Suez canal 1869

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The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World by Jonathan Hillman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, capital controls, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, high-speed rail, intermodal, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Malacca Straits, megaproject, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, trade route, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, union organizing, Washington Consensus

Headrick, Tools of Empire. 7. Irène Delage, “Inauguration Ceremony of the Suez Canal at Port-Said, 17 November, 1869,” Fondation Napoléon, accessed November 15, 2018, https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/paintings/inauguration-ceremony-of-the-suez-canal-at-port-said-17-november-1869/. 8. Fondation Napoléon, “Speech Given by Monsignor Bauer,” November 16, 1869, https://www.napoleon.org/wp-content/themes/napoleon/annexes/hors-serie/suez/en/html-content/inauguration/ceremonie/discours.html. 9. Max E. Fletcher, “The Suez Canal and World Shipping, 1869–1914,” Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (1958): 572. 10.

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Fletcher, “The Suez Canal and World Shipping, 1869–1914,” Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (1958): 572. 10. Jean-Paul Calon, “The Suez Canal Re-visited: 19th Century Global Infrastructure,” in Macro-Engineering: MIT Brunel Lectures on Global Infrastructure, ed. Frank P. Davidson, Ernst G. Frankel, and C. Lawrence Meador (Cambridge, UK: Woodhead, 1997), 11–24, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9781898563334500057. 11. “The Suez Ship Canal,” New York Times, September 3, 1869, https://nyti.ms/2yJgXqG. 12. Zachary Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal (New York: Knopf, 2003). 13. Amal Soliman ElGhouty, “Public Debt and Economic Growth in Egypt,” Business and Economic Research 8, no. 3 (2018): 183–200, http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/ber/article/view/13443. 14.

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Olukoya Ogen, “The Economic Lifeline of British Global Empire: A Reconsideration of the Historical Dynamics of the Suez Canal, 1869–1956,” Journal of International Social Research 1, no. 5 (Fall 2008): 527, http://www.sosyalarastirmalar.com/cilt1/sayi5/sayi5pdf/ogen_olukoya.pdf. 17. Piquet, “Suez Company’s Concession in Egypt.” 18. Fondation Napoléon, “Speech Given by Monsignor Bauer.” 19. Eric Toussaint, “Debt as an Instrument of the Colonial Conquest of Egypt,” Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, June 6, 2016, http://www.cadtm.org/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_article=13562. 20. Fletcher, “Suez Canal and World Shipping,” 564 (quoting the Economist). 21.

A World Beneath the Sands by Toby Wilkinson

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, conceptual framework, distributed generation, financial independence, invention of writing, New Journalism, public intellectual, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman

But, just as the statue of the once-mighty Khafra had been swallowed up by the sands of Giza for over forty centuries, so events after 1869 were not kind to the French. Less than a year after Eugénie’s triumphal progress along the Suez Canal and up the Nile, her husband was overthrown, bringing an end to the Second Empire and consigning the house of Napoleon to history. De Lesseps’s great achievement, which should have secured French economic interests in Egypt, instead led to a rapid expansion of British trade through the Suez Canal.48 And as for Mariette, while he was lauded in Egypt, he found much less favour in his home country.

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Over the remaining forty years of his career, he published essays on the construction of the pyramids, the Nile height measurements at Semna, and the language and culture of the Ethiopians; the first scientific study of ancient Egyptian chronology, Die Chronologie der Aegypter (1849), which sparked criticism from theologians because it challenged biblical orthodoxy, but laid the foundations for all subsequent studies; a comprehensive king list of Egyptian rulers; a Nubian grammar; and a study of measurements and proportions in the ancient world. He discovered a bilingual inscription, the Canopus Decree, which proved Champollion’s system of decipherment beyond doubt, and he was the first to tackle the question of Egypt’s prehistoric past. At the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Lepsius led the new Prussian crown prince (later Emperor Friedrich III) on a Nile cruise, and from 1874 until his death he was director of the Royal Library. Few others in the history of Egyptology – not even Champollion – can claim so many achievements. In 1850, the Berlin Academy, where Lepsius’s career had begun, elected him a full member (he had been made a corresponding member in 1844, during the expedition to Egypt), thus publicly recognizing that the study of ancient Egypt stood alongside theology, philology and all the branches of learning, on its own merits.

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In an obituary in The Times, Lucie’s friend, Caroline Norton, summed up her life and legacy succinctly: ‘Lady Duff Gordon lived in Egypt, and in Egypt she has died, leaving a memory of her greatness and goodness such as no other European woman ever acquired in that country.’66 Khedive Ismail has been described as ‘an ugly man of the greatest charm’.67 His subjects may have begged to differ, at least on the latter point. Charming or not, he certainly had a taste for opulence (Sauternes was his drink of choice), and his extravagance was notorious, especially when it came to entertaining foreign guests. When Empress Eugénie visited Egypt in 1869, for the official opening of the Suez Canal, Ismail ordered an eight-mile long road to be laid from central Cairo to enable her ‘to drive out to the Pyramids without fatigue (she perversely rode out there every morning on horseback) and had built under their shadow a stone mansion in which she might repose for a single night’.68 As for his own palace at Giza, its gardens were intersected by mosaic pavements laid by craftsmen brought from Italy, all at a reputed cost of 30,000 Egyptian pounds.

A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

Work was extremely slow, however, partly because they were operating right on the edge of a conflict zone – and the accompaniment of twenty soldiers had drawn the attention of Acehnese independence fighters.164 During the mid-nineteenth century the Sultanate of Aceh, at the northwestern end of Sumatra, was a prosperous trading centre supplying half the world’s pepper. Just beyond the fringe of effective Dutch control, its independence was backed, in theory, by the British; as late as 1867 a Foreign Office minute recorded, ‘The independence of Acheh should be guaranteed.’165 But the geopolitical landscape was changing. From the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the turn from sail to steam, the quickest route for sea trade between Europe and China now passed through the Malacca Straits between the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra rather than the Sunda Straits further south between Java and Sumatra. This increased the importance of the Aceh coastline of northeastern Sumatra at a time when other powers, particularly France and the United States, were in the ascendant in the region and might have the will and the means to take possession of Aceh themselves.166 In 1868 the British Colonial Office signalled its new geopolitical calculation that ‘Acheen had much better be in the hands of Holland than of France or the United States’,167 and by 1871 Britain and Holland were ready to swap Aceh – regardless of native wishes – for the Dutch-held part of the Gold Coast and some trade concessions.

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This dramatically shorter route became commercially viable only because of simultaneous developments in steamship technology: firstly, the paddle wheel was being superseded by the screw propeller which was more effective on the high seas; and secondly, the more efficient compound steam engine was greatly reducing the coal consumption of steamers, allowing them to cover greater distances before re-coaling and freeing up space for more cargo. Crucially, unlike the sailing ship, a steamer could readily navigate the often treacherous conditions in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, and could move under its own steam through the Canal.178 Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, one of the basic parameters of international commerce and military strategy had been that any large movement of goods or troops between Europe and the Far East had to go by the Cape route. The two main so-called ‘overland routes’ – from the eastern Mediterranean across Ottoman territory to either the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf – were, by contrast, used for more local trade, for the speedier movement of passengers and for more rapid communications by postal service which, more recently, had been augmented by the electric telegraph.

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., ch. 2; Searight, British, ch. 11; Furber, ‘Overland’; Hoskins, British, chs. 1–11; Hoskins, ‘First’; Hoskins, ‘Growth’; Harris, ‘Persian’; Shahvar, ‘Tribes’; Shahvar, ‘Concession’; Onley, ‘Britain’; Ingram, Beginning, ch. 6; Bailey, ‘Economics’; Farnie, East and West, ch. 2. 180. Pudney, Suez, ch. 4; Hoskins, British, ch. 12; Farnie, ibid., 29–31. 181. Quoted in Harrison, Gladstone, 45. 162. Quoted in Farnie, East and West, 73; Pudney, Suez, ch. 8; Brown, ‘Who Abolished’. 183. ‘The Suez Canal’, Economist (20 November 1869); Fletcher, ‘Suez’, 564. 184. Coffin, Our New Way, 507. 185. Quoted in Pudney, Suez, 182; Harrison, Gladstone, 51–3; Marlowe, Anglo-Egyptian, 90–8; Farnie, East and West, ch. 14; Chamberlain, Scramble, 37–9. 186. Pudney, ibid., 74; Marlowe, Spoiling, 55–6; Farnie, ibid., 38, 45–7; Hoskins, ‘British’. 187.

Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, G4S, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

At the very northern end of Sharia Palestine is a large stone plinth Offline map Google map that once held a statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, until it was torn down in 1956 with the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Suez Canal House Historic Building Offline map Google map (Commercial Basin) If you’ve ever seen a picture of Port Said, it was probably of the striking green domes of the Suez Canal House, which was built in time for the inauguration of the canal in 1869. As it’s currently fenced off (it’s not open to the public), the best way to get a good look at the building’s famous facade is by hopping on the free ferry to Port Fuad.

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The line, extended to Suez in 1858, carries Europeans heading East until the opening of the Suez Canal. 1859 Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French engineer, sees work begin on his project to build a canal between the Mediterranean and Red seas, making it the quickest way from Europe to the East. The canal takes 10 years to complete. 1869 Khedive Ismail, Mohammed Ali’s grandson, opens the Suez Canal. The British, who had preferred a railway, soon take control of the waterway as the quickest route to their Eastern empire. 1879 Having bankrupted the country, running up debts of more than £100m, Khedive Ismail is forced to abdicate but not before selling his shares in the Suez Canal to Britain. 1882 British troops invade to suppress nationalist elements in the army.

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His heirs continued the work, implementing reforms and social projects, foremost of which were the building of Africa’s first railway, opening factories and starting a telegraph and postal system. Egypt’s fledgling cotton industry boomed as production in the USA was disrupted by civil war, and revenues were directed into ever-grander schemes. Grandest of all was the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869 to great fanfare and an audience that included European royalty, including Empress Eugenie of France. Packaging Tourism In 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal, the Khedive (Viceroy) Ismail announced that Egypt was now part of Europe, not Africa. Wherever it was, the massive amounts the khedive spent on developing and promoting his country boosted the number of people who wanted to see the treasures along the Nile.

Egypt Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

call centre, carbon footprint, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, late fees, low cost airline, off grid, place-making, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl

When two small fleets, one originating in Port Said and the other in Suez, met at the new town of Ismailia on 16 November 1869, the Suez Canal was declared open and Africa was officially severed from Asia. Ownership of the canal remained in French and British hands for the next 86 years until, in the wake of Egyptian independence, President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez in 1956. The two European powers, in conjunction with Israel, invaded Egypt in an attempt to retake the waterway by force. In what came to be known as the ‘Suez Crisis’, they were forced to retreat in the face of widespread international condemnation. Today, the Suez Canal remains one of the world’s most heavily used shipping lanes.

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The line, extended to Suez in 1858, carries Europeans heading east until the opening of the Suez Canal. 1858 The British explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke reach Lake Victoria and recognise it as the main source of the White Nile. 1859 Ferdinand de Lesseps, a French engineer, sees work begin on his project to build a canal between the Mediterranean and Red Seas, making it the quickest way from Europe to the East. The canal takes 10 years to complete. 1869 Khedive Ismail, Mohammed Ali’s grandson, opens the Suez Canal. The British, who had preferred a railway, soon take control of the waterway as the quickest route to their Eastern empire. 1879 Having bankrupted the country, running up debts of more than £100 million, Khedive Ismail is forced to abdicate but not before selling his shares in the Suez Canal to Britain. 1882 British troops invade to suppress nationalist elements in the army.

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A 10pm bus goes to Alexandria (E£55, eight hours) and Cairo (E£70, eleven hours) or just take a Marsa Matruh service and change there. A servees or microbus to Marsa Matruh will cost E£20 to E£30. Servees (E£5, or E£35 for a whole car) to the Libyan border crossing at Amsaad depart when full. Suez Canal Suez Canal Highlights Port Said Ismailia Suez Suez Canal Why Go? The Suez Canal, Egypt’s glorious triumph of engineering over nature, dominates this region, slicing through the sands of the Isthmus of Suez for 163km, not only severing mainland Egypt from Sinai but also Africa from Asia. The canal was the remarkable achievement of Egypt’s belle époque, an era buoyed by grand aspirations and finished by bankruptcy and broken dreams.

