Читать книгу Sinews of War and Trade - Laleh Khalili - Страница 13

Steamships changed the face of navigation and the pathways of trade. Ships were no longer bound to the seasons and winds. Even more important, the provision of fuel for oceangoing ships – first coal and, in the twentieth century, oil – spread the tentacles of empire to numerous ports around the world. The earliest steamships required vast amounts of coal and, when traversing open seas, their boilers encrusted with sedimented and corrosive salts and their inner machinery required all-too-frequent lubrication.¹⁴ But the navigability and power of steamships made them an irresistible weapon in the strategic and commercial contestation between European empires. The French colonisation of Algeria in 1830 stoked British fears that the Mediterranean was becoming a French lake in the same way the Black Sea had become a Russian lake. British imperial officials thought the consolidation of their control in South Asia could prove advantageous against France and Russia.¹⁵ But to reach South Asia profitably, more powerful, faster ships were needed.

The British East India Company’s conversion of its fleet to steamships in the 1830s marked the ascendance of steam, though it took decades before all the oceangoing ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope to India were converted. The East India Company’s turn to steam spurred the Government of Bombay to find a coaling station on the route from Bombay to Suez (and from there overland to Alexandria), resulting in the occupation of the island of Soqotra in the Indian Ocean in 1835. Soqotra’s harbours, however, did not provide good shelter, and the islands did not have the necessary infrastructure to support a coaling station. This led to the British abandoning Soqotra and bloodily conquering Aden in 1839. As a historian of the Suez Canal writes, Aden was ‘the first territorial acquisition of the Red Sea route and the first coaling station annexed to any empire’.¹⁶ The governor of Bombay, Sir Robert Grant, justified the conquest of Aden thus:

The establishment of a monthly communication by steam with the Red Sea, and the formation of a flotilla of armed steamers, renders it absolutely necessary that we should have a station of our own on the coast of Arabia, as we have in the Persian Gulf … As a coal depot, no place on the coast is so advantageous; it divides the distance between Bombay and Suez, and steamers may run into Back Bay during the night and unload at all seasons in perfect security.¹⁷

Distance and suitability as a halfway house went hand in hand with the possibilities both of trade and strategic access. Aden remained a fuelling outpost for the British Empire in the Indian Ocean even after petroleum displaced coal, until the British were driven out of Aden in 1967 by the anticolonial struggles there.

By the 1840s, the British Admiralty had also begun converting its naval vessels to steam, further intensifying the need for imperial coal depots. Between 1850 and 1869 alone, the net tonnage of British goods transported by steamships had increased from 168,474 to 948,367.¹⁸ Steamship technologies and imperial expansion were mutually reinforcing. The imperial steamships trading around, policing, and fighting upon the Indian Ocean required frequent and high-volume replenishment of their fuel coal. This, in turn, led to the conquest of new colonial beachheads along trade routes. These strategic outposts themselves generated additional trade, required a great deal more administrative information and communication, and necessitated more capital investment, more intensive exploitation of labour, and ever-expanding knowledge and intelligence about local conditions. In his account of the age of coal, On Barak explains the prevalence of British coal by the fact that products mined in Wales or Northern England could be exported to the colonies in ships that would otherwise have been in ballast (or not carrying cargo). The vast trade in British coal overseas encouraged industrialisation at home, while the rise of mass democracy in Europe resulting from the materialities of coal mining was accompanied by the projection of authoritarian power over colonies overseas.¹⁹

British control over much of the coastal areas in West, South, and East Africa translated into British supremacy over the Cape route to India. Britain also controlled the coal supplies, since ‘coal from Bengal was being used in steamers in the 1830s, from Borneo in the 1840s, and from Natal in the 1860s. Though not as good as Welsh coal, they gave Britain a near-monopoly of the world’s steamer coal supplies’.²⁰ The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 made Britain’s imperial coaling stations – and the routes that were strung between them – still more significant to Britain’s dominion over the oceans. Even as the British feared the French mastery in the Mediterranean and controlling shares in the Suez Canal, British primacy over the sea routes of the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Cape were never in doubt. And that was owed to coal.

But steam was not the only technology that reinforced the mapping of routes and the importance of ports as landing stations.