Summary
In Said’s account in Orientalism, the logical conclusion of Orientalist thought and effort: Ferdinand de Lesseps’s canal, opened in November 1869, destroyed the Orient’s distance and transubstantiated it from resistant hostility into obliging, submissive partnership, so that thereafter “Oriental” is an administrative or executive notion rather than a geographical one (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.97-101 / printed p.88-92).
Details
- Thomas Cook’s Excursionist and Tourist Advertiser for July 1, 1869, called the November 17 inauguration “the greatest engineering feat of the present century” and the formation of a line of water communication between Europe and the East “the thought of centuries” (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.97 / printed p.88).
- De Lesseps returned to Egypt in 1854 and the undertaking was completed fifteen years later; the Compagnie universelle was formed in 1858, and in 1862 the Académie française offered a prize for an epic on the canal (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.98-99 / printed p.89-90).
- At the opening ceremonies the papal envoy spoke on November 16 of the Cross standing respected before the Crescent and of the two extremities of the globe drawing together and recognizing their mutual fraternity (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.100 / printed p.91).
- After de Lesseps, Said argues, no one could speak of the Orient as belonging to another world: there was only “our” world, “one” world, and for imperialists like Balfour or anti-imperialists like J. A. Hobson the Oriental, like the African, is a member of a subject race and not exclusively an inhabitant of a geographical area (Orientalism (1978), PDF p.101 / printed p.92).
Related pages
Orientalism (1978), Ferdinand de Lesseps, Napoleon Bonaparte, Imaginative geography