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

Indian merchants and money-lenders, like the Madras chettiars who followed the British into Burma,74 were indispensable commercial auxiliaries who were willing to work for much lower margins than their British counterparts. They reached into parts of Asia and Africa that European merchants overlooked or disdained. With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the linkages between the eastern and western economy became much stronger. By the 1870s, it becomes possible to speak of a global economy in which improvements in transport and communication by telegraph had encouraged the integration of markets and the convergence of prices in ordinary foodstuffs – perhaps the best indicator that the world was becoming a single economic space.

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During and after the American Civil War, it was briefly acute, and the British had to consider how to strengthen their meagre garrison in Canada, especially in winter when the St Lawrence River was frozen.38 The second was on India’s north-west frontier, where the advance of Russian influence from the Caspian Sea into Central Asia was monitored closely. The third and most serious was the vast region that the Victorians called the ‘Near East’ – extending from Greece to the eastern borders of Persia. For it was here that they expected to have to defend their short route to India (after 1869, the Suez Canal), and exclude any rival from Egypt or the land approaches to the Persian Gulf, with its access to India.39 India, indeed, became the central obsession of imperial defence – because it was vulnerable and because it was valuable. The 1857 revolt left a curious double legacy. It bred something close to paranoia among the British about the dangers of a second Mutiny, and made them hypersensitive about any challenge to their izzat – their prestige as the ruler or sarkar.

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Galbraith, The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor (Berkeley, 1957). 59. See Merrill Dension, Canada’s First Bank: A History of the Bank of Montreal (Toronto, 1967). 60. See M. Westley, Remembrance of Grandeur: The Anglo-Protestant Elite of Montreal 1900–1950 (Montreal, 1990). 61. A. R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago [1869] (Oxford, 1986), p. 32. 62. See D. A. Farnie, East and West of Suez: The Suez Canal in History (Oxford, 1969). 63. The main shipping routes to Australia and New Zealand largely bypassing the Asian ports can be seen in G. Philip and T. S. Sheldrake (eds.), The Chambers of Commerce Atlas (London, 1928 edn), Plate 21. 64. For dhows see E. Gilbert, Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar 1860–1970 (Oxford, 2004). 65.

Egypt by Matthew Firestone

call centre, clean water, credit crunch, friendly fire, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Right to Buy, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, Thales and the olive presses, trade route, urban sprawl, young professional

Egypt’s fledgling cotton industry boomed as production in the USA was disrupted by civil war, and revenues were directed into ever-grander schemes. Grandest of all was the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869 to great fanfare and an audience that included European royalty, including Empress Eugenie of France. In the same year that Khedive (Viceroy) Ismail announced that Egypt was now part of Europe, not Africa, Thomas Cook led the first organised package tour to see the wonders of ancient Egypt. It was the start of an industry that was to become one of Egypt’s core businesses – mass tourism. * * * The opera Aida was originally commissioned for the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal, but Verdi was late delivering and it was first performed on Christmas Eve, 1871, two years after the opening

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The British force the French to leave but their legacy, a fascination with ancient Egypt, lives on. 1805 An Albanian mercenary, Mohammed Ali, exploits the power vacuum left by the French to seize power and establish a new ‘Egyptian’ dynasty; he begins a modernisation program that transforms the country. 1856 Africa’s first railway, between Tanta and Cairo, is built by British engineer Robert Stephenson. The line extended to Suez in 1858 and was popular with Europeans heading to India and the Far East until the opening of the Suez Canal. 1869 Khedive Ismail, Mohammed Ali’s grandson, opens the Suez Canal. The British, who had preferred a railway, soon take control of the waterway as the quickest route to their empire in the East. 1882 British troops invade to suppress nationalist elements in the army. Although they officially restore power to the khedive, Britain effectively rules Egypt in what becomes the ‘veiled protectorate’. 1902 Inauguration of the Aswan Dam, the world’s largest at that time, and the Asyut Barrage, which help control the Nile flood.

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MEDICAL SERVICES Delafrant Hospital ( 322 3663; Sharia Orabi) Public Hospital ( 322 0694; Sharia Safiyya Zaghloul) MONEY Bank of Alexandria (Sharia al-Gomhuriyya; 8.30am-2pm & 6-8pm Sun-Thu) National Bank of Egypt (Sharia al-Gomhuriyya; 9am-2pm & 6.30-8pm Sat-Thu) POST Main post office (Sharia al-Geish; 8.30am-2.30pm Sat-Thu) TOURIST INFORMATION Tourist office ( 323 5289; 8 Sharia Palestine; 9am-6pm Sat-Thu) Sights SUEZ CANAL HOUSE If you’ve ever seen a picture of Port Said, it was probably of the striking green domes of the Suez Canal House, which was built in time for the inauguration of the canal in 1869. Unfortunately, the interior of the building is off limits to visitors. TOWN CENTRE The heart of Port Said is located along the edge of the canal, on and around Sharia Palestine. Here, the waterfront is lined with late 19th-century five-storey buildings complete with wooden balconies, louvered doors and high verandahs in grand belle époque style.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

In 1875, taking advantage of the Egyptian government’s financial distress, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli acquired a significant stake in the canal company. The Suez Canal was now effectively under the protection of the world’s most powerful navy. Lesseps’s shareholders were ecstatic. It did not matter that the work had been expected to take six years but took ten, or that the initial forecast of five million tons of shipping per year through the canal was not realized until well into the 1870s. The future belonged to ever-larger steamships, for which the canal was well suited. By 1880, the value of shares in the Suez Canal company had more than quadrupled, and the company was paying an annual dividend of around 15 percent.

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Then large locks could allow boats to rise up to the level of the lake and sail across to locks that would enable descent to the other side. The Suez Canal has no locks even today, but look closely at a map and you will see a structure with striking similarities to Panama. Lesseps’s engineers dug a canal from the Mediterranean to the Great Bitter Lake and then filled it with ocean water to turn a dry salt bed into a (small) inland sea. Lesseps had drawn the wrong lesson from Suez. Instead of resisting locks, he could have emulated how the natural terrain was used to reduce the amount of digging required. Unfortunately, by the time the Suez Canal was complete, Lesseps was locked into a way of thinking that ignored all other options.

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Throughout we also emphasize how at times different choices were made in different countries, as well as the implications of technologies in the leading economies on the rest of the world, as they spread, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes forcefully, across the globe. Chapter 2 (“Canal Vision”) provides a historical example of how successful visions can lead us astray. The success of French engineers in building the Suez Canal stands in remarkable contrast to their spectacular failure when the same ideas were brought to Panama. Ferdinand de Lesseps persuaded thousands of investors and engineers into the unworkable plan of building a sea-level canal at Panama, resulting in the deaths of more than twenty thousand people and financial ruin for many more.

Great Continental Railway Journeys by Michael Portillo

Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Louis Blériot, railway mania, Suez canal 1869, trade route

A year later, Abdul Hamid was deposed and the new building project, intended like the railway line to immortalise him, became known as the Al Anbariya mosque. The Suez Canal depicted in 1869, the year it was completed BRITISH SPIES AND THE DOOMED AQABA RAILWAY WITH BRITAIN POISED TO GO TO WAR with Germany in 1914, there were some colonial concerns to be addressed. What, for example, would happen to the Suez Canal, the waterway that linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, which was opened in 1869? Built by the French, the British were initially aloof about the project. But in 1875 the Egyptians sought a necessary cash injection by selling their shares in it and Britain came forward as the buyer.

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But in 1875 the Egyptians sought a necessary cash injection by selling their shares in it and Britain came forward as the buyer. The French remained the major shareholders. Not only did the Suez Canal offer a short cut for the maritime journey to India, but it also made it quicker to reach the Persian Gulf at a time when oil was assuming greater significance than ever before. The relationship between Britain and the Ottoman empire had been tested in 1906 when there were plans to extend a branch line of the Hejaz Railway to Aqaba in the north-east – too close to Egypt and the Suez Canal as far as Britain was concerned. Ultimately, plans for the line were scrapped. Carve-up in the Middle East During the First World War, Britain made pledges to co-operative Arab states, implying they would receive independence after victory was achieved.

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According to colleagues, Favre had aged visibly as a result of the stress and condemnation he endured. So neither Escher nor Favre was in the spotlight to receive the plaudits when the railway began running. On its opening, the tunnel was compared as an engineering feat to the recently completed Suez Canal and even on a par with the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Much later, the reputation of both men was restored. Soon it was followed by other major tunnels out of Switzerland. The westerly Simplon tunnel, designed by German engineer Alfred Brandt (1846–1899), was opened in 1906. At nearly 20 km (12½ miles) long, it was for years the longest tunnel in the world and provided a route from London to Istanbul for the Simplon Orient Express.

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

With its favoured position at a maritime crossroads (where the shortest transatlantic route crossed the seaway linking the north and south of Europe), Britain became the main entrepot for the New World's trade with the Old – just as it was for the seaborne trade between Europe and Asia until the cutting of the Suez Canal in 1869. By 1815, London had replaced Amsterdam as the financial centre of Europe, partly because of the wartime blockade of the European mainland, partly because it had been at the centre of a Europe-wide web of war loans and subsidies. The supply of long credit on easy terms from London was the key to business with regions where the local financing of long-distance trade was underdeveloped or lacking.

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By September 1881, an alliance of discontent had made Colonel Arabi, a senior army officer, the dominant power.23 The scale of Egyptian debt, Egypt's importance as the closest and most dynamic of Europe's new Afro-Asian trading partners and her strategic value as the ‘highway’ to the East (drastically increased with the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869) all made an Anglo-French accord with the ruling power in Cairo of the greatest urgency. But the prospects of an agreement with Arabi were always bleak. The Anglo-French officials of the ‘Dual Control’ regarded his movement as a roadblock in the path of financial reform. Without the wholehearted backing of a ‘native’ government, they feared the shrivelling of their influence.

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Pastoralism and mining developed in the vast spaces of Queensland.66 Huge deposits of silver, lead and zinc were found at Broken Hill in New South Wales.67 An infant manufacturing economy emerged behind Victoria's tariffs, and Melbourne (as the local metropolis of gold) became the financial capital of the Australian colonies.68 British investment rushed in. Railway mileage tripled in the decade after 1870 to 4,000 miles and reached 10,000 miles in 1892.69 With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the arrival of the submarine cable in 1872, Australia's long isolation seemed less forbidding. But Europe was still thirty days’ steaming away,70 and up to the 1890s most Australian trade was carried slowly but cheaply in sailing ships.71 In fact, between 1860 and 1890, distance and democracy had combined to fashion a highly distinctive pattern of Australian development.

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

In that year the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (the ‘P&O’) gained a royal charter for a mail monopoly between London and Alexandria. Two years later it had a contract to carry mail between Suez, Sri Lanka, Madras and Calcutta; and by 1845 its service was extended to Singapore and China. In the 1860s and ’70s, India and China were linked to Europe by telegraph. But the greatest change came with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, cutting weeks off the sea route to India, speeding the transit of passengers and mail, and breaking down the barrier (as much psychological as physical) that once seemed to separate Europe from the ‘Eastern World’. ‘The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam’, wrote Joseph Conrad in 1902, ‘let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade.’46 Easier access to Europe awakened the merchants’ interest in neglected backwaters off the main sea lane.

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Steamships, railways and the electric telegraph had been widely adopted in Europe and North America from the 1830s and ’ 40s. By the 1870s they were colonizing vast new areas of the world, carving corridors of access into regions where travel had been difficult (and costly) and information scarce. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant the extension eastward of the steamship lines and their scheduled services, creating the great trunk road of merchant shipping all the way to Shanghai and Yokohama. Submarine cables and the overland telegraph could nowbring commercial and political news from East Asia to Europe within days, and then hours.

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Fourthly, in their colonial territories and in other countries as well, European governments promoted a property regime that would safeguard the interests of expatriate enterprise.66 By local laws if possible, by extraterritorial privilege if necessary (as in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Iran, Siam, China and Japan), the sphere of market institutions was to be steadily expanded. The main driving force behind the newglobal economy was the great improvement in transport and its extension worldwide. Between 1869, when the Suez Canal opened, and 1914, when the Panama Canal was finished, much of the rest of the world was drawn into the nexus of communications that already existed between Europe and America. Steamships, railways and the electric telegraph, with its submarine cables, nowgirdled the earth. After 1900, the extension of this network to include every productive region seemed only a matter of time.

