anachronistic assumption. Because the amount and value of European-Asian trade in the 19th Century were high to "require" a Suez Canal, you're mistakenly assuming the amount and value of European-Asian trade in the 16th, 14th, 10th, 1st, or earlier centuries were high enough to to "require" a Suez Canal.

That was not the case.

Point taken.

On the other side, it's the basic assumption of infrastructure investments to provide chances of earning more that previously did not exist. Opportunity is followed by business, the mere opportunity to provide asian goods faster and to a lower price should increase demand.

The Suez Canal isn't a better mousetrap, you don't build it and they will come. You have to have a very good reason to build it before you build it. And then you have to have a very good reason to maintain it after you build it.

That sounds reasonable - but is contrary to an awful lot of infrastructure investment done today.

Basically, the question is whether at former times a strong ruler with the funds needed would decide that a canal would promote trade in a resaonable way. That will be a much smaller canal between the Nile and the red sea as historically built.



Finally, considering why the canal was given up: I doubt that it was given up on purpose at any time in history. The fact that there were repeated tries to establish such a canal show that this was considered a good idea by many historical figures. That they were given up most likely resulted from internal turmoil. A prosperous Egypt with a stable government can easily pay for the canal. If war or epidemics decrease trade and the ability to pay upkeep, the canal is lost - and it seems it was often reopened once Egypt fully recovered.
 
Interesting discussion here. If I have understood things correctly (and it is more than possible that I don't), then the Suez canal was really built when steam powered ships became commonplace?

By the way, what are the terms used in this sentence?

"If we do not, we might as well be discussing ISOTs and ASBs?"

OTL = Original time line (or perhaps Other time line)?

IOTL = In OTL?

:confused:
 
Interesting discussion here. If I have understood things correctly (and it is more than possible that I don't), then the Suez canal was really built when steam powered ships became commonplace?

By the way, what are the terms used in this sentence?

"If we do not, we might as well be discussing ISOTs and ASBs?"

OTL = Original time line (or perhaps Other time line)?

IOTL = In OTL?

:confused:
ISOT

ASB (1)
ASB (2)

Essentially he means PoDs that require something magical to happen because they are so unlikely based on real history.
 
While those voyages were lengthy, they could be started at any time. The Portuguese could dispatch a ship every month and have it return 20 months later thus creating a constant flow of trade. Every month another shipment would arrive and another ship would be dispatched.

In contrast, the seasonal wind variations in the Red Sea shut down sea borne trade there for months each year. That's why caravan route cities like Mecca and Medina flourished even though trading ships existed, caravans could still move along the coasts of the Red Sea when the wind wasn't right.

When you factor the Red Sea cycle with the monsoon cycle, the trade cycle moving up the Red Sea, across Egypt and/or the Sinai, and into Europe was nearly as long as the Good Hope route. What's more, the glut/famine nature of that trade led to collapses and spikes in the price of the goods being handled.

Bernstein covers all this in the book I mentioned. Try to find it, it's well worth reading.
So you're in love with Bernstein. That's good.
What is less good is that you make a couple of strange statements: the Portuguese were not trading by individual ships, they were organising convoys; even more to the point, the monsoon effects is even stronger in the Indian ocean: to obtain maximum benefit from the monsoon cycle, the Portuguese arrived in India during spring and departed at the end of the summer.



It wasn't dropped because it was flawed. It was dropped because it didn't provide enough of a benefit to make the effort worthwhile.

As I've repeatedly explained, the ancient canals, and the canal idea the Venetians toyed with, were transhipment canals and not through shipment canals. You proposed a through shipment canal because of your anachronistic knowledge about the utility of such a canal and your mistaken assumptions regarding the level of trade that canal would handle.

The Venetians of the period weren't thinking about sailing ships from Venice, through the canal, and on to Aceh. They were thinking about recreating the transshipment style canals which existed earlier. The same hull wouldn't carry goods the entire voyage, the goods would be passed between several hulls along the entire voyage.

When Venice looked at the cost of building/maintaining the canal and building/maintaining a Red Sea/Indian Ocean fleet and maintaining the goodwill of all the locals and defending the canal and it's entrepots and setting up/defending an armed entrepot at the mouth of the Red Sea and setting up/defending armed entrepots across the Indian Ocean, they realized the costs of the project outweighed the profits on the trade the project would bring in.

The proposed canal wouldn't pay so the proposed canal project remained a proposal.

The trade levels along a specific route are a function not only of the demand in Europe, but also of the benefits that a shorter route can produce. In other words, it's quite likely that the demand for spices fluctuated according to some kind of economic cycle, but it is sure that if the Portuguese trade can deliver at cheaper cost it will affect negatively the Venetian trade and viceversa. It's a zero-sum game, but I would argue that yours (or Bernstein's) estimates of the Red sea trade are influenced by the lack of a canal.


