The English poet of empire Rudyard Kipling penned the much quoted lines, ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’. Even if, by the early twentieth century, European observers had become overwhelmed by what they saw as fundamental differences between attitudes and styles of life in East and West, this was not true of the nineteenth century. Then, the ideal became the joining of East and West: a physical joining, through the Suez Canal, but also a cultural joining, as western Europeans relished the cultures of the Near East, and as the rulers of Near Eastern lands – the Ottoman sultans and their highly autonomous viceroys in Egypt – looked towards France and Great Britain in search of models they could follow in reviving the languishing economy of their dominions. This was, then, a reciprocal relationship: despite the claims of those who see ‘orientalism’ as the cultural expression of western imperialism, the masters of the eastern Mediterranean actively sought cultural contact with the West, and saw themselves as members of a community of monarchs that embraced Europe and the Mediterranean.1 Ismail Pasha, viceroy of Egypt between 1863 and 1879, always dressed in European clothes, though he would occasionally top his frock-coat and epaulettes with a fez; he spoke Turkish, not Arabic. Equally, the Ottoman sultans, and more particularly their courtiers (like Ismail, frequently Albanian), often sported western dress. They would, of course, be selective in their use of western ideas. The Egyptian viceroys were happy to send clever subjects to study at the École Polytechnique in Paris, a Napoleonic foundation; at the same time they discouraged excessive mixing in the French salons: they wished to import radical ideas, but about technology, not government. What had almost entirely disappeared by the early nineteenth century was the idea of the Ottoman realms as the seat of conquering warriors of the faith. Having lost their military and naval superiority in the East, the Ottomans were no longer the subject of fear but of fascination. Traditional ways of life caught the attention of western artists such as Delacroix, but other westerners, notably Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, were keen to promote modernization. The Egyptian rulers themselves were anxious to bring Egypt into Europe. They saw no contradiction between its location in an African corner of the Levant and a European vocation: Europe was (and is) an idea and an ideal rather than a place.2
Napoleon’s campaigns in the East had already aroused enormous interest in Egypt among the French: just as ancient Egypt had been the seat of a magnificent and wealthy empire, modern France was now equipped to play the same role in Europe, the Mediterranean and the wider world. The underlying concept was that of ‘civilization’, a concept that still maintains a hold on how the French think of their place in the world. This fascination with ancient Egypt began with the careful recording of ancient monuments by draughtsmen in Napoleon’s army; far from being a luxurious indulgence, this was a task which expressed the central aims of the French enterprise in the eastern Mediterranean, in which France posed as the heir to the empires of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies. Egyptian motifs did not lose their fascination after the first Napoleon: under the rule of his nephew, Napoleon III, between 1848 and 1870, the ‘Second Empire style’ canonized Egyptian decorative forms in elegant furnishings and architectural details. The difficulty in making contact with the mental world of the ancient Egyptians was that their scripts were unreadable. But even this problem was eventually resolved, once French troops had uncovered an inscription in hieroglyphics, hieratic script and Greek at Rosetta, which Napoleon appropriated (though it now rests in the British Museum). The decipherment of the Egyptian scripts by the young French genius Champollion, in 1822, opened new windows on to ancient Egypt and was as important as the acquisition of Algiers, a few years later, in convincing France that it possessed a mission in the lands of Ottoman allegiance within the Mediterranean.
There were enthusiasts who were obsessed by the attractions of the East. Around 1830 Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin became the self-appointed prophet of a new sect dedicated to the creation of a link between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. This was not simply a question of trade and engineering. Enfantin saw in the physical meeting of East and West the creation of a new world order in which the male principle, embodied in the rationally minded West, would enter into union with the female principle, embodied in the mysterious life forces of the East: ‘to make the Mediterranean the nuptial bed for a marriage between the East and West and to consummate the marriage by the piercing of a canal through the isthmus of Suez’. Out of this intercourse a world of peace would emerge in which the semi-divine Enfantin would be acclaimed as the heir to St Paul, not to mention Moses, Jesus and Muhammad. This was only one feature of his thinking that attracted attention. His insistence on showing proper honour to women puzzled many in Constantinople and Cairo; his bizarre sky-blue costume with flared trousers might easily have made him a figure of fun in Paris. Yet he gained entrée into French salons, and he surveyed the terrain between the Mediterranean and Suez before he was received by Muhammad Ali, who listened politely to his plans for a canal linking East and West.3 The viceroy of Egypt was as enthusiastic as anybody about the need to bring economic improvement to his land, but he saw a canal through the desert as a drain on his resources, not as an asset: he suspected that a canal would divert trade past the Egyptian heartlands, bringing no benefit to Alexandria or Cairo (now linked by the Nile and the Mahmudiyya canal), but plenty of profit to western European businessmen attempting to trade between France or England and India.