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, classic study, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, New Urbanism, plutocrats, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, young professional

The khedive himself fervently courted, and was in turn pampered by, European rulers: invited to tea with Queen Victoria at Balmoral, and greeted by the French emperor with greater pomp and ceremony than the Ottoman sultan had been in 1867. (He was less tolerant of Western art forms, sacking the Jewish writer James Sanua as court playwright when the latter attacked polygamy and mocked the British.) In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal, attended by European royalty, seemed to confirm Egypt’s arrival in the modern world. Austria’s bemused Emperor Franz Joseph wrote to his wife about the khedive’s ball, which several thousand people attended, including Indian maharajas, Levantine merchants, European diplomats, desert chieftains and ‘very many vulgar people’.50 ‘My country is no longer in Africa,’ Khedive Ismail is reported to have boasted; ‘it is in Europe.’51 The Europeans were even less persuaded by the Egyptian claim to high civilization than they had been by the Ottoman regard for their sovereignty.

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Reading the newspapers in his provincial town, the sixteen-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru (1889 – 1964), later India’s first prime minister, had excitedly followed the early stages of Japan’s war with Russia, fantasizing about his own role in ‘Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thralldom of Europe’.3 The news from Tsushima reached him as he was travelling on a train from Dover to his English public school, Harrow; it immediately put him in ‘high good humour’.4 The Chinese nationalist Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925) was also in London when he heard the news and was similarly exultant. Returning by ship to China in late 1905, Sun was congratulated by Arab port workers at the Suez Canal who thought that he was Japanese.5 Excited speculation about the implications of Japan’s success filled Turkish, Egyptian, Vietnamese, Persian and Chinese newspapers. Newborn babies in Indian villages were named after Japanese admirals. In the United States, the African-American leader W. E. B.

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The Egyptian journalist and politician Ibrahim al-Muwaylihi, one of al-Afghani’s disciples in Cairo, wrote angrily about the local merchant, who ‘has been impoverished by a stagnant market and forced to cling for shelter to the hem of the foreigner, who can, if he pleases, ruin him or allow him to remain where he is.’56 Extortionate taxes imposed by the khedive also made life intolerable for many Egyptians outside the cities. Lady Duff Gordon, a rare European to have spent considerable time in the Egyptian countryside, reported a year after the opening of Suez Canal the exploitation of the fellaheen (peasants) that had made it possible: ‘I cannot describe to you the misery here now – Every day some new tax. Now every beast, camel, cow, sheep, donkey, horse is made to pay. The fellaheen can no longer eat bread; they are now living on barley-meal mixed with water and raw green stuff, vetches etc.’57 In addition to the country’s nascent intelligentsia, the peasantry furnished ripe material for an insurrection.

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

From now on, the races would maintain some distance. The decision that henceforth India would be run not by the East India Company but by the British government meant greater involvement by elected politicians, and required administration on a much more formal basis. The development of fast steam ships, the opening of the Suez Canal in November 1869 and then the laying of telegraph cables made it possible for London not merely to state its will but to intervene to make sure it was carried out. This was to bring about a big change in how the British saw India, and, in turn, how they saw themselves. The Company’s opening up of India had delighted some Europeans.

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The man who held these beliefs, Evelyn Baring, was to play the most significant role in one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic possessions – even though it never formally became a part of the empire. For strategists, imperial ambitions were offset by real practical anxieties. Keeping the empire safe meant, above all, safeguarding India, the grandest possession. That in turn required complete confidence in the security of the Middle East, and especially the safety of the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869 and had cut the journey time to India from months to mere weeks. The anxiety which racked the minds of the guardians of empire was that Egypt lay within the Ottoman Empire, which had been in steady decline throughout the nineteenth century. There had been suggestions before that the safest way to protect British interests was to seize control of Egypt, talk which Viscount Palmerston had earlier disdainfully dismissed, telling a fellow aristocrat that Britain really did not want to control the country ‘any more than any rational man with an estate in the north of England and a residence in the south would have wanted to possess the inns on the north road.

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The country had been exhausted and impoverished by two world wars, had withdrawn from its colonies and was demonstrably unsure quite where its future lay. The United States, the new global policeman, professed itself an enemy of imperialism and, in first undermining British attempts to manage the Palestine issue, and then seeing off the duplicity behind the plot to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, delivered mortal blows to the country’s self-confidence. Colonies seemed to belong to another time in history. And it had all passed so quickly. The fate of the crumbling Ottoman Empire worried European politicians for the best part of a century: the British Empire’s illness was speedy and fatal and carried it off in a few decades.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

By 1855, steamships carried one-third of England's trade with the western Mediterranean and almost all of its trade with northern Europe, and by 1865, steam powered cargoes to and from Alexandria as well. In 1865, the steamship Halley carried a load of coffee from Rio de Janeiro to New York, demolishing the myth that only wooden ships preserved the beans' flavor, and iron ships came to dominate the North and South American East Coast trade.29 The opening of the Suez Canal on November 17, 1869 shortened the distance between London and Bombay from 11,500 to 6,200 miles. This cut the heart out of the long-range advantage of sail. Since the steamsail boundary (shown in Figure 12-1) for 1870 was about seven thousand miles, this meant that the canal's opening abruptly rendered sail uneconomical between Europe and Asia.

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For a detailed discussion of the relative advantages of chilled and frozen beef, see Richard Perren, "The North American Beef and Cattle Trade with Great Britain, 1870-1914," Economic History Review 24, no. 3 (August 1971): 430-434. 44. "Coal Ammonia for Refrigeration," Scientific American LXIV (1891): 241. 45. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin (New York: Crown, 1998), 51-52. 46. Fischer and Nordvik, 11:526. 47. Max Fletcher, "The Suez Canal and World Shipping, 1869-1914," Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (December 1958): 556-573. Chapter 13 1. Cordell Hull, International Trade and Domestic Prosperity (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1934), 5. 2. Joseph M. Jones Jr., Tariff Retaliation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), 74. 3.

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Nordvik, "Maritime Transport and the Integration of the North Atlantic Economy, 1850-1914," in Wolfram Fischer et al., eds., The Emergence of a World Economy 1500-1914, vol. 2, (Wiesbaden: Commissioned by Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986). Fisher, Irving, The Theory of Interest (Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1977). Fletcher, Max, "The Suez Canal and World Shipping, 1869-1914," The Journal of Economic History 18, no. 4 (December 1958): 556-573. Flynn, Dennis, and Arturo Giraldez, "Path Dependence. Time Lags, and the Birth of Globalization: A Critique of O'Rourke and Williamson," European Review of Economic History 8 (April 2004): 81-108. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, accessed at http://www .fao.org/AG/AGAInfo/commissions/docs/greece04/App40.pdf.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia

agricultural Revolution, bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, David Attenborough, disinformation, Eratosthenes, ghettoisation, joint-stock company, long peace, mass immigration, out of africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War

PART FIVE THE FIFTH MEDITERRANEAN, 1830–2010 1. Ever the Twain Shall Meet, 1830–1900 1. Cf. E. Said’s tendentious Orientalism (London, 1978). 2. Z. Karabell, Parting the Desert: the Creation of the Suez Canal (London, 2003), pp. 147, 183. 3. Ibid., pp. 28–37; J. Marlowe, The Making of the Suez Canal (London, 1964), pp. 44–5. 4. Marlowe, Making of the Suez Canal, pp. 1–3. 5. Karabell, Parting the Desert, pp. 56–7; Lord Kinross, Between Two Seas: the Creation of the Suez Canal (London, 1968), pp. 20–30. 6. Kinross, Between Two Seas, pp. 32–3; R. Coons, Steamships, Statesmen, and Bureaucrats: Austrian Policy towards the Steam Navigation Company of the Austrian Lloyd 1836–1848 (Wiesbaden, 1975), pp. 148–61. 7.

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I have identified five distinct periods: a First Mediterranean that descended into chaos after 1200 BC, that is, around the time Troy is said to have fallen; a Second Mediterranean that survived until about AD 500; a Third Mediterranean that emerged slowly and then experienced a great crisis at the time of the Black Death (1347); a Fourth Mediterranean that had to cope with increasing competition from the Atlantic, and domination by Atlantic powers, ending around the time of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869; finally, a Fifth Mediterranean that became a passage-way to the Indian Ocean, and found a surprising new identity in the second half of the twentieth century. My ‘Mediterranean’ is resolutely the surface of the sea itself, its shores and its islands, particularly the port cities that provided the main departure and arrival points for those crossing it.

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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.

CultureShock! Egypt: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette (4th Edition) by Susan L. Wilson

air freight, anti-communist, call centre, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, land reform, RAND corporation, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route

Going through the Canal shortens the distance from the Far East to Europe by 8,047 km (5,000 miles), thus vitally affecting commercial shipping. 18 CultureShock! Egypt This tanker makes its way through the Suez Canal, the artifical waterway which brings in most of the foreign currency for Egypt. The Canal has helped to revolutionise shipping by shortening the distance from Europe to the Far East. Built by French companies starting in 1859, it opened on 17 November 1869. Great Britain acquired the Canal in 1875 and Egypt subsequently nationalised it in the 1950s. A sea level artificial waterway with no locks, its total length is 169 km (105 miles) including approach channels.

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Although Muhammad Ali was not Egyptian (he was Albanian by birth), his great organisational skills and vision for a rich and powerful Egypt provided the impetus for suppressing the Mamluks. Muhammad Ali’s successors ruled in theory on behalf of the Ottoman sultan, but in reality functioned as independent rulers (called khedives or ‘viceroys’). The Suez Canal was opened in 1869 during the leadership of Khedive Ismail. Unfortunately, for Egyptians, Ismail overextended Egypt financially and was forced to sell the Egyptian government’s share of the Canal to the British. As a result, British control over Egyptian finances ensued. A popular revolt threatened an overthrow of the khedive system in 1882, but was halted when the British intervened.

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Bani Hasan al Shurraq If you are interested to find out more, read my article about a not-so-visited, but very interesting, Middle Kingdom site at Bani Hasan al Shurraq near el-Minya at: http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/banihasan.htm. Suez Canal Located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, the Suez Canal is one of the world’s most important artificial waterways. It connects the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea and the Gulf of Suez with the Mediterranean Sea. The city of Port Said is located at the northern terminus on the Mediterranean Sea. Ismailia, the administrative headquarters, is about midway through the Canal. The southern terminus is at the city of Suez. Prior to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the Suez Canal held centre stage in several confrontations. The Canal provides the single largest source of foreign currency in Egypt’s economy.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Simonstown looked as though it had been there for ever, and for ever there would stay—like the great Cape above, or the Royal Navy itself, without which Victoria’s world seemed inconceivable.1 5 But there was a weak link in this network of strength. Most of the imperial bases were concerned au fond with India, the greatest and richest of the British possessions, but in 1869 the position of India in the world was shifted by the opening of the Suez Canal. This was a notably un-British event. The French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps had built the canal, French capital had largely financed it, the French Empress Eugénie had sailed to Egypt in her royal yacht to open it. At first the British unaccountably failed to grasp its significance.

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For one thing they realized that control of the terrible African slave trade, still an issue close to their hearts, lay in the control of the Nile’s headwaters. For another they hazily conceived that the security of India was dependent upon command of the Nile: the Nile governed Egypt, it was reasoned, Egypt contained the Suez Canal, the Suez Canal was the spine of Empire.1 The British repeatedly claimed that they had no designs on Egypt, but nobody believed them for long. Once Disraeli had acquired the Suez Canal shares, Britain’s physical presence on the Nile seemed only a matter of time. The Egyptian State was still in theory a dependency of the Ottoman Empire, with the Khedive as the Sultan’s Viceroy, and its financial condition was so chaotic and corrupt that the Western Powers had already intervened to control its economy and protect their own interests.

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The Khedive of Egypt was theoretically a satrap of the Sultan of Turkey, so that whoever controlled the Dardanelles had a hypothetical control of the Suez isthmus too: when the British armies fought in the Crimea, when the music-hall audiences sang the Jingo song, when the statesmen met at Berlin to hammer out the future of the Balkans, Egypt was always in the wings. By 1875 even the British had to admit the importance of the Suez Canal, and very galling it was. In the person of Lieutenant Waghorn they themselves had pioneered the Egyptian route to India, and though the Canal Company was a French concern, with the Khedive holding a 40 per cent minority interest, by 1875 more than three-fifths of its traffic flew the British flag, and nearly half the ships that sailed from Britain to India took the Suez route.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Bagehot grumbled in 1875 when Disraeli, as prime minister, opted to buy 176,602 shares in the Suez Canal from the Khedive of Egypt, bringing the total Britain owned to just under half. As an investment yielding 5 per cent it was sound, and would allow the Khedive to ‘reform his finances’. But Bagehot was unsure if it would solve the problem it was meant to address – making sure the passage to India stayed open, and in British hands. ‘We do not know what will be the course of history or the necessities of future times.’ ‘If we are prepared to take hold of Egypt, will this share in the Suez Canal help us in so doing? Will it not be better to take the country when necessary, without making public beforehand our intention to do so?’

