Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859–1906: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal
Lucia Carminati
The Suez Canal between “the Med and the Red” is by far the world’s most important artificial waterway, accounting for more than 1.5 billion tons of cargo and more than 25,000 ship transits in 2023. Since its opening in 1869, it has been the subject of thousands of books, the vast majority of which focus on its construction, the economic benefits that accrue to shippers and consumers, or its role in geopolitics. The laborers who dug the canal, initially armed with nothing more than pickaxes and shovels, and made the towns and camps in which they lived, have been all but invisible.
Recently, historians have begun considering how building canals affected the people who built them or lived in their path. While Marixa Lasso’s Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (2019) views the Panama Canal through the screen of the myriads displaced by its construction, in Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859–1906: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal Lucia Carminati fixes her gaze on the birth and life of Port Said. With discernment and energy and relying on a rich mix of consular and other archival records, as well as newspapers and contemporary accounts, Carminati sketches an intimate history from below of the city that came into being to accommodate the needs of the canal’s builders and managers.
Named for Mohamed Sa'id Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Egypt who granted Ferdinand de Lesseps a concession to build the canal, Port Said dates its founding to the moment de Lesseps broke ground on April 25, 1859. Thereafter the population grew quickly, though the process of urbanization lagged such that when the canal opened a decade later, it was described as “still barely more than an encampment,” albeit one of 10,000 people. Most laborers were Egyptian, but migrants in their thousands flooded into Port Said from around the Mediterranean: Syria, Ottoman Turkey, Morocco, Greece, Italy, Austria, Poland, France, and Great Britain, among others.
In addition to navvies, skilled workers, and administrators, these newcomers included entrepreneurs, both men and women, who provided the rudimentary amenities necessary to accommodate such a flood of people—from stores and eateries to sites of entertainment from nightclubs to brothels, and places of worship for Muslims, Christians, and Jews—and providing a slew of other services like teaching and housekeeping. Family migration was encouraged, but many women also came to Port Said on their own or found themselves there alone after being widowed or otherwise abandoned.
These mostly transient and often impoverished migrants made Port Said the site of a wide range of domestic intimacies: marital unions, adulterous liaisons, bigamous marriages, and cross-cultural and interfaith relationships. Many arrived in the hope of improving their family’s fortunes by remitting money home or sending for spouses, children, and extended family. In reality, many (120,000 is a commonly cited figure) died, or abandoned thoughts of home, or earned too little even to repatriate themselves. “Bread and fortune” were little more than a mirage.
Port Said settled into a more routine existence following the canal’s opening, although the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez and the Egyptian government competed for jurisdiction. In the 1880s it was a hotbed of organized criminals who smuggled everything from legal goods to hashish to people. Carminati shows the extent to which Egyptian authorities—in emulation of Europeans—attempted to keep tabs on criminals and embraced the idea of the surveillance state as a cornerstone of modernity.
This was a monumental task. Although it was not a destination per se, many of the 500,000 people who passed through the port every year disembarked if only for a few hours. Until 1887, ships were not allowed to transit the canal at night, but even after that it remained a major coaling station—the city was home to 15,000 coal heavers—and it took upwards of 24 hours to load a ship fully.
But Port Said was, and to some degree remains, an anomaly. While it was not entirely a company town, it was not fully Egyptian, either. When Carminati’s history closes in 1906, with the opening of improved train service to Ismailia and Cairo, roughly 60 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born. For all the cosmopolitanism that suggests, it was an invisible city, hidden in plain sight. As the English journalist George W. Steevens wrote, “It is on the road to everywhere, and yet it is on the road to nowhere. Ships pass every day for every sea in the world except Port Said.” In this respect, it is a product of its itinerant roots.
Lucia Carminati. Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859–1906: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023.