Channelling Mobilities

Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869–1914

Valeska Huber

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781107030602
• eBook ISBN: 9781107240483
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The history of globalisation is usually told as a history of shortening distances and acceleration of the flows of people, goods and ideas. Channelling Mobilities refines this picture by looking at a wide variety of mobile people passing through the region of the Suez Canal, a global shortcut opened in 1869. As an empirical contribution to global history, the book asks how the passage between Europe and Asia and Africa was perceived, staged and controlled from the opening of the Canal to the First World War, arguing that this period was neither an era of unhampered acceleration, nor one of hardening borders and increasing controls. Instead, it was characterised by the channelling of mobilities through the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of movement. Telling the stories of tourists, troops, workers, pilgrims, stowaways, caravans, dhow skippers and others, the book reveals the complicated entanglements of empires, internationalist initiatives and private companies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Figures and maps
• Acknowledgements
• Transliteration and Translation
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: mobility and its limits
• 1 Rites de passage and perceptions of global space
• 2 Regimes of passage and troops in the Canal Zone
• 3 Companies and workers
• 4 Bedouin and caravans
• 5 Dhows and slave trading in the Red Sea
• 6 Mecca pilgrims under imperial surveillance
• 7 Contagious mobility and the filtering of disease
• 8 Rights of passage and the identification of individuals
• Conclusion: rites de passage and rights of passage in the Suez Canal Region and beyond
• Bibliography
• Index