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Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain 1832–1938, Baltimore 1992, pp. 318–23. 146.‘Japan’, 24 October 1863. 147.‘Japanese Offenses and British Retaliation’, 7 November 1863. William Watson, ‘The Namamugi Incident, 1862’, History Today, May 1964, p. 325. 148.‘The Financial Effect of the Suez Canal Purchase’, 27 November 1875; ‘The Political Effect of the Suez Canal Purchase’, 27 November 1875. 149.‘The Indian Viceroyalty’, 5 December 1863. Did Bagehot once remark to Hutton, as the latter claimed, that ‘he would have been glad to find a fair excuse for giving up India, for throwing the Colonies on their own resources, and for persuading the English people to accept deliberately the place of a fourth or fifth rate European power?’

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He secured the post of Commissioner of the Customs for Greg – also in Paris, transcribing his chats with the former premier François Guizot. Wartime London was a similar whirlwind of Allied loans and socializing, with Wilson near the centre: balls in honour of Louis-Napoleon, medal ceremonies for crippled heroes, and dinner parties; at one Ferdinand de Lesseps pitched his plans for the Suez Canal to Wilson over pudding as the poet Matthew Arnold, another guest, looked over the proposal.106 Neither Wilson’s editorial interventions nor his social life passed unnoticed in the wider liberal world, with which he had sometimes disagreed on foreign policy as early as 1850.107 Cobden and Bright furiously opposed the Crimean War, and had savage things to say about former brothers-in-arms who lent it support.

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World by Christian Wolmar

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, company town, high-speed rail, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, railway mania, refrigerator car, side project, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, urban sprawl

Even more strangely, the arrival of the French Compagnie Universale du Canal Interoceanique on the isthmus to start building the canal in the late 1870s proved initially to be the saviour of the railway, which had begun to lose traffic following the completion of the transcontinental within the United States in 1869. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the canal’s first but ultimately unsuccessful engineer, realized that he needed to get control of the railway to ensure he had a monopoly control of transportation in the area and his company bought up the shares at a far higher price than merited by the profitability of the railway. The French invested considerably in improvements to the railway, but de Lesseps, who had built the Suez Canal which was also completed in 1869, was unable to repeat the trick in Panama, defeated by cost, disease and the impossibility of realizing his plan to build a sea-level canal without locks.

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Interestingly, although Italy paid for half the railway, ‘the early commercial advantage was all to Germany, though northern Italy was being provided with the raw materials to develop its industry and, eventually, to take advantage of rich markets in northern Europe’ 27 – a classic example of a railway spreading wealth to both its extremities. It changed the face of European commerce and was the most significant engineering feat affecting world trade other than the Suez Canal which opened in 1869. Its success stimulated the building of other Alpine tunnels, notably the Simplon which, at over twelve miles, became the world’s longest. It was designed to link the upper Rhine with Italy and, begun in the summer of 1898, it only took eight years to complete thanks to further technological progress on drilling equipment.

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The impetus to build the railway was rooted in the history of the Russian occupation of Siberia. Russia had established a base on the Pacific as early as the seventeenth century but it was only in the mid-nineteenth century that its territories there began to be threatened by Western interests. The development of efficient steamships in the 1840s and the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 made it easier for the major Western nations to reach the Pacific side of Russian territory than for Russia itself. The building of the American transcontinental railway and the beginnings of the Panama Canal project raised fears among the Russian elite that the country’s territorial integrity would be threatened by the growing commercial opportunities afforded by improved transport routes.

Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent E. Calder

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, air freight, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, geopolitical risk, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interest rate swap, intermodal, Internet of things, invention of movable type, inventory management, John Markoff, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, zero-sum game

As in the case of the transcontinental railroad, the actual construction was preceded by a lengthy period of conceptualization, change in national political-economic incentives, and consensus building. The result was a clear conversion of America’s international standing from regional into full-fledged global power. Conceptualization began even before completion of the transcontinental railway itself, although not by Americans. In 1869 Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, an entrepreneurial French aristocrat, completed construction of the Suez Canal, with an eye to revolutionizing world shipping through constructed waterways. In May 1879 he convened the International Congress for the Study of an Interoceanic Canal, to build support for an analogous sealevel waterway in Panama, for which he began construction in 1881.

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The Arctic Ocean, over half of which fronts on Russia, including the most passable routes, is increasingly attractive to China on three counts. First, polar transportation sea routes from China to Europe are much more direct than those through the Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal, as suggested in Map 7.2. Indeed, traversing the Arctic Ocean cuts 6,000 kilometers off the nautical distance from Shanghai to Hamburg.26 From northern Chinese ports like Dalian, travel time to northwestern Europe during the July-to-­ November open season is potentially 25 percent shorter via the Arctic than via the Suez Canal.27 Second, whatever the remaining technical difficulty of navigating in frigid waters, Arctic sea lanes are potentially more strategically accommodating for China in a strategic sense than those of the southern seas, given the PRC’s emerging geostrategic differences with the United States.

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The Arctic is estimated to hold 30 percent of the world’s entire undiscovered supply of natural gas and 13 percent of its untapped oil, not to mention substantial stores of 146 chapter 7 Northern Sea Route Travel time: 35 days Travel window: July to November ARCTIC Rotterdam, Netherlands RUSSIA Dalian, China Suez Canal Strait of Malacca INDIAN OCEAN Suez Canal Route Travel time: 45 days Travel window: Year-round map 7.2 The new Eurasian Arctic shipping frontier coal, iron, uranium, gold, copper, and fish.28 China is not an Arctic nation, and an estimated 88 percent of Arctic resources fall within 200 miles of the coastlines, where they can be claimed by the five littoral nations (Russia, Canada, the US, Norway, and Denmark).29 Yet over half of this entire coastline is indisputably Russian, creating natural opportunities for Sino-Russian cooperation, provided that global warming intensifies, China’s growth continues, and Arctic resource development proceeds as expected.

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature by Ben Tarnoff

California gold rush, interchangeable parts, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, new economy, New Journalism, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, South of Market, San Francisco, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman

No single event marked the shift from the rich, hopeful 1860s to the stagnant, gloomy 1870s more than the transcontinental railroad. The messianic rhetoric that greeted its completion had begun to fray almost right away. In November 1869, six months after the rails met in Utah, the Suez Canal had opened in Egypt. Gone was the possibility of dominating the lucrative Asia trade—Europe now had a faster route to the Far East. There were bigger difficulties ahead. Before 1869, California’s relative isolation had sheltered its economy from eastern competition. San Francisco had enjoyed a profitable stranglehold on regional commerce: everything passed through its port.

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The gold rush had Industrialization of gold mining: Martin Ridge, “Why They Went West: Economic Opportunity on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier,” American West 1.3 (May 1964), pp. 48–50, and Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope, pp. 45–47. Corporate agriculture and land monopoly: Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream, pp. 131–132, 164–165. No single event Suez Canal: SFLF, p. 351. There were bigger California’s challenges after 1869: Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 [1935]), pp. 60–65; Robert Knight, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1900–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 12–14; Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, pp. 130–134; SFLF, pp. 296–297; William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 34–40.

…

CHAPTER SIX The connection couldn’t The telegram announcing the delay arrived on the afternoon of May 7, 1869; see Daily Alta California, May 8, 1869, and San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 7, 1869. Reasons for delay: David Haward Bain, Empire Express, pp. 648–652. At sunrise, cannon Celebration on May 8: San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 8, 1869, and Daily Alta California, May 9, 1869. By the time Celebration on May 10: Daily Alta California, May 11, 1869, and San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, May 10, 1869. One of the illuminated signs held during that evening’s festivities read “The Pacific Railroad, Uncle Sam’s Waistband—He would burst without it.”

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

This is what Lord Carnarvon had never shrunk from telling Disraeli and the Cabinet. To establish this base, Britain had grabbed the Cape temporarily from the Dutch East India Company during the French Revolutionary War, and made the occupation permanent after 1806. The Cape then guarded the only direct sea-lanes to India and beyond. In 1877, despite the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, two-thirds of Britain’s trade with India and the East still took the Cape route, and to guard it Britain needed not only a fortress-base – like Gibraltar – but a fortress-colony – like Canada – whose loyalty could be counted on, come hell or high water. In fact, intermittent rebellion had proved a feature of the Cape from the days of the Dutch East India Company.

…

Abbas tried, as far as he dared, which was not far, to encourage European investment, especially British investment in railways. Said, who favoured the French, was much more daring than Abbas. He gave Ferdinand de Lesseps the momentous concession for the Suez Canal. However, by the time he died, the French-built canal was only half-way through the sands of the isthmus. It was Ismael who squared the Sultan, completed the canal in 1869, and made it the dazzling symbol of the new Egypt, not just a cut through the isthmus but a link between continents. ‘We are not now a country of Africa,’ he said proudly, ‘but a country of Europe.’4 Implicit in everything Ismael did was the idea of partnership with Europe.

…

During the same period the national debt had risen to £90 million, and most of this reckless borrowing had simply been spent paying foreigners the exorbitant interest on earlier loans. Where would it end? To the tune of Verdi’s Aida – commissioned for the opening of the Suez Canal – the country was marching grandly into bankruptcy. In 1875 Ismael could only keep the wolf from the door by selling to the British government his last big asset, his £4 million holding in the Suez Canal shares. Next year the wolf was back at the door and he was technically bankrupt. He defaulted on the interest on foreign loans. The European Powers then established the Caisse de la Dette Publique, an international commission to protect the foreign bond-holders who had made fortunes lending money to Ismael at extortionate rates of interest.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

In addition, in what was to prove of great importance to his son, the elder Samuel had built up a network of trusted relationships with some of the great British trading houses—run mainly by expatriate Scots—in Calcutta, Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, and other parts of the Far East. The younger Marcus was born in 1853. And in 1869, at age sixteen, after some schooling in Brussels and Paris, he went to work on his father's ledgers. At that very moment in America, John Rockefeller, fourteen years older than Samuel, was about to begin his decade-long campaign to consolidate the oil industry. Throughout the entire world, new technology was radically transforming trading and international commerce. In 1869, the Suez Canal was opened, knocking four thousand miles off the journey to the Far East. Steamships were taking over from sail.

…

And his talents did not end there. At the age of sixty-four, he married a woman of twenty, and then, forthwith, proceeded to father twelve children. Though long discussed, such a waterway was thought to be impossible until de Lesseps floated a private concern, the Suez Canal Company, which won a concession from Egypt to build a canal and began actual construction in 1859. A decade later, in 1869, the canal was finally completed. The British were quick to recognize a good thing when they saw it, especially when it substantially reduced the travel time to India, the jewel of the empire, and they rued their lack of a direct stake in "our highway to India," as the Prince of Wales dubbed the waterway.

…

Samuel needed a new, larger, technologically more advanced type of tanker, and he commissioned the design and construction of such ships. He needed guaranteed supplies of kerosene from Batum, in sufficient volume and priced to reflect the savings gained by not having to tin the kerosene. He needed access to the Suez Canal, which would cut the voyage by four thousand miles, pulling costs down further and increasing his competitive advantage against Standard, whose oil traveled to the Far East on sailing ships around the Cape of Good Hope. But the Suez Canal was closed to tankers on grounds of safety; indeed, Standard's tankers had already been refused entrance. But that did not deter Samuel. He would batter down the door. Samuel also required large storage tanks in all of the major Asian ports.

To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World's Greatest Railroad by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, Cape to Cairo, Crossrail, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, railway mania, refrigerator car, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban planning

Indeed, during the conflict Russia had even feared a British attack on its Pacific coast; and in the 1880s the two countries nearly came to war several times over British occupation of Afghanistan, which was intended to create a buffer between its Indian colony and Russia, whose territorial ambitions were creeping southwards. According to Marks, ‘the situation was aggravated by the imminent completion of the Canadian Pacific railroad, which would cut the journey between England and Japan from the 52 days it took through the Suez canal to 37 days’.11 There were even incorrect allegations that the British had built and financed the Canadian Pacific, which was eventually completed in 1885, and these arguments were used to strengthen the case for building the Siberian railway. China, too, came heavily into the equation. Manchuria, formerly an empty buffer zone between the two great Asian empires, was being populated and there was talk of various railways across its territory.