Enfantin’s eccentricities seemed more tolerable back home in France because he colourfully expressed an assumption that began to guide French thinking about society and the economy. Under the influence of Saint-Simon’s writings, Enfantin and his contemporaries insisted on the need for progressive improvement of both material and moral conditions. New technology, including railways and steamships, was beginning to transform the European economy, although the darker side of industrialization soon became visible in England. In the salons of Paris, however, theory reigned, and it continued to be nourished by the ethos of revolutionary France. Progress had become an ideal. Significantly, it had become an ideal in the Egypt of Muhammad Ali no less than in the France of Louis-Philippe. Transforming the ideal into reality, in the case of the Suez Canal, was the work of Ferdinand de Lesseps. He combined extensive diplomatic experience with mastery of the detail needed to form a Canal Company, to sell many (but not quite enough) of its shares, and, most importantly, to persist in his project until he had worn down the resistance of those who objected to his plans. His tireless travels back and forth by steamship between France and the Levant, as well as to Spain, England and elsewhere, even to Odessa, ensured that he was constantly in touch with developments throughout the complex network of politicians, investors and specialist engineers on whom the canal project depended. He had the great advantage of family ties to Louis-Napoléon, president of the Republic from 1848 and emperor from 1852 to 1870: his cousin was the empress’s mother.
There were many who claimed that the canal was their idea, though there still remained, carved into the stony desert of western Sinai, traces of ancient canals built to join the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. In the third century BC, Ptolemy II Philadelphos extended what remained of a canal built by the Persians in the years around 500 BC. Links between the Nile and the Red Sea remained open, with interruptions, until the early Arab period. The aims, however, were quite limited: ‘Amr ibn al- ‘As, the Arab conqueror of Egypt, used the canal system to convey Egyptian wheat to Mecca.4 The idea that a canal might link the trade routes of the Mediterranean with those of the Indian Ocean was not seriously broached before the nineteenth century, for good reason: Egypt was to all intents the Nile waterway, and a parallel waterway through the desert would deprive its rulers of the tax revenues on which the Ptolemies, Fatimids and Mamluks had depended so heavily.
There were other ideas about how to create a trade route linking the two seas. In the 1820s the young English entrepreneur Thomas Waghorn noticed the long delays incurred when sending mail from India to England, and saw the potential of a route from Bombay to Suez, which could also carry those passengers who were willing to endure the heat and discomfort of a journey by carriage across the desert from the Red Sea to the Nile. Relief at reaching the Nile was tempered by consternation at the plague of rats, cockroaches, flies and fleas that infested the steamers and sailing vessels that carried passengers up river. After that, it was reasonably easy to take passage to England, since a monthly steam packet service linked Alexandria to Malta and Falmouth in Cornwall – these steamship services will be discussed later.5 When de Lesseps met Waghorn, he was impressed, writing that ‘he served as an example’ – not merely of enterprise and courage but of the need to create an effective link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.6 The British position remained that a Nile route was preferable. Lord Palmerston, while he was prime minister, strongly opposed de Lesseps’s plans. There were technical problems that any number of land surveys failed adequately to resolve. Was the level of the Red Sea the same as that of the Mediterranean? The aim was to build a canal, not a cascade. The variety of soils – sandy desert, rocky desert, swamp – further complicated the operation. But the reasons behind Palmerston’s opposition were not simply technical. Should the project succeed, the French would acquire a passage to India, their prestige in Egypt would increase immeasurably, and British interests in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean would suffer.