When you read the Bernstein book, you'll learn that the Ottomans didn't try as hard as you'd like to think they should have because the Portuguese didn't grab up all the trade for themselves or even come close to grabbing up all the trade for themselves.
I don't need to read Bernstein to understand the kind of effort the Ottomans put in their Indian ocean push: the disagreement is about the reasons why the Ottomans (and/or Venice) did not make a stronger attempt to oppose Portuguese penetration.

Portugal wasn't entering a virgin field in the Indian Ocean. There was an ancient and robust trading system there which had been operating more or less smoothly for over a thousand years. Portugal grabbed a few armed points as a way to plug into that trade system, but they failed to seize any of the true choke points which would have given them control of that system. For example, Portugal repeatedly failed to seize a fortress at the entrance to the Red Sea that would have given them control of that body of water and the Sinai Route which used it and Portugal never came close to shutting down the Persian Gulf or "Sinbad" route to the north which the Ottomans used.

With the choke points still open, the Ottomans and other middlemen were still getting all of the goods they needed for their own domestic consumption. For a long period of time, all the arrival of Portugal and the other European nations did was slowly reduce the amount of goods passing through Ottoman and other hands for resale onward.

Putting it another way, the Ottomans still had all the pepper they could eat. They just had less pepper to sell.

The entire system continued to work until the early 1600s when the Dutch, and, to a lesser extent, other European powers began seizing the various sources of production directly. Before that, the Europeans had been content to plug into the existing system as other powers had done before them. With the production sources under control, the ancient trade system finally collapsed, Europe replaced all the middlemen, and the Ottomans and others found themselves buying from Europeans instead selling to Europeans.
While the Indian Ocean was not a virgin field, the Portuguese naval superiority allowed them to enjoy almost one century of dominance.
Re. the choking points, you may want to check Portuguese presence in Diu, Goa, Bombay, Hormuz, Ceylon, Malacca, Zanzibar.

When we look at suggestions like these, it is always necessary to avoid anachronisms. That is, we need to limit ourselves to what the peoples of the time knew and avoid inserting what we know into the equation. Venice made a determination regarding building a transshipment canal with the facts and suppositions available to it in the 1400s and we must examine any variants of that determination within the same context to avoid anachronisms. If we do not, we might as well be discussing ISOTs and ASBs.
This is an Alternate History forum, and its goal is obviously to explore "roads not taken". There is quite a difference between "probable outcomes" and "possible outcomes", and IMHO anachronism is a very slippery term: an early industrial revolution is much more difficult than an early canal between Mediterranean and Red sea.
I'm not a fan of any deterministic view of history (such as saying that once the exploration age starts, the Mediterranean is condemned to become a backwater).
 
So you're in love with Bernstein. That's good.


You should read him. While the book covers man other topics, it contains the best one volume description of the in and outs of the Indian Ocean trade I've yet found.

What is less good is that you make a couple of strange statements: the Portuguese were not trading by individual ships...
You know very well I wasn't stating that at all so stop selectively reading my posts in order to create something to quibble about. You're most definitely not stupid enough to have read that passage and gotten that meaning from it, so stop pretending that's what you did.

I was pointing out that, unlike a trading power using the Red Sea, Portugal could dispatch ships at any time of the year. I wasn't suggesting they sent lone ships every week. :rolleyes:

... to obtain maximum benefit from the monsoon cycle, the Portuguese arrived in India during spring and departed at the end of the summer.
Exactly. In you desire to create a quibble where none exists, you helped prove one of my points.

Even after reaching the Indian Ocean via the Cape, the Portuguese still had to take the monsoon cycle into account. Why? Because, despite what you'd like to believe, the Portuguese weren't dominating the Indian Ocean trade. They were plugging into an existing system instead and the existing system was timed by the monsoon cycle.

In other words, it's quite likely that the demand for spices fluctuated according to some kind of economic cycle, but it is sure that if the Portuguese trade can deliver at cheaper cost it will affect negatively the Venetian trade and viceversa.
Thanks to the infrastructure requirements of a canal, which are more than just digging and maintaining a canal, shipping around the Cape is cheaper.

It's a zero-sum game, but I would argue that yours (or Bernstein's) estimates of the Red sea trade are influenced by the lack of a canal.
Seeing as I'm just some guy on an internet forum, you can and should argue with my estimates. Bernstein however is an economist and historian while you too are just some guy on an internet forum.

Guess who I'm going to bet on?

I don't need to read Bernstein to understand the kind of effort the Ottomans put in their Indian ocean push: the disagreement is about the reasons why the Ottomans (and/or Venice) did not make a stronger attempt to oppose Portuguese penetration.
As I've already explained, the Ottomans were still getting enough goods to meet domestic demands. It was the middleman trade which began to take a hit and that trade was inconsequential from the Ottomans' standpoint. The Ottomans successfully opposed Portugal's actions to seize choke points along the Persian Gulf or "Sinbad" route, which oddly enough was the route that happened to supply them.

Venice, on the other hand, saw after Portugal's accomplishment a slow drop in the number of goods it could buy from middlemen. However, what really hit Venice's trade was Portugal undercutting Venice's prices with Venice's customers. It wasn't that Venice ran out of goods, it was that Venice ran out of goods at the prices her customers were willing to pay.