…

As an expression of gratitude for Russia’s benevolence in arranging and guaranteeing this loan for reparations, the Chinese sent Li Hongzhang, a very senior politician who had led the army during the fighting, as its representative to the coronation of Nicholas II. Witte, informed that Li was arriving by way of the Suez Canal, machinated to ensure that he was not met by any European politicians during the trip, so that they could negotiate the terms for the railway through Manchuria on his arrival in St Petersburg. Witte despatched an envoy, Prince Esper Ukhtomsky, to intercept Li at the canal. There was no shortage of princes in tsarist Russia and, in truth, Ukhtomsky was a pretty minor one, but nonetheless his rank made him a suitable greeter for the Chinese aristocrat and he proved successful in steering Li to St Petersburg before any English or German diplomats could seek him out.

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In the east, work on the Ussuri section, barely 500 miles long and running through territory that was flat and seemed to be relatively easy, progressed the slowest. It was not only the usual difficulties in finding the right type of labour, but materials too were hard to obtain given the remoteness of the region. Everything had to be shipped from Odessa on the Black Sea, a journey through the Suez Canal that took at best forty days, and often more. Moreover, Vyazemsky’s men were hampered by the variable climate. While it was to be expected that work would grind to a halt in the sub-zero temperatures of midwinter – although this area’s proximity to the sea means it is far warmer in winter than in deepest Siberia – it was the summer rains that caused the unexpected delays.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

But by 1845, Brunel had built a screw-propelled ship for the Atlantic crossing, the SS Great Britain. It took further technical innovations such as compound and triple-expansion engines, which hugely increased fuel efficiency by using steam several times over, to make regular long-haul journeys possible. Coaling stations allowed steamships to carry more cargo, and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 saved nearly 4,000 miles on the China run. The hegemony of British shipping was ensured by the largest naval force in the world, which from 1889 onwards was required by an Act of Parliament to have at least as many battleships as the next two largest navies in the world combined. British trade was underpinned by the vastly greater degree of mechanization that gave British industry a huge advantage over its competitors, allowing it to produce more goods, faster, in greater quantities, and to a higher standard.

…

Fast sailing ships raced to be the first to bring the new year’s tea from China back to Europe, with the tea-clipper Cutty Sark losing a famous race against its rival Thermopylae in 1872: both ships left Shanghai on 18 June, and arrived back in London on 19 and 10 October respectively. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 gave a key advantage to steamers, since sailing ships still had to go via the Cape of Good Hope. Competition was even fiercer for transatlantic crossings, and the rivalry between shipping lines soon became a symbol for the prowess of the countries where they had their onshore headquarters, with the Germans taking the prize from the British in 1897 but losing it in 1909 to the British liner Mauretania, which logged an average speed of more than 26 knots, a record that stood until 1927.

…

Foreshadowing the bombing of the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, the only ice-free Russian port in the Pacific, in February 1904. After a lengthy siege, Russia surrendered Port Arthur in January 1905. In February, the Russians lost a major battle at Mukden, where their losses totalled 90,000. In May the Russian Baltic fleet reached the scene of the conflict after many months, having been denied use of the Suez Canal by the British, who were allied to the Japanese and had been annoyed by Russian ships firing on their fishing vessels in the North Sea in the mistaken belief that they were Japanese gunboats. The Japanese annihilated the Russian fleet, sinking eight battleships with no major losses of their own, and their ground forces occupied Sakhalin Island.

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices by Robert McNally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, collective bargaining, credit crunch, energy security, energy transition, geopolitical risk, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Ida Tarbell, index fund, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, joint-stock company, market clearing, market fundamentalism, megaproject, moral hazard, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, price stability, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transfer pricing, vertical integration

But before the agreement could become effective, the deal collapsed apparently due to objections from the Russian government.100 Voluntary efforts to combine were proving just as difficult internationally as they had at home. Meanwhile, another major threat to Standard Oil’s global dominance was brewing in Asia. London-based trader Marcus Samuel won the right to sell Russian oil in Asia, designing ingenious tanker ships that could cut costs, especially when routed through the newly opened Suez Canal. Samuel’s company, named Shell in honor of his father who had sold ornate shell gift boxes, declared total war against Standard Oil; the two companies were soon pouring resources into refining and distribution infrastructure in order to capture market share.101 Standard Oil and Shell actively sought to acquire stakes and develop large oil fields in Asia, closer to consuming markets.

…

The third price hike was precipitated by the 1956 Suez Crisis, and serves as a good illustration not just of the impact of TRC involvement but of the difficulty in managing a global market—and one centered in an increasing fractious region. In October 1956, mounting tensions between nationalist Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and Britain, France, and Israel boiled over into military conflict. Disruption in traffic through the Suez Canal and of oil piped to the eastern Mediterranean from Middle Eastern fields pushed oil prices up, and shortages threatened Western Europe (which depended on Middle Eastern supplies). Europe clamored for more oil from the United States. Washington acquiesced and began planning for the possibility of a prolonged disruption in Middle Eastern oil.

…

States had assured Stewart the oil was available, although a tanker shortage might impede rapid resupply of the East Coast or Europe if Middle Eastern barrels were lost.120 Yet, Texas was in no hurry to increase production; in fact the TRC cut production quotas for October, although it promised to reverse policy if an emergency developed.121 The possibility turned to reality as fighting caused closure of the Suez Canal, which, along with the sabotage of an Iraqi pipeline to the Mediterranean, resulted in the loss of 1.5 mb/d or 10 percent of global supply in November.122 Washington implemented emergency plans to pool oil supplies. The large oil companies, located primarily in western Texas with good transportation links to Gulf ports, immediately urged the TRC to sharply increase quotas to enable greater exports of oil.

The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

Brownian motion, deindustrialization, Honoré de Balzac, Louis Pasteur, New Economic Geography, Peace of Westphalia, price stability, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban sprawl

Apart from the overgrown, collapsing terraces that were cut into the hillsides and the almost windowless tenements where the heated silkworms munched the leaves and made the sound of heavy rain, there is nothing in the verdant scenery on either side of the Rhône to show that life in the land of industrial vegetation was just as hard and unpredictable as it was in the foundries and coalfields. In 1852, a disease called pébrine began to spread among the silkworms. By the time Louis Pasteur discovered the cause and a cure in 1869, the industry had collapsed, the Suez Canal had opened and cheaper silk was being imported from the East. A worm had brought prosperity and a micro-organism took it away. At about the same time, the vines that smallholders had rushed to plant on their plots of rye and wheat were attacked by a peppery mildew called oidium.

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She left in disgust and returned to Paris, where all the culinary wonders of France could be discovered and enjoyed. 15 Postcards of the Natives A CENTURY AND A HALF after Windham’s expedition to the glaciers of Savoy, when cyclists were pedalling over the Pyrenees and the first cars were chugging along the dusty roads of France, it would be hard to believe that there was anything left to explore – though the fact that the grandest canyon in Europe somehow escaped attention until 1896, when it was discovered less than twenty miles from a departmental capital (p. 335), suggests that the country was not quite as well known as it seemed to be. In 1869, a daily newspaper pointed out that it would soon be possible to travel ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ by using the Mont Cenis tunnel and the Suez Canal. Jules Verne read the articles and used the title for his novel Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873), in which the journey across France takes up just four lines of Phileas Fogg’s notebook: Left London, Wednesday 2 October, 8.45 pm.

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It was not until 1857 that another epic expedition began to dot the entire country with the circular metal plaques that appear like numerical clues in a gigantic treasure hunt, embedded in the parapet of a bridge, the wall of a church or the plinth of a roadside cross. These were the points required for a complete geodesic survey. The expedition was led by the surveyor of the Suez Canal, Paul-Adrien Bourdaloue. Within eight years, survey points 1,000 metres apart formed a preliminary network of 15,000 kilometres, at which point the French government withdrew 50 per cent of the funding. Napoleon would not have been surprised to learn that this official indifference to geographical truth had disastrous consequences.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

So they and the Turks managed to put a stop to the digging. Napoleon III helped form an international organization to oversee the canal, and work started again in 1864. The two sea levels were so close that no locks were needed (to raise or lower ships to different water levels.) The Suez Canal was first opened to traffic on November 17, 1869. The implications to world trade were amazing. Transportation costs dropped, depending on distance, by a factor of three or more. As importantly, distance and time became deterministic. The trip from Malaya to England to deliver tin took exactly three months, which was the same time it took for copper to arrive from Chile.

…

It was a financial failure. The opening of the amazing Suez Canal did away with many of the long voyages that Brunel envisioned. It was sold for a song in 1864, but ended up with a place in history. The Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company contracted with the Great Eastern’s new owners, the Great Eastern Steamship Company, to lay cable that would connect England to North America in 1866. You see, it was the only ship large enough to hold the massive spools of telegraph cable to be laid on the ocean floor. But I’ll get to that later. *** The Suez Canal was the next cost reducer. With the Atlantic tamed by steam, the next challenge to lower transportation costs was a route to India and China.

…

Contracts for the purchase or sale of a commodity three months into the future allowed buyers or shippers to hedge their business, lowering the cost of risk. We’ll need these financial markets in this story soon. Within three years, the canal almost went bankrupt, and Egypt was forced to buy most of the shares of the Suez Canal Compagnie it didn’t own, mortgaging the future profits of the only decent business it had: cotton (who can resist the subtle feel of Egyptian weave bath towels?). By 1875, Egypt was going broke. Who needed to hire local workers to load or unload when you could just cruise through the canal? Cotton profits were going to the bank.

The Rough Guide to Egypt (Rough Guide to...) by Dan Richardson, Daniel Jacobs

Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, colonial rule, disinformation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Livingstone, I presume, satellite internet, self-driving car, sexual politics, Skype, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

When Mohammed Ali died insane in 1849, his successor Abbas (1848–54) closed the country’s factories and secular schools and opened Egypt to free trade, thus retarding industrialization. Said Pasha (1854–63) granted a concession to a French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, to build the Suez Canal – a project completed in 1869, by which time Khedive Ismail (1863–79) was in power. He transformed Cairo, spending lavishly on modernization, but exorbitant interest rates had to be paid on European loans. To stave off bankruptcy, he sold his Suez Canal shares to the British government in 1875. Ismail was deposed by his son Tewfiq (1879–92), whose own fiscal power was limited by the French and British, to the disgust of patriotic Egyptians.

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The Canal scarcely impinges on the leafy, villa-lined streets of Ismailiya, once the residence of the Suez Canal Company’s European staff and now a popular honeymoon destination for Egyptians. By contrast, with its evocative waterfront, beaches and duty-free shopping, Port Said feels like Alexandria minus its cultural baggage – and a place that’s somehow more authentic as a maritime city. WALKING BY THE CANAL, PORT SAID Highlights 1 Ship-watching on the Suez Canal International ferries and supertankers are among the many giant ships that ply the 163km-long Suez Canal, which remains an important trade link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. 2 Ismailiya This European-style garden city was constructed for the foreign employees of the Suez Canal Company, and some of Ismailiya’s leafy boulevards lined with colonial villas still look much as they did in the 1930s. 3 Limbo Festival Not what you might assume, this fascinating festival is held annually in Ismailiya a week after Easter and involves locals burning dolls symbolizing pet hates – footballers and politicians are popular targets. 4 Colonial architecture Port Said’s crumbling but atmospheric nineteenth-century townhouses highlight the city’s blend of French, British and Italian influences – some of the timber-porched buildings even have a touch of New Orleans about them

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In February 2012, 74 people were killed at a riot at a football match in Port Said. Many believe the violence was politically motivated, and rumours that the police had failed to intervene sparked days of clashes across Egypt in which a further sixteen people died. * * * SUEZ CANAL FACTS AND FIGURES The 163km long Suez Canal, the world’s third longest, generally handles up to fifty ships a day (though its full capacity is 75) with an average transit time of fifteen hours. During its closure in the early 1970s, supertankers were built to travel around Africa – and proved too large to pass through Suez once it reopened.

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby

An Inconvenient Truth, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, Burning Man, centre right, COVID-19, disinformation, epigenetics, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial engineering, George Floyd, haute couture, if you build it, they will come, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, lockdown, post-work, psychological pricing, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

In the years that followed, the Egyptian Army formed a special unit, the Fedayeen, and launched terrorist attacks against civilians on an almost daily basis. The Sinai War (October–November 1956). Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was spoiling for a second round with Israel. Egypt also blocked two crucial waterways for Israel (the Tiran Straits and the Suez Canal) and encouraged Fedayeen attacks. This motivated Israel to join the French and Brits for a failed attempt to try and take back the Suez Canal. This was mostly a French initiative, but the Brits wanted the canal, and the Israelis wanted to stop the Fedayeen (and open the waterways and halt Egypt’s arming), so everyone had an agenda. The Six Day War (June 5–June 10, 1967).