The Ottoman sultan was also far from convinced that he wanted a canal to the Red Sea to be built. In part this was a political issue. De Lesseps urged the viceroys to make their own decision about the canal, and to ignore those who argued that the canal required the permission of the Ottoman sultan himself. The first viceroy to be seduced by de Lesseps’s project was Said, the obese son of Muhammad Ali, who had despaired at his child’s inordinate love for macaroni. Said was in fact a canny politician who was willing to commission ground surveys, to invest heavily in de Lesseps’s shares, and even to pay for the newspaper of the Suez Canal Company. Said did, it is true, waver, but the more he became involved in the schemes the more obvious it became that the losses he would incur if it collapsed were intolerable. Money was, of course, the problem, especially after de Lesseps failed to agree terms with Jacob de Rothschild in 1856.7 De Lesseps turned to another source of finance, announcing a worldwide shares offer in which only the Egyptian viceroy and the French participated with any enthusiasm. De Lesseps was a persuasive man, as Said discovered when unsold shares had to be offloaded on the viceroy. There were rewards for Said: the new port at the northern end of the canal was named Port Said; even if at the start it was only a rough encampment, it grew rapidly as the canal progressed, and in time for the opening it acquired an impressive mole made of great concrete blocks dumped in the sea. By the time Said died, in January 1863, considerable progress had been made with the project, even if it was still far from certain that the target date of 1869 could be met: vast amounts of earth needed to be moved, and the higher ground along the designated route of the canal needed to be breached. So far, the solution was to rely on forced labour recruited by Said, corvée labour of the type that had been practised in Egypt since the days of the Children of Israel. The corvées aroused unease in Europe, because they seemed something like slavery, and because they were inefficient, with men constantly in transit from the Nile to the canal and back again.
All this changed with the accession of a new viceroy, Said’s capable and efficient nephew Ismail. He had not previously favoured the canal, for he was a great landowner and disliked the corvée system, which took fellahin away from the fields, often in the months when they were needed most. He was a graduate of the military academy of St Cyr and was aware of Western ideas. He had no intention of democratizing his monarchy, but (rather like Tsar Alexander II) he viewed the labour system as anachronistic in a modernizing society. It was he who said: ‘Egypt must become part of Europe.’8 His suspension of the corvées left de Lesseps with the problem of where to find labour, and appeals as far east as China produced little manpower. The answer, entirely appropriate to the modernizers, was mechanization, and at the end of 1863 Borel, Lavalley and Company set to work to design a great array of machines suitable for the different soils along the canal route. About three-quarters of the soil removed to create the canal was dug up by these machines, mainly in the final two years of the building of the canal, from 1867 to 1869, but nothing was predictable: on the very last day an enormous rock was found to be protruding into the canal, threatening any ship of reasonable draft, and had to be blasted out of existence.9 The use of machines doubled the cost of the enterprise, but without mechanization the project would never have finished on time, and swift delivery was vital if the canal were to win the approval of the viceroy, the sultan and the French emperor.
Ismail was convinced that he could use his handsome revenues from cotton to pay his contribution to the building of the canal. Egypt was well placed in the 1860s to benefit from world demand for cotton, which had boomed because the traditional supplier across the Atlantic, the United States, was immersed in civil war. In the long term, prospects were not as good as Ismail assumed, but, like too many politicians, he assumed there would be no bust after boom; in 1866 he was already short of funds, and de Lesseps arranged a loan in Paris at a hefty rate of interest without even consulting him. By the time the canal was completed Ismail Pasha had paid 240,000,000 francs towards its construction, nearly £10,000,000 at then current exchange rates.10 Politically, Ismail found he had to steer a careful course. He persuaded the Sublime Porte to grant him a new title and the automatic right of succession through eldest sons, and saw this, with some justice, as recognition that he was now to all intents an independent sovereign. The Turks reluctantly dredged up an old Persian title, ‘khedive’, whose exact meaning was apparent to no one, but which seemed to be an assertion of regal authority. On the other hand, Ismail had good reason to be alarmed at the development of the powers of the Suez Canal Company, which acted, at least towards European settlers in the canal zone, as an autonomous government. The erosion of Egyptian control over the canal was already under way.