Because Portugal never came close to capturing or controlling even a majority of the Indian Ocean trade, Venice and the other middlemen were still getting goods to sell onwards. What Portugal actually did was grab a middleman's markets and not grab the middleman's suppliers.

That would have to wait for over a century and the activities of the Dutch.

Re. the choking points, you may want to check Portuguese presence in Diu, Goa, Bombay, Hormuz, Ceylon, Malacca, Zanzibar.
And you may want to actually read about the subject. Once again, Portugal never came close to controlling even a simple majority of the Indian Ocean trade and no European power did so until the European powers seized control of the sources of production.

This is an Alternate History forum, and its goal is obviously to explore "roads not taken". There is quite a difference between "probable outcomes" and "possible outcomes"...
And there is a bigger difference yet between "possible" and "plausible".

... and IMHO anachronism is a very slippery term...
Only because you don't understand it.

There were very good reasons at the time why Venice didn't dig her proposed canal or why the Ottomans didn't try even harder to evict the Portuguese from the Indian Ocean. When we begin to examine the road not taken, the first thing we need to do is understand why the people at the time chose the road they did.

And those reasons very rarely are that they were fucking stupid.

To you and I living in a global trading network so vast, so seamless, and so profitable that my winter orange juice comes from Argentina, my t-shirt from Bangladesh, my TV from Taiwan, and many of my other innocuous daily items from other far flung nations. To us the idea of digging a canal linking the Red Sea and Mediterranean is such a slam dunk, no brainer, money making machine and it's inconceivable that someone else wouldn't see the idea as a slam dunk, no brainer, money making machine.

Our world isn't their world however. The trade levels we too often assume only just began to take off in the 1600s, the technologies we take for granted lowered physical hurdles we have to try hard to remember, and the concerns that they had to face at the time are obscure from our viewpoint.

You need to forget your world and remember their world.

I'm not a fan of any deterministic view of history (such as saying that once the exploration age starts, the Mediterranean is condemned to become a backwater).
I'm not a fan either, but I am a realist. The powers of the Mediterranean must deal with two choke points if they want to access the trading superhighway of the world's oceans: Gibraltar and the Sinai. The Atlantic powers face no such handicaps. All things being equal, the powers which have to deal with fewer hurdles will do better, and even then it's not guaranteed.
 
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If I have understood things correctly (and it is more than possible that I don't), then the Suez canal was really built when steam powered ships became commonplace?


Beginning to become commonplace. Oceanic steam propulsion only broke the back of oceanic sail propulsion when an interlinked collection of engineering advances in the 1880s increased fuel efficiency markedly.

What the opening of the Suez Canal did was cut the distance between Europe and Asia thus making steam vessels the best economic choice for that route.

It's seems complicated, but it really isn't. First, steamers need fuel and need to carry fuel obviously. That need limited their efficiency on long shipping routes. Roughly speaking, if a trip required a steamer to set aside 25% of it's carrying capacity for fuel - even with refueling - a sailing ship was the better shipping choice.

Second, when you work out how far a ship can steam on a given amount of fuel and factor that into the 25% carrying capacity limit, the result is a break even point. Below that point, steamers are the better shipping choice and above that point sailing ships are the better shipping choice. In 1850, setting aside 25% of it's carrying capacity allowed a steamer to travel about 3,000 miles so voyages longer than 3,000 miles were better handled by sail. By 1890, thanks to advances in several technologies, that break even distance was over 10,000 miles.

The Suez Canal cut the distance between London and Bombay from about 12,000 miles to about 6,000 miles and, in 1869 when the canal opened, break even point for steamers was about 7,000 miles. That cut sail out of the route immediately.

There's another reason why the Canal didn't help sailing ships and, despite my repeated references to it, it's been studiously ignored by those promoting the idea that an earlier canal would somehow magically and markedly increase trade volumes.

After the Suez Canal opened, less than 5% of the vessels using it were sailing ships despite sailing ships being the simple majority of oceanic transport vessels. The reason for this was not only that sailing ships needed to be towed through the canal, but for almost all of the year, sailing ships in the Red Sea also had to be towed northward against the prevailing winds. That meant sailing ships traveling on voyages longer than the 1860s break even point of 7,000 miles still couldn't use the canal without also having to pay towing fees.

So, the Suez Canal boosted steam propulsion in two ways. First, it lowered the length of a voyage below steam's then current break even point and, second, it opened up a shorter route which sailing vessels could not easily use.

There's a reason why caravan cities like Mecca and Medina existed for thousands of years despite the operation of earlier canals. There's a reason why the Persian Gulf or "Sinbad" route existed or thousands of years despite the higher cost of land transportation too. That reason is that, except for brief irregular periods, a sailing vessel cannot sail northward along the Red Sea. Venice can send all the naus she wants southward along the Red Sea, but she'll still need to use caravans or galleys to bring her goods northward.
 
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