…

It was a time of great uncertainty. And as the major powers hunkered down to prepare for the war to end all wars, the British military recruited a small, elite team to map out the Negev desert. Huh??? Why, on the brink of a world war, did the Brits care so much about this chunk of empty land? Three words: the Suez Canal. This shy little waterway might not look like much, but it was the single body of water that directly connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. Meaning it was the single thing that connected the East to the West. Meaning it was the single thing that connected the British Empire to its most important colony—India.

…

One important part of their agreement to leave Palestine had to do with the British Empire giving up its hold on India. As soon as that was done (on August 15, 1947), the Brits no longer needed the region to defend the path to India, so they were thrilled to give up their Mandate over Palestine and just kept control over that oh-so-important route, creating the Suez Canal Zone (militarized, of course, until 1956). The UK (and the US and the rest of the world) knew the Arabs were vehemently and aggressively against the existence of any type of a Jewish state,2 and in order to not upset them they decided to simply leave the Jews and the Arabs to duke it out on their own, which they would soon do.

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

1401 First Lollard Martyr 1403 Percy’s Revolt; Henry Percy killed at Shrewsbury 1406 James I of Scots 1409 Owen Glyndŵr 1411 Foundation of Guildhall in London 1413 Henry V 1415 Agincourt 1420 Treaty of Troyes; Paston Letters 1422 Henry VI 1429 Joan of Arc at Orléans 1437 James II of Scots 1450 Cade’s Rebellion 1453 End of Hundred Years War; Gutenberg Bible 1455 Wars of the Roses begin 1460 James III of Scots 1461 Edward IV c.1474 Caxton prints first book in English 1483 Richard III 1485 Henry VII; founding of the Yeomen of the Guard 1488 James IV of Scots 1492 Christopher Columbus reaches America 1509 Henry VIII marries Catherine of Aragon 1513 James V of Scots 1519 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor 1527 Henry VIII fails in attempt to divorce Catherine of Aragon 1533 Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn; Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury 1536 Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour; Wales annexed to England 1540 Henry VIII marries and divorces Anne of Cleves; marries Catherine Howard 1540 Henry VIII, King of Ireland 1542 Mary, Queen of Scots 1547 Edward VI 1549 First Book of Common Prayer 1553 Mary I 1556 Cranmer executed 1558 Elizabeth I 1561 Mary, Queen of Scots returns to Scotland from France 1562 British slave trade starts 1567 James VI, King of Scotland 1571 First anti-Catholic Penal Law 1580 Drake’s circumnavigation 1587 Mary, Queen of Scots executed 1596 Robert Cecil, Secretary of State 1600 British East India Company incorporated 1601 Essex executed 1603 James I 1603 Ralegh treason trial and imprisonment 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible 1616 Death of William Shakespeare 1618 Ralegh executed; Thirty Years War starts 1625 Charles I 1632 Lord Baltimore granted patent for the settlement of Maryland 1641 The Grand Remonstrance issued 1642 Civil War starts; Battle of Edgehill 1643 Battle of Newbury 1644 Battle of Marston Moor 1645 New Model Army established 1649 Charles I executed; massacres at Wexford and Drogheda 1651 Charles II crowned at Scone; Hobbes’ Leviathan published 1655 Jamaica captured 1658 Cromwell dies 1660 Charles II; Declaration of Breda; Pepys begins his diary 1662 The Royal Society; Boyle’s Law 1666 Fire of London 1670 Hudson’s Bay Company 1673 Test Act 1678 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress 1685 James II 1689 William III and Mary II 1690 Battle of the Boyne 1692 Massacre of Glencoe 1694 Bank of England 1695 Bank of Scotland 1702 Queen Anne 1704 Battle of Blenheim; capture of Gibraltar 1707 Union with Scotland 1714 George I 1719 Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe 1722 Walpole, first Prime Minister 1727 George II 1740 War of Austrian Succession; Arne composes ‘Rule Britannia’ 1742 Handel’s Messiah 1746 Battle of Culloden 1751 Clive captures Arcot 1755 Dr Johnson’s Dictionary 1756 Seven Years War 1759 General Wolfe dies at Battle of Quebec 1760 George III 1765 Stamp Act; Hargreaves’ spinning jenny 1767 Revd Laurence Stone’s Tristram Shandy 1768 Royal Academy of Arts founded 1772 Warren Hastings, first Governor General of Bengal 1773 Boston Tea Party 1774 Priestley isolates oxygen 1775 American Revolution – Lexington and Concord 1776 American Declaration of Independence 1779 Captain Cook killed in Hawaii 1780 Gordon Riots; Epsom Derby 1781 Battle of Yorktown 1783 Pitt the Younger PM 1788 Regency Crisis 1789 French Revolution 1792 Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man 1799 Napoleon 1801 Union with Ireland 1805 Trafalgar 1807 Abolition of Slave Trade Act 1815 Waterloo 1820 George IV 1828 University of London founded 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act 1830 William IV 1832 First Reform Act 1833 Abolition of slavery in British colonies Act 1834 Houses of Parliament burned down 1836 Births, Marriages & Deaths Act 1837 Queen Victoria 1838 Public Records Office founded 1839 Bed Chamber Crisis; Opium War 1840 Prince Albert; Treaty of Waitangi 1843 Joule’s First Law 1844 Rochdale Pioneers; first telegraph line in England 1846 Repeal of Corn Laws 1847 Marks and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto 1849 Punjab conquered 1850 Public libraries; Tennyson, Poet Laureate 1854 Crimean War; British Medical Association founded 1855 Daily Telegraph founded; Palmerston PM 1857 Sepoy Rebellion (Indian Mutiny); Trollope’s Barchester Towers 1858 Canning, first Viceroy of India 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species 1861 Prince Albert dies; American Civil War 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassinated 1867 Second Reform Act; first bicycle 1868 TUC 1869 Suez Canal opened; Cutty Sark launched 1870 Death of Dickens 1876 Victoria made Empress of India 1880 Gladstone PM 1881 First Boer War 1884 Third Reform Act 1885 Gordon dies at Khartoum 1887 Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee 1891 Elementary school fees abolished 1895 Salisbury PM 1896 Daily Mail founded 1898 Omdurman 1899 Second Boer War 1900 Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius 1901 Edward VII 1903 Suffragettes 1904 Entente Cordiale 1908 Borstal opened 1909 Old Age Pensions 1910 George V 1914 Irish Home Rule; First World War 1916 Lloyd George PM 1918 RAF formed from Royal Flying Corps; Marie Stopes 1919 John Maynard Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace 1920 Black and Tans; Anglican Church in Wales disestablished 1921 Irish Free State 1922 Bonar Law PM 1923 Baldwin PM 1924 First Labour Government (MacDonald PM); Baldwin PM; Lenin dies 1925 Britain joins Gold standard 1926 General Strike 1928 Women over twenty-one given vote 1929 The Depression; MacDonald PM 1931 National Government; Statute of Westminster 1932 British Union of Fascists 1933 Hitler 1935 Baldwin PM 1936 Edward VIII; George VI; Spanish Civil War 1937 Chamberlain PM 1938 Austria annexed by Germany; Air Raid Precautions (ARP) 1939 Second World War 1940 Battle of Britain; Dunkirk; Churchill PM 1942 Beveridge Report; fall of Singapore and Rangoon 1944 Butler Education Act; Normandy allied landings 1945 Attlee PM; Germany and Japan surrender 1946 UN founded; National Insurance Act; National Health Service 1947 India Independence; Pakistan formed 1948 Railways nationalized; Berlin Airlift; Ceylon (Sri Lanka) independence 1949 NATO; Irish Independence; Korean War 1951 Churchill PM 1952 Elizabeth II 1955 Eden PM; Cyprus Emergency 1956 Suez Crisis 1957 Macmillan PM 1958 Life Peerages; EEC 1959 Vietnam War; Fidel Castro 1960 Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech 1963 Douglas-Home PM; De Gaulle veto on UK EEC membership; Kennedy assassination 1964 Wilson PM 1965 Southern Rhodesia UDI 1967 Pound devalued 1969 Open University; Northern Ireland Troubles; Robin Knox-Johnston first solo, non-stop sailing circumnavigation 1970 Heath PM 1971 Decimal currency in UK 1972 Bloody Sunday, Northern Ireland 1973 Britain in EEC; VAT 1974 Wilson PM 1976 Callaghan PM; first Concorde passenger flight 1979 Thatcher PM; Rhodesian Settlement 1982 Falklands War 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev; Global warming – British report hole in ozone layer 1986 Chernobyl; Reagan–Gorbachev Zero missile summit 1987 Wall Street Crash 1988 Lockerbie 1989 Berlin Wall down 1990 John Major PM; Iraq invades Kuwait 1991 Gulf War; Helen Sharman first Briton in space; Tim Berners-Lee first website; collapse of Soviet Communism 1992 Maastricht Treaty 1994 Church of England Ordination of Women; Channel Tunnel opens 1995 British forces to Sarajevo 1996 Dolly the Sheep clone 1997 Blair PM; Diana Princess of Wales dies; Hong Kong returns to China 1998 Rolls-Royce sold to BMW; Good Friday Agreement 1999 Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections 2001 Terrorist attacks on New York 2002 Elizabeth the Queen Mother dies 2003 Second Gulf War 2004 Asian Tsunami 2005 Freedom of Information Act; Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles wed; terrorist attacks on London 2006 Queen’s eightieth birthday 2007 Ministry of Justice created; Brown PM 2008 Northern Rock collapse 2009 Market crash; banks partly nationalized; MPs expenses scandal 2010 Cameron PM.

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The Poor Laws were supposed to help but, in many cases, they failed to do so – a reminder that this was a period when the advances of the age outstripped the social needs of the people. Many of those freezing London dockers would have started their working lives loading and unloading sailing ships. Now there were vessels with steam engines even though sail was by no means finished – the famous Cutty Sark wasn’t launched until 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened. (Sailing cargo ships were a common enough sight on the oceans.) The railways now criss-crossed the country and, as transport spread, so did suburbs of tightly packed housing, especially small houses, 20 per cent of which often contained two families. In industry, Joseph Whitworth had patented his standard sizes in threads and screws.

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In 1865, a Liverpool engineer-turned-shipowner called Alfred Holt built three ships fitted with engines that met the criteria and could carry 3,000 tons of cargo – twice as much as the big clippers – as well as plenty of coal, and could steam, at ten knots, for more than 8,000 miles without stopping. This meant that one of these new steamships could get to China and back in about two months. Even in good weather conditions the clippers would take three months, and carry nowhere near that amount of cargo. And then, in the year that the Cutty Sark was built, 1869, the Suez Canal was opened. This gave the new steamships an advantage. By the end of the 1870s only the smaller ships were built of wood. A centuries-old tradition had died. Also about to die was one of Britain’s most famous writers, Charles Dickens. In 1868 he returned from a series of gruelling public readings in America.

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

back-to-the-land, banking crisis, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Great Leap Forward, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, liberation theology, Nelson Mandela, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

In the words of a Royal Commission on Colonial Defence chaired by Carnarvon, the Cape route was ‘essential to the retention by Great Britain of her possessions in India, Mauritius, Ceylon, Singapore, China and even Australasia’. It needed to be ‘maintained at all hazards and irrespective of cost’. Strategic considerations overrode financial concerns. Furthermore, the Cape provided a vital commercial link. Despite the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, one seventh of all British trade annually passed the Cape. In the event of a war affecting the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, the Cape route would become even more important. What concerned Carnarvon was the chaotic character of the interior of southern Africa, which offered opportunities for other European powers to meddle and undermine British supremacy in the region.

…

Livingstone’s lonely death in central Africa in 1873 while searching in vain for the source of the Nile unleashed a burst of imperial sentiment that mixed a world power’s responsibility for trusteeship with a strong dose of economic opportunism. Disraeli’s surge of imperial activity during the 1870s - acquiring Cyprus, Fiji and a large bulk of shares in the Suez Canal - won popular support. In a pamphlet written in 1876, Edwin Arnold, editor of the Daily Telegraph, used the phrase ‘from the Cape to Cairo’ to demonstrate the scale of imperial ambition. Queen Victoria herself was particularly pleased when, at her own suggestion, Parliament in 1877 bestowed on her the title of Empress of India.

…

If you part with the road you part with everything.’ Rhodes urged Scanlen to ‘act at once’, but Scanlen was not persuaded. In a speech to parliament in Cape Town in August 1883, Rhodes went further, claiming that ‘the whole future of this Colony’ was at stake: I look upon this Bechuanaland territory as the Suez Canal of the trade of this country, the key of its road to the interior . . . The question before us really is this: whether this Colony is to be confined to its present borders, or whether it is to become the dominant state in South Africa - whether, in fact, it is to spread its civilization over the interior . . .