The ceremonies for the opening of the canal in November 1869 neatly expressed the desire of the khedive to be accepted among the rulers of Europe. Among the guests were Empress Eugénie of France in the paddle-steamer L’Aigle, Franz Josef, emperor of Austria, and princes from Prussia and the Netherlands. Religious ceremonies were held to mark the event, according to both Muslim and Christian rites. The empress’s father-confessor proclaimed that ‘today two worlds are made one’; ‘today is a great festival for all of humanity’. This message of the brotherhood of mankind, of which Enfantin would certainly have approved, was exactly the one Ismail wished to promote. The confessor also delivered a eulogy of de Lesseps, comparing him to Christopher Columbus, while de Lesseps was convinced that no such joint ceremony of Muslims and Christians had ever before been held.11 On 17 November a great procession of more than thirty ships set out from Port Said along the canal, and the grandees’ journey was interrupted by lavish stops for refreshment and entertainment along the route. The empress’s paddle-boat reached the Red Sea on 20 November and was greeted by a 21-gun salute. De Lesseps had ‘converted Africa into an island’, as The Times reported.12
Everything now would depend on the volume of traffic through the canal, from which the khedive optimistically hoped to derive great benefit; he was entitled to a 15 per cent share in the profits from the canal. It is no surprise that shippers and traders took a few years to adjust to the existence of a new express route to the Orient. In 1870 over 400,000 tons of goods were shipped through the canal, on nearly 500 vessels. In 1871 this rose to 750,000 tons. But the khedive had been led to believe that he would be receiving revenue from 5,000,000 tons a year, and it took a while to reach that figure. While the canal was being built, Port Said attracted plenty of French steamships (sixty-four) and many Egyptian ones too, as well as great numbers of Turkish sailing ships. Austrian sailing vessels brought coal from Wales and southern France, wood from Corsica and Istria, and wine from Provence to solace the European settlers on the barren edges of Sinai.13 The contrast between these raw figures and those from the years following the inauguration of the canal provides a real sense of the changes that took place once the passage was opened. In the long term, there was massive growth: 486 ships passed through the canal in 1870, 765 in 1871, and for the rest of the decade the figure hovered around 1,400, breaking beyond 2,000 in 1880 and reaching a high point of over 3,600 in 1885, after which the number fell back only slightly. Despite the coolness of the British government towards the project, British businessmen were quick to take advantage, and by 1870 two-thirds of the traffic was owned by British investors. In the twenty years from 1870, the British ascendancy became stronger and stronger, so that by 1889 the United Kingdom accounted for well over 5,000,000 tons of goods, out of nearly 6,800,000 tons; this left France with a tiny proportion (362,000 tons) and smaller shares for shipping from Germany, Italy and Austria (mainly Trieste). The Board of Trade in London asserted: ‘the trade between Europe and the East flows more and more through the Canal, and the British Flag covers an ever increasing proportion of this trade’.14
This was a bright future, but in 1870 shareholders could only hope, and their uncertainty grew as the Canal Company proved unable to produce a dividend, or, as a French pamphlet proclaimed: ‘The agony of the Suez Canal – Zero results – Next comes ruin!’15 De Lesseps decided to focus his attention on another canal project, through Panama (which was beyond his technical and financial capacity), and the French emperor, defeated in war by Prussia, was forced into exile while Paris was taken over by its communards. Once order was restored in Paris, the Third Republic proclaimed its firm support for the canal, but was unable to help the hapless investors. Ismail had been largely abandoned, and in 1872, out of funds, he was forced to raise a loan of 800,000,000 francs (£32,000,000); by 1875 his debts were approaching £100,000,000, and simply servicing them, at about £5,000,000 per annum, was draining away his resources faster than he could accumulate them – in 1863 the Egyptian government had received less than that in tax revenues. His attraction to lenders lay in his collateral: he possessed large numbers of Suez Canal shares, including those dumped on Egypt by de Lesseps when foreign investors had proved reluctant to buy. He had steered Egypt towards greater political independence, but the financial cost was so great that he risked compromising that independence. In 1875 the only option seemed to be the sale of the Egyptian shares. French buyers were ready to pounce. Then Benjamin Disraeli received intelligence of what was happening and saw that, for £4,000,000, he had the opportunity to gain partial control of the Mediterranean route to the Indies. He informed Queen Victoria that purchase of the shares, ‘an affair of millions’, ‘would give the possessor an immense, not to say preponderating, influence in the management of the Canal. It is vital to Your Majesty’s authority and power at this critical moment, that the Canal should belong to England.’ By the end of 1875 the British government found itself the owner of 44 per cent of all canal shares, making it the largest shareholder. Disraeli informed the queen: ‘it is just settled: you have it, Madam’.16
This purchase had enormous consequences for Egypt and the Mediterranean. An Anglo-French Dual Control Commission was set in place to administer the Egyptian state treasury and to impose proper discipline on the khedival budget, vastly increasing the influence of Great Britain in Egyptian affairs. However, the commission authorized the sale of the khedive’s right to 15 per cent of the canal revenues to a French bank for a knockdown sum, which hardly bolstered his position. The Ottoman sultan, with good reason, saw this as the first step towards an Anglo-French takeover of Egypt, while Ismail’s dependence on foreign loans would endanger the annual tribute the khedive paid to Constantinople. Ismail dreamed of finding new assets within Sudan, but sending armies to the south cost more money than he could afford. He became increasingly isolated: in 1879 the sultan removed him from office, though in these kinder times he suffered no worse a penalty than exile in the Bay of Naples. Yet in deposing Ismail, the sultan was in reality bowing to pressure from the Dual Control Commission, and the succession of Ismail’s son Tawfiq, who was friendly to the European powers, only brought Egypt deeper into the British web. By 1882 Tawfiq was under immense pressure at home: an army coup installed an Arab-led government that was hostile to the old Turkish-Albanian elite. In late summer 1882, with the help of an army despatched from England, British forces bombarded Alexandria, where a massacre of foreigners had taken place, to European disgust; the British secured the Suez Canal and advanced towards Cairo, with the public aim of restoring Tawfiq to his throne.17 Egypt now became to all intents a British protectorate, even if the khedive (and his successors, the kings of Egypt) were allowed considerable autonomy. In deposing Ismail, the sultan had set off a series of events that led to the final loss of Egypt by the Ottoman Empire, but in reality the sequence of events had begun when de Lesseps’s labourers turned the first sod of the Suez Canal.
