A Venice of the Desert: The Successes and Failures of the Suez Canal in Revitalising Mediterranean Trade

Abstract

Promotion of the Suez Canal was always premised on the expansion of trading opportunities for countries and cities of the Mediterranean. While the impact of the Suez Canal in expanding long-distance trade between Europe and Asia is well known, how trade developed within core and peripheral regions of Europe has not been assessed. This chapter evaluates how the Suez Canal contributed to trade expansion for the global core of Northwest Europe compared to trade in the European periphery of the Mediterranean in the period after the canal’s opening. This chapter demonstrates, firstly, that Asian trade did not grow as much to ports of the Mediterranean compared to trade to Northwest Europe. Second, the lower levels of trade growth according to regions within Europe through the Suez Canal could be related to changing routes of shipping lines that took advantage of the Suez Canal to travel directly between major ports of Northwest Europe and Asia, thus entirely bypassing the traditional trans-shipment routes via minor ports of the Mediterranean. Consequently, while the Mediterranean was previously central to trade between Europe and Asia, the opening of the Suez Canal that cut through the region actually made it geographically isolated and less able to benefit from the economic opportunities of the new trade route.