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

“The same means of communication will unite the western coast of this continent to the eastern coast of Asia. New York will remain the center where these lines meet.” This, in other words, was to be something much more than a large bridge over an important river. It was to be one of history’s great connecting works, symbolic of the new age, like the Atlantic cable, the Suez Canal, and the transcontinental railroad. “Lo, Soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?” wrote Walt Whitman at about this time. “The earth be spann’d, connected by network…The lands welded together.” “The shapes arise!” wrote the Brooklyn poet. Singing my days, Singing the great achievements of the present Singing the strong, light works of engineers… But it was Roebling himself, never one to be overly modest, who had set forth the most emphatic claim for the bridge itself and the one that would be quoted most often in time to come: The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs, will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age.

…

A momentous new Age of Progress was dawning and for most of those who raised their glasses to toast John Roebling, as for most Americans, nothing was taken as such proof of that spirit as the works of engineers—”…the great achievements of the present…the strong, light works of engineers…” In Egypt the French had nearly finished the Suez Canal. In Europe the Mont Cenis Tunnel, then the longest on earth, was being blasted beneath the Alps. But nowhere was there so much happening as on the continent of North America. The Union Pacific was laying track at a rate of eight miles a day by this time. In Massachusetts a hole was being bored nearly five miles through the solid rock of Hoosac Mountain, just to slice a little time off the railroad run from Boston to Albany.

…

Of course, if this were so, his plans should not be relied upon, and the work should be suspended until an investigation could be had; but physicians tell me his intellect is all right. I am today more convinced than ever of the great injustice of displacing a man of his merit and standing without giving him an opportunity to defend himself. The idea that he could not do his duty without being at the bridge office is preposterous.” De Lesseps had been in Paris while the Suez Canal was being built, Semler said, and so why was it so unreasonable for Roebling to remain in a house a few blocks from the bridge. “There is nothing sentimental in my feelings in this matter. The question is simply one of justice.” Semler told reporters he would be back in his office Thursday morning.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

I ran all the way around it in an hour, and that included dips out of and into Spain at beginning and end. Where colonies like India enriched Britain immeasurably, for most of its history Gibraltar never amounted to all that much, even militarily, and what significance it did have was brief. It came into its own with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, since that transformed the Mediterranean Sea from a lake into a highway. Possession of the Rock ensured that Britain controlled both the Mediterranean’s entrance and its exit. For the coal-powered Royal Navy before the First World War, Gibraltar was a useful refuelling station, ensuring ships could patrol far from their home bases.

…

And, in the years after Indian independence, that meant they must cling on to their sole remaining world-class geopolitical asset: the Suez Canal. As long as Britain controlled the waterway, its strategists could dream of projecting power south into the Indian Ocean, east into the Middle East and north into the Soviet Union, and of denying the canal to its enemies and interrupting their trade. Britain could not be relegated to being a mere European power while it had such an asset in its portfolio. ‘If we cannot hold the Suez Canal, the jugular vein of World and Empire shipping communications, what can we hold?’ asked the author of a report on the canal’s future written for the government.

…

Sure enough, when the evacuation was complete and there was no one left to stop him, Egypt’s assertive new leader – Gamal Abdel Nasser – nationalised the Suez Canal. Britain’s great strategic asset now belonged to the people whose country it ran through. This was a monumental blow to British prestige, but it was the manner in which the government in London responded that turned defeat into disaster. The trouble was that Nasser hadn’t actually done anything illegal: the Suez Canal Company was an Egyptian enterprise, which the government in Cairo could nationalise if it wanted, having promised full compensation to its shareholders, who were – apart from the British government – overwhelmingly French.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

The years immediately before the eruption were stable, prosperous, expansive. Whatever setbacks the city had endured in the aftermath of the VOC's collapse at the end of the eighteenth century had been more than amply reversed in the cosmopolitan, buccaneering, free-marketeering years of the latter half of the nineteenth. The Suez Canal opened in 1869: an appetite for goods from the East – now far closer to European markets, with the short-cut through the desert and ever faster ships on routes – meant that new trading houses were springing up, and new markets for new tropical commodities and wares were emerging on all sides. The population of Batavia, like that of other favoured Eastern cities, began to grow, and fast: it jumped from half a million in 1866 to well over a million at the time of the eruption (merely 12,000 of those were Europeans, 80,000 Chinese, the rest all native East Indians understandably eager to take advantage of the growing wealth around them).

…

In many ways the mechanics of Mr Schuit's job were, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, changing fast. The ships themselves were altering their appearance, drastically. Sail as a means of moving them across the oceans was steadily giving way to steam. Wooden hulls were being replaced by steel, copper nails by iron rivets. The Suez Canal had opened for business, making passages to and from Europe more rapid and less risky. There was a steady growth in traffic, with more cargoes as world trade increased, and with ships from more nations. Congestion in the shipping lanes reflected the ebb and flow of global business and global politics; and it also reflected (as with the warship Elisabeth, on her way home from a posting off China) the rise and fall of distant empires.

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.: Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects 396–7 Simla, India 144 Singapore 157, 158, 168, 187, 189, 190, 191, 200, 231, 233, 264n, 265, 278 Singapore Cricket Club 153 Sinkara Lake 126 Sir Robert Sale (British vessel) 230 Skerl (translator) 75 Skopje 378 slavery in Batavia 42, 44–5, 46 on Rodriguez 261 Smith, William 69 Smithsonian Institution, Washington 287n, 312 Snider-Pellarini, Antonio 72n Socoa, near Birritz 280, 281 sodium 304 Soenda Straits xv solfataras 303, 326 Solferino, battle of 195 Solo, Java 2, 124, 127, 133, 153 Solo, sultan of 124 Solomon Islands 384n Solor fort 29 South Africa 281, 287, 289 South America 67, 71, 72, 74, 308 South American Plate 308 South Atlantic 111 South China Sea 43, 161n, 182 South Georgia 274, 281 South Pole 74, 76, 84, 85, 281 Southampton 172n South-East Asia 52, 224n maps xiii, xiv Southern Africa 197 Spaan, Mr van 211n Spain, Spanish 13n, 14, 22, 29n Spanish Netherlands 29n Speenhof, Mr 46 Spice Islands, Islanders 33, 60, 297n Spice Route 11, 13n spiders, ballooning 356–9, 357, 361–2 Spitsbergen 87 Sri Lanka see Ceylon stabilists 107–8 Steers Island 314, 347n Sterling, Edward 194n Stockholm 80 Stokes, Sir George 273n Stonyhurst College 288 Stonyhurst weather observatory 270 Strachey, General Richard 271, 273n stratosphere 285, 286, 313 stratospheric ash, cloud of 289–91 Sturdy, E.W. 220n subduction 111, 112, 113, 154, 318, 319,388 subduction factories 307, 308–9, 320 subduction zones 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 171, 308, 309, 312, 317, 319,388 Sudan 335n Suez 191 Suez Canal 143, 183 Sufi movement 334, 337 Sukarno, General 145–6, 380 Sukarnoputri, Megawati 376 Sukhumi 190 Sulawesi 24, 55, 64, 66, 137 sulphur 302 sulphur dioxide gas 243, 388, 389 Suma Pars. 27 Sumatra 1, 6, 20, 26, 31, 48, 49, 55, 61, 78, 126, 169, 309, 374 Islamicized 17, 40 mapping 22, 24, 171 van Linschoten on 25 British colonial intentions 34 volcanically unstable 114–15 splits from Java 126, 155 and P'u-tei 132 earthquakes 154 and gutta-percha 188 warnings of forthcoming eruption (1883) 207 sky completely darkened (August 1883) 234 deaths from tephra 242–3, 245 plate tectonics 317 Islam in 342 rain forest 355 Sumbawa Island 294 sun blue 287, 289 colorations 288 white corona 288 sun-compass 86 sun-gauges 267 Sunda country 125, 126 Sunda Kelapa, Jakarta 136–7, 147 Sunda (steam ferry-boat) 157, 168 Sunda Strait 3, 6, 22–3, 25–7, 45, 50, 111, 115, 119, 127, 148, 149, 155–8, 161n, 164–7, 170, 173, 175, 182, 183, 200, 204, 207, 210, 213, 219–21, 223, 226, 231, 233, 237–9, 241, 245, 249, 253, 258, 260, 272, 275, 278, 282, 298, 319, 338, 342, 345, 354, 355, 367n, 372, 376, 378–81 Sundanese 332, 333, 335 sunsets 287–93 supercontinents 73, 74, 88 Surabaya, Java 17, 153, 168, 172n, 278 Surapati 45 Surtsey Island, off Iceland 384n, 385 survival of the fittest 61–2 S.W.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible by William N. Goetzmann

Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, delayed gratification, Detroit bankruptcy, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, index fund, invention of the steam engine, invention of writing, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, wage slave

He became the khedive of Egypt, an Ottoman protectorate, in 1863 and began immediately to modernize his nation by building infrastructure and adapting to Western culture and tastes. His most famous proclamation: My country is no longer in Africa; we are now part of Europe. It is therefore natural for us to abandon our former ways and to adopt a new system adapted to our social conditions.11 His most spectacular success was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869—as much a feat of finance as hydrology. The capital for the project was raised by the private firm Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez, founded in 1858 by the brilliant diplomat and projector Ferdinand de Lesseps. The company negotiated a deal with Ismail’s predecessor that exchanged shares in the firm for a long-term operating concession.

…

Countries in chronic debt, colonies and revolutionary governments short of cash—these polities resorted to the transmutation of illiquid assets like land into liquid assets like publicly tradable debt and paper money. IV THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBAL MARKETS Bond issued to finance the construction of the Suez Canal. GLOBAL CONFLICTS This part of the book narrates the final act in a story in which the technology of finance has so far played both hero and villain—or more aptly perhaps, a protagonist uncertain of moral valence. In the modern era, the problems and possibilities inherent in finance led to a dramatic conflict over the direction of civilization itself.

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The Urabi revolt started in Alexandria in June with attacks on foreigners and spread throughout Egypt. British gunboats bombarded the port city, eventually defeating the rebellion at the battle of Tel el-Kebir. What began as a sovereign debt crisis turned inexorably into imperialism; the catalyst, of course, being the control of the strategically vital Suez Canal. The fall of Egypt into debt, even as it was furiously modernizing itself with foreign capital, was a warning to all nations. One moment Ismail Pasha was entertaining European dignitaries in the Cairo Opera house, the next he was stripped of his wealth and power by the same. Even worse, his subjects were made to pay for his excess.

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

The problem was that Captain Sprye had been in Burma in the 1840s and had never ‘explored a single mile of the line himself’. He was the very model of an armchair general. ‘From his armchair in London he glorifies himself as the . . . Lesseps of Indo-China.’9 (Ferdinand, Vicomte de Lesseps was the French engineer who had built the Suez Canal in 1869 and who was very much an international hero of the 1870s.) For his part, Sprye had ‘been riding his hobby for fifteen years or more’. He wrote ‘interminable letters to every Government office in any way concerned’ and was generally viewed as ‘an intolerable bore’.10 The problem with building a railway which connected Rangoon with the populous El Dorado of western China was the terrain.

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Iraq was important primarily because of its potential oil reserves, but very little oil had actually been produced. Everyone knew it was there. As a Cabinet memorandum of 2 August 1918 had pointed out, the Germans themselves, in a paper on Mesopotamia written in 1916, had observed that ‘the greatest importance after that of the Suez Canal, attaches to the possession of Mesopotamia’, where ‘petroleum wells’ had been known for ‘thousands of years’.14 More generally, there were wider, strategic considerations too. Britain had an interest in protecting the route to India and the Indian trade. The possession of Iraq made sense for Britain.

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It provided the country with a massive source of revenue at a time when the oil price was about to soar. More broadly it conferred on Saddam Hussein a prestige and authority in the Arab world which only Nasser, in recent times, had managed to enjoy. After all, the nationalization of the IPC echoed Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, sixteen years before. ‘Oil for the Arabs’ had become the new rallying cry of Arab nationalists since Israel’s humiliating victory in the 1967 war. The same cry would become especially resonant in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973.23 Saddam constantly boasted of his achievement in snatching Iraq’s oil wealth from the greedy hands of the imperialists and giving it back to the Iraqi people.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

The 1873 story begins with the Franco-Prussian indemnity that was one-tenth paid in gold in 1871 and led to substantial speculation in Germany which then spilled into Austria.56 Jay Cooke, a latecomer to railroad finance and seeking capital for railroads in Europe, overextended himself with the Northern Pacific; he tried to borrow in Frankfurt but could not compete with the German and Austrian building booms.57 Other shocks included the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the mistake of the German authorities in paying out new coin before withdrawing the old silver coins, the Chicago fire of 9 October 1871,58 and especially the excitement generated by German unification under the leadership of Prussia’s Bismarck. German acquisition of £90 million from the indemnity endangered stability in Britain because of the threat of conversion into gold.

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The Union Générale was a bank started by Eugène Bontoux, an engineer who had worked with Rothschild and then left to initiate rival operations in Austria, Serbia, and southeastern Europe. An earlier Union Générale, founded in 1875, was not a success. Bontoux started his Union Générale in Paris in 1878 as France was entering a boom based on the expansion of the railroads and the construction of the Suez Canal. The boom peaked in December 1881 and the crash followed in the next month. Bouvier’s interest was in whether Bontoux, a Catholic, failed because of his mistakes as a lender or whether he was ‘done in’ by a conspiracy of establishment Jewish and Protestant bankers that resented an intruder. Bouvier concluded with a Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’.

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Morgan/JPMorganChase 24, 86, 130, 200, 204, 222, 224, 241, 252, 263, 266–7, 270 Morgan Stanley 56, 137, 139, 270 Morgenstern, Oskar 60, 155, 166, 240 mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) 74, 86, 149, 259, 262 MSNBC television 147 mutual funds 20, 23, 104, 128, 136–7, 151, 175, 177, 286 Mutualité Industrielle (Belgium) 89 Napoleon III 89 NASDAQ stocks, 1990s bubble in 6–7, 15, 17, 32, 183, 184 National Association of Security Dealers (NASD) 139 National Australia Bank, Sydney 124 National Bank of Austria-Hungary 82 National City Bank 148 National Trust Company of New York 197 Navigation Acts (GB) 164 negative carry concept 36 neo-Austrian School 81 Netherlands see Holland new economy 181, 182 New York City 221, 222 New York Clearing House 221 New York Stock Exchange 6–7, 23, 32, 77, 104, 135, 183, 184, 201–2, 204 New York Warehouse and Security Company 50 New Zealand 157 Newton, Sir Isaac 47 Nikkei stock market index 24, 113, 123–4 Nordic countries, asset price bubble, 1985–89 1, 5 Nordwolle (Norddeutsche-Wolkämmerei) 244 Norman, G.W. 91 Norman, Montagu 77, 91, 245 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 5, 24, 178, 189, 253 Northern Pacific railroad 44, 50, 166 Northern Rock 4, 86, 192, 263, 264 Norway 1, 4, 5, 157, 278 NOW accounts 69 Nurkse, Ragnar 41 Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company 142, 164, 203 oil prices 2, 4, 13, 14, 278 Open Market Investment Committee, Federal Reserve Bank 227 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 51 d’Ormesson, Wladimir 89 outsiders/insiders 23, 46–8 Overend, Gurney & Co. 41, 97, 141, 165 overshooting/undershooting concept 3, 35, 230, 231, 232, 279 Overstone, Lord (Samuel Jones-Loyd) 84, 91, 102, 194–5, 215 overtrading concept 30, 33, 35, 57, 84, 160, 161, 167, 226 Panama Canal bonds 219 panics 1906–7 21, 82–3, 97, 167–8, 222, 238–9 causes of 25, 33, 104–5 definition 103 interest rates and 50, 54–5, 82, 106, 168 swindles perpetrated during 23–4 see also bubbles; crises Paris, as financial center 239–40 see also France Parmalat 138 Pedersen, Jørgen 242 Peel, Sir Robert 222–3 Pereire brothers 218 Plaza Agreement, 1985 256 Poland 51–2 Ponzi, Charles 29, 51, 52, 117, 118, 141 Ponzi finance 14–15, 20, 29–30, 52, 70, 71, 109, 117, 118, 125, 137, 140, 143, 148, 288 Popper, Karl 40 Portugal 287 pound sterling 16, 54, 63, 73, 77–8, 93–4, 159, 168, 226, 241–2, 245–6, 248–9, 275 Powell, Ellis T. 207 price volatility 1, 30–1 prices see asset prices; commodity prices; market prices privatization 28, 52, 98, 157, 177, 189, 290 Prussia 54, 55, 165 Franco-Prussian indemnity 54, 165–6 lender of last resort in 218 see also Germany Prussian Bank 164, 165, 218 Prussian Seehandlung 164, 218 psychology of contagion 156–7 Maginot line effect 51 of the mob 43–5 of rationality 43–5 of swindlers 140, 151 pyramid schemes 14–15 quality of debt 69–71 Quantum Fund (George Soros) 303n8 Quattrone, Frank 152 Radcliffe Commission (GB) 67 railroads 96, 97, 101, 162, 164, 166, 147 1830/1840s booms in 45, 92, 162, 225 ratio of debt 73–4 rational expectations theory 39–40, 84–5 rationality of individuals 39–40, 42–53, 84–5, 304n22; irrationality 48–50, 54 of markets 33–6; irrationality 42–53 psychology of 42–3 real bills doctrine 67 real estate stock markets and 1, 12, 30, 32, 59, 64, 111–15, 173–4 speculation in 44–5, 55–6, 57, 64, 188–9 Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) 55–6, 113, 202 real estate prices 31, 90, 176, 185–6 economic booms and 5, 108, 111–15 in Japan see Japan in US 180–1 recessions see crises recoinage 54 regulation see bank regulation/supervision; deregulation Reichsbank (Germany) 91, 93, 224, 238, 244 Reinhart, Carmen 81 reportage system 63 reports see call money repression, financial 51 Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) (US) 94, 210 revulsion concept 18, 33, 34, 91, 154 Ricardo, David 214–15 Richardson, William A. 219 Rigas family 134–5, 152 Riksbank (Sweden) 66 Rite-Aid 152 rogue traders see swindles/fraud Rohatyn, Felix 71 Rosenberg, Hans 55, 145, 164 Rothbard, Murray 196, 214 Rothschild family 51, 55, 77, 195, 207, 218, 235, 236, 237, 241 Royal African Company 161–2, 168 Royal Bank of Scotland 4, 120, 192 Rusnak, John 124 Russia 1772 crisis 235 1998 ruble crisis 6, 95, 234, 280 Baring crisis, 1890 and 206–7 IMF and 234 see also Soviet Union (former) Sadleir, John 151 Salomon Smith Barney 22, 130, 138 Savary, Charles 146, 152 savings, flow of 185, 285 Sayers, Richard S. 238 Scandinavia see Denmark; Norway; Sweden Schaaffhausen, Abraham 163–4 Schäffle, Albert E.F. 73 Schama, Simon 110 Schiff, Jacob H. 203–4, 221 Schuyler, Robert 147–8 Schwab, Charles 181 Schwartz, Anna 78–9, 154, 155, 215, 227 on Great Depression 78–9, 154, 155 Scrushy, Richard 135 Second Bank of the United States 91, 160–1, 219 Second World War see World War II Securities and Exchange Commission 46, 77, 120, 131, 136–7, 140, 147, 149, 194, 266 securitization 149, 258–60 Selgin, George 81 Sepoy Mutiny, 1857 (India) 54 Shell Oil 136 Sherman Silver Act 1890 (US) 54 shutdown, of stock markets 201–2 Silberzug loan, 1857 106, 206, 237 silver 19, 54, 62–3, 64, 94, 104, 105, 160, 161, 164, 200, 205, 206, 235–6, 237 Simons, Henry 80 Sinclair, Sir John 211 Sindona, Michele 44 Singapore 16, 123, 124, 178, 180 Skilling, Jeffrey 132 Smart, William 160, 212 Smith, Adam 18, 30, 73 on South Sea Bubble 41–2 Smithsonian Agreement, 1972 2, 250 Snyder, Harold Russell 148 Società Bancaria Italiana 21, 167, 222 Soros, George 254 South Africa 8, 21, 37, 51, 164 South Korea 1, 6, 24, 31, 85, 178, 179, 253, 255 South Sea Bubble, 1720 17, 41–2, 43, 47, 53, 57–8, 62, 88, 96, 100, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 152, 153, 158–9, 200, 273 Adam Smith on 41–2 Bank of England and 104, 200 Bubble Act 1720 53, 57, 88 international contagion of 158–9 as a swindle 142, 143 South Sea Company 47, 53, 57, 62, 88, 93, 104, 140, 142, 143, 144, 151, 152, 153, 200, 305n33 Soviet Union (former) 51 see also Russia Spain 120, 170, 186, 260 Holland and 110, 163 special financing facilities/vehicles (SFVs) 131 speculation 12–15, 30, 32, 35, 44–5, 57–9, 74–7 as destabilizing 41, 46–53, 57–9 national differences in 59–60 overtrading 14, 25–8, 51 in real estate 49–50, 176–77 in technology stocks 6–7, 12, 28, 181, 182, 281 see also euphoria; manias speculative finance 29, 69–70 Spencer, Herbert 214 spinning, of share allocations 183 Sprague, O.M.W. 97, 105, 144, 203, 219–20 Standard and Poor’s 500 futures 77 Standard Oil Company 97 State Bank of Russia 207 Stead, Christina 46, 153, 314n36 Stewart, Martha 23, 135, 152 stocks see bonds Stringher, Bonaldo 167, 222 Strong, Benjamin 99, 223 Strong Funds 137 Strousberg, Bethel Henry 144, 145 subprime mortgages 25, 93, 261 Suez Canal 75, 166 Sullivan, Scott 133 Sumitomo Corp./Bank 124, 125, 174 Swartz, Mark 124 Sweden 1, 4, 5, 72, 157, 205, 229, 278, 285, 288 Riksbank 66 Swift, Jonathan, on the South Sea Bubble 144 swindles/fraud 20, 88–9, 117–153 bucket/boiler shops 46, 47, 138 historical survey 117–153 see also gambling Sword Blade Bank (GB) 57, 62, 104, 200, 201 Taiwan 179 technological innovation 18, 27, 28, 56, 181 technology stocks, speculation in 6–7, 12, 28, 181, 182, 281 Temin, Peter 79 Thailand, 1990s asset price bubble 1, 2, 6, 22, 126, 170, 177, 181 Thayer, Paul 146 Thiers, Louis Adolphe 217, 236 Thiers rente 55 Third World countries see developing countries Thomson, J.

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won & Lost on the Railways by Christian Wolmar

anti-communist, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Ford Model T, Khartoum Gordon, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, V2 rocket

The capture of Aqaba helped protect the British right flank in Palestine, where a different type of war was taking place, one which involved building a railway rather than destroying it. Having initially only sought to defend the Suez Canal, the British, led by Lawrence’s hero, General Edmund Allenby, decided to go on the offensive across the Sinai towards Palestine but they needed a railway to supply them, just as Kitchener’s army had when reconquering Sudan. The aim was to push through from Egypt to Palestine, and chase the Turks out of Gaza, and then Jerusalem, with the ultimate goal of Damascus. The railway was started at Kantara, on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, and was gradually extended eastwards during 1916 and the early part of 1917.

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Railways were seen as the instrument through which Germany could establish its dominance with the nicely alliterative Berlin-Baghdad railway as the centrepiece. The railway was conceived by the Germans as a way of giving them access to a port on the Persian Gulf – the plan was for the railway eventually to reach Basra – and allowing them to trade with the Far East without having to go through the British-controlled Suez Canal. This was a direct threat to long-standing British interests. The British had been a powerful force in the Gulf since the early nineteenth century and had agreed with Russia spheres of interest in Persia while all the coastal sheikhdoms had treaty relationships with India. The Germans had already financed the Anatolian Railway from the coast through to Ankara, which would be part of a Berlin-Baghdad railway.

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It was a disastrous failure, with delays and uncertainty allowing the Turks to reinforce their positions over the beaches, resulting in the abandonment of the attack by the end of the year. Britain was left with two armies in the Middle East, in Palestine and Mesopotamia (in what is now Iraq). In Palestine their main role was to guard the vital Suez Canal but in Mesopotamia the war against the Turks, which was primarily about protecting oil supplies from the Gulf, had initially resulted in a humiliating defeat for the British at Kut Al Amara in April 1916. The British had over-extended themselves by trying to occupy Baghdad, running too far ahead of their largely river-based supply lines, a problem which was eventually remedied through the construction of a large network of narrow-gauge railways.

Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone by Juli Berwald

clean water, complexity theory, crowdsourcing, Downton Abbey, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, Panamax, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Skype, sparse data, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, TED Talk, the scientific method, Wilhelm Olbers

They reminded Israeli scientist Bella Galil