The other transformation that took place in the Mediterranean in the middle of the nineteenth century was the coming of steamships, followed by the arrival of ironclad vessels. The first attempts to build steamboats can be dated as far back as the 1780s, in the United States and France. The fundamental new features of steam navigation were speed, reliability and regularity. Speed should not be exaggerated; eight knots was considered fast. Nonetheless, the steamship route from Trieste to Constantinople, instituted in 1837, took two weeks, as against a month or even forty days by sailing ship, and by the end of the century larger, ironclad, screw-driven steamships reached the Turkish capital in less than a week. Steamships did not need to tack in the face of contrary winds and could face the Mediterranean in all seasons. Shipping was less constrained by the traditional routes that followed prevailing winds and currents; in other words, routes from point to point became more direct, and it became possible to predict with a fair degree of accuracy when a ship would arrive. On the other hand, steamships were very expensive, and – whereas sailing ships were empty of machinery down below – the hold of a steamship was full of fuel (in the form of coal), not to mention the engines and boilers, which occupied the prime position amidships, as well as the quarters provided for the crew and passengers; they also carried sail to augment or replace steam power when appropriate. One report explained that ‘steamships cannot be and never will be cargo ships’; because they provided an express service, they did not linger in ports loading and unloading cargoes in the rather casual way a sailing vessel might.18
It became obvious that steamships would be most useful for transporting mail, including bank transfers; in other words, steamships could play a vital ancillary role in trade, accelerating the speed of payments and the spread of commercial information, as well as providing space for passengers who found steam packet ships more comfortable. The French government was planning steam packet routes as early as 1831, when steamships opened a route from Marseilles to southern Italy.19 Timetables could be constructed: in 1837 the Austrian government entered into a contract with the Austrian Lloyd Company, based in Trieste, for two voyages a month from Trieste to Constantinople and Alexandria, visiting Corfu, Patras, Athens, Crete and Smyrna, and carrying coin, mail and passengers.20 Four years earlier a group of insurance underwriters in Trieste had established the organization known as Lloyd Austriaco, taking the name from the London coffee house where a similar cooperative organization of underwriters had emerged in the eighteenth century. In 1835 Austrian Lloyd created a steamship company, in the realization that their work as insurers would benefit enormously from access to up-to-date information; 60 per cent of stock in Austrian Lloyd was snapped up by the Rothschilds in Vienna, and the London branch of the Rothschild bank helped supply ships and engines from England.21 In 1838 the Austrian Lloyd fleet consisted of ten steamships, the largest of which, the Mahmudié, was, significantly, named after the canal linking Alexandria to the Nile, and displaced 410 tons; its engines produced 120 horsepower. The fleet was decribed by the British consul in Trieste as ‘well-constructed, well-equipped, and well-manned’.22
Outside the Mediterranean, the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company established services from England through the Straits of Gibraltar; it had already begun to specialize in a packet service between England and Iberia (this was the ‘peninsular’ part of the title of the firm that became Peninsular and Oriental, or P & O), and took as its colours the red and gold of the Spanish flag and the blue and white of the Portuguese flag then current. P & O rivalry with Austrian Lloyd caused some annoyance: in 1845 the British company established a route right across the Mediterranean and into the Black Sea, as far as Trebizond – once in the Black Sea, the British threatened to clash further with the commercial interests of Austrian steamships that plied up and down the Danube and along the Black Sea coasts.23 Steam navigation had turned into a success story: European powers competed to gain ascendancy along the trade routes, and yet the competition remained remarkably peaceful: some naval conflicts did break out in the mid-nineteenth-century Mediterranean, but the threat of piracy had been very greatly reduced since the American and French victories in Barbary, and clashes between armed fleets were rare after the Greek War of Independence.
One exception is provided by the conflict that culminated in an Austrian naval victory over the newly established Italian fleet at Lissa, now known as Vis, in July 1866. The Austrian acquisition of Venice after the Napoleonic Wars brought the Venetian fleet under Austrian command, and for a period the Austrians also controlled fleets in Tuscan lands briefly ruled by the Habsburgs – until 1848, Italian was the language of command in the Habsburg navy and the majority of sailors were Italian, though by 1866 Germans accounted for 60 per cent of manpower.24 The Habsburg fleet was well managed; the emperor’s brother Ferdinand Maximilian, later to meet a tragic fate in Mexico as Emperor Maximilian, served as commander-in-chief between 1854 and 1864, and appreciated the advantages not simply of steam power but of cladding the hulls of his ships in iron. He found the fleet to consist of sailing ships and a few paddle-steamers; he commissioned screw-driven schooners, followed later by armour-plated frigates, which were particularly expensive – in 1861 Austrian foundries were not up to the task of producing iron plates at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity, and the plates had to be ordered from the Loire Valley and exported from Marseilles in strict secrecy. Engines, though, were constructed at a new factory in Trieste, in which the emperor had a financial stake. He let his brother spend whatever he thought was necessary.25
Rule over lands in northern Italy had brought the Habsburg emperor into conflict with the forces that sought to unify the peninsula under the house of Savoy. An alliance between Prussia and the kingdom of Italy threatened Austrian control of Venice and north-eastern Italy. When the Austrian and Italian fleets met off the Croatian coast at Lissa the Austrian fleet was outnumbered – the Italians possessed twelve ironclad steamships, while the Austrians had only mobilized seven. The number of unarmoured steamships in the Italian side was also slightly higher. On the other hand, the Italians had clearly given little thought to the form action would need to take. An engagement between ironclads was a novelty, and the Austrians decided that the correct tactics (in a throwback to classical antiquity) would be to ram the enemy. Although this did no favours to their ships, the Austrians did manage to sink two Italian ironclads. The Austrian commander admitted: ‘the whole thing was chaos … It is a miracle we did not lose a single ship.’ Against the odds, the Austrians had won.26 The victory did not assure them of Venice, which they lost to the Italian kingdom, but it did prevent Italy from gaining control of the Dalmatian coast (from which a number of the ‘Austrian’ sailors originated).27 If anything, the loss of Venice after Lissa only enhanced the importance of Trieste as the gateway of the Habsburg empire in the Mediterranean.
Trieste boomed under Habsburg rule. Thirty years before the Suez Canal opened, an American diplomat in Vienna reported to the Secretary of State in Washington in glowing terms:
Trieste itself is a beautiful and for the greater part a new city – and, as in new cities generally, there is much activity and business. Its harbour is excellent with a sufficient depth of water for almost any vessel. It contains 50,000 inhabitants mostly engaged in commerce which is said to be lucrative and rapidly increasing. Its imports amount to 50 millions of Florins [over $100,000,000] and its exports to 40 millions.28
Trieste faced many challenges: the quality of goods coming down from the Habsburg hinterland around Vienna and Prague was not especially high, making it difficult for Trieste to sell Austrian products in the Mediterranean, while access to the Austrian heartlands was blocked by the Alps. On the other hand, Trieste was a free port able to enjoy generous exemptions from standard commercial taxes. As early as 1717 the city had received privileges from Emperor Charles VI of Austria, and behind that lay an even longer tradition of trade within the Adriatic – Charles V had granted the merchants of Trieste special rights in southern Italy in 1518. In these centuries Trieste was still very small, greatly overshadowed by Venice, from whose political tutelage it had escaped in the fourteenth century. It took much longer to escape Venice’s economic domination: at the end of the eighteenth century Venetian merchants were trans-shipping goods via Trieste to benefit from its status as a free port. Further privileges, along with maritime law codes, were acquired at the end of the eighteenth century under Empress Maria Theresa, and Trieste was able to exploit its position even more when Venice lost its independence in 1797: in 1805 537 ships were registered at Trieste, the vast majority owned by Venetians.29
There was another side to Trieste that was distinctive. Aware of the success of Livorno, Charles VI created an enclave in which buinessmen of all faiths could settle and prosper. After Joseph II proclaimed his Edicts of Toleration in the 1780s, the Jews and other ethnic groups were guaranteed their security.30 The ghetto of Trieste, squeezed on to the hillside beneath the castle, was abolished in 1785. One Jewish writer, Elia Morpurgo, who was also a silk producer, praised Maria Theresa as the ‘woman of valour’ described in the Book of Proverbs, for she had caused commerce to flourish to the advantage of her subjects: ‘open ports, roads made short, convenient and easy, the flag at sea respected and secure’. The other religious groups to be found in Trieste included Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, Serbian Orthodox. Each group was organized as a nazione which was expected to consider the well-being of the city before admitting more settlers, who should be economically useful, not vagabonds. Behind the religious labels could be found any number of ethnic groups, notably Slovenes and Croats from close by, but also German, Dutch, English, Albanian and Turkish migrants or visitors, a guazzabuglia, or disordered mix of peoples and tongues, though the languages that dominated public life were Italian and German.31
The city of Italo Svevo is particularly famous for its Jewish community, which was well integrated into local society by the 1830s, while it retained its own schools and institutions. Indeed, the rabbis became very exercised about standards of religious observance, whether breaches of the Sabbath or a casual attitude to the Jewish dietary laws.32 The Jewish population grew substantially, from just over 100 in 1735, when the town had a total population of fewer than 4,000, to 2,400 in 1818, when Trieste had grown to contain over 33,000 inhabitants. Freer from restrictions than elsewhere in the Habsburg dominions, the Jews of Trieste played a significant role in the economic development of the city. Theory as well as practice appealed to them – G. V. Bolaffio wrote a book about currency exchange, and Samuel Vital wrote about insurance, while in later decades Triestino Jews were prominent in the development of the study of accounting, economics and commercial law. Jews also took an active part in the Borsa, or Stock Exchange, and were involved in the foundation of Austrian Lloyd: the founders included the Jews Rodrigues da Costa and Kohen, the Greek Apostopoulo, the Slav Vučetić, the Rhinelander Bruck and the Ligurian Sartorio, the last two of whom pleased the monarchy so much that they were ennobled.33 This mixing of peoples provided a cultural stimulus as well. By the end of the century Trieste was famous for its literary cafés, beginning with the Caffé degli Specchi, ‘of the mirrors’, founded in 1837, and intellectual and political life at the end of the nineteenth century was dominated by the question whether Trieste belonged in Italy or Austria, quite apart from the presence within the city of an increasingly self-conscious Slovene population.34
Viewed from Vienna, another city where many peoples managed to coexist in varying degrees of tension, Trieste appeared the ideal gateway to the East. The thirty years after 1830 saw a gradual expansion of business through its port: the tonnage of imports more than doubled, while the number of steamships began to increase at the expense of sailing vessels, showing that steamships gradually found space for merchandise. In 1852 nearly 80 per cent of goods arrived on sailing ships, but by 1857 only about two-thirds did so. The major trading partner of Trieste was the Ottoman Empire, accounting for around one third of exports in the 1860s, but the United States, Brazil, Egypt, England, Greece all enjoyed regular contact with Trieste; its shipping took third place after Great Britain and France in the commerce of Alexandria, ahead of Turkey and Italy, nor did this business slacken in the late nineteenth century. The range of goods is also impressive, though most were simply forwarded to Vienna and the Habsburg heartlands: coffee, tea and cocoa, large quantities of pepper, rice and cotton.35 Between the year the canal opened and 1899, the quantity of goods transported almost quadrupled.36
The history of Trieste and of Austrian Lloyd reveals the opportunities and frustrations faced by those seeking to exploit the new conditions in the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century. Mediterranean navigation had changed beyond recognition: the Great Sea was now a passage-way to the Indian Ocean, and making the passage was an entirely different experience from anything in past times; information shuttled back and forth as the mail networks developed; there was a greater degree of peace and safety than at any time since the heyday of the Roman Empire. Yet it was not the Austrians, nor the Turks, nor even the French, who dominated the Mediterranean, but imperial Britain.