Читать книгу Sinews of War and Trade - Laleh Khalili - Страница 15

While steam and subsea cables were crucial to the designation of sea routes, pilgrimage was pivotal in transforming Jeddah into a major Red Sea port, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. Jeddah has long been the main port of Mecca, which is a little under a hundred kilometres inland. Many pilgrims bought and sold goods in Mecca in order to secure their passage home from Arabia; others used hajj as an occasion for profit-making trade. Braudel has described the hajj pilgrimage as one of the richest trade fairs in early modern times, but others have disputed its significance, given that the lunar calendar to which the hajj conforms cannot be made to agree with the monsoon schedules, which follow a solar calendar.²⁹

The age of steam, which unshackled travel from the regularity of the monsoon winds, made the sea routes as important as land routes for pilgrimage. The expansion of maritime pilgrimage routes, in turn, proved a lucrative source of income for European shipping businesses. As early as the 1850s, European companies based in Asia (including the British India Steam Navigation Company) were chartering ships for pilgrims. The opening of the Suez Canal accelerated the trend of Europe-based firms getting into the business.³⁰ For the vast majority of the period after the opening of the canal, and until aeroplanes overtook ships as the primary transport for pilgrimage, European shipping firms controlled the most profitable pilgrimage routes from India, Southeast Asia, and Egypt to Jeddah. This focus on hajj transportation intensified following World War I, when the US instituted quotas on the number of migrants, thus truncating the business of transatlantic shipping. European shipping companies thereafter focused on expanding (or creating from scratch) their Asian and Middle Eastern markets.³¹ Their success far outstripped that of local firms, not only because most state officials regulating the process were Europeans themselves but also because these shipping firms received major mail subsidies from governments and had far easier access to finance. Because of the regularity of the hajj pilgrimage and its vast scale, the logistics of pilgrimage travel on the sea was a microcosm of the global relations and local considerations that shaped the business, including the viability and transformations of sea routes over time.

Travelling to the hajj by sea was a matter of trial and tribulation. As one eighteenth-century pilgrim from India wrote, ‘During travel on sea, one is faced with shortage of space, problems of food and drink, stores which can only be obtained at distant ports, and the fear of drowning.’³² The ships were often dangerously and claustrophobically overcrowded.³³ Disasters could easily result in hundreds of passenger deaths. If the sea routes were treacherous, arrival in Jeddah was not very pleasant either, all the way through the early decades of the twentieth century. This major port which had once been controlled by the Ottomans, came under the control of the British-sponsored Sharif Hussein after World War I. After the ascendance of Ibn Saud to the throne, Jeddah was eventually side-lined in favour of Riyadh, from which the Saud family hailed. Throughout this turbulent history, the rulers of Jeddah spent just as much as necessary – and no more – on dredging the harbour. A 1923 account by a pilgrim lamented the inadequacy of the port:

Jeddah Harbour is not like other seaports. Generally, the water is very shallow all along the coast. But the port authorities keep removing the sand (by dredging) so as to make the channel deep enough for passage of boats; this allows easy loading and unloading of passengers and cargo possible, if not at all times then at least at high tide. The Turkish rulers did not consider it essential to make a deep-water jetty by straightening out the beaches, as they probably did not have the required force for defending the harbour. They only made a channel for small boats that is marked off by pillars placed at many places. Since this channel is not too wide, boats also get struck up on the sand bars.³⁴

Despite all this, until the early years of the 1950s, 75 per cent of pilgrims still travelled to Jeddah by ship. Several factors led to a dwindling of maritime hajj pilgrimage only twenty years later: new modes of transport and better infrastructures, paved roads and aeroplanes among them.³⁵ Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as anticolonial struggles forced European powers to abandon their colonies, European shipping firms also discontinued their pilgrimage services. The closure of the Suez Canal in 1956 was particularly significant as it put a stop to maritime journeys of pilgrims from the Mediterranean. Jeddah’s proximity to Mecca, however, encouraged its growth as a port of arrival and departure – by air or sea – for pilgrims, while its location in the vicinity of the Suez Canal guaranteed its significance as a commercial seaport for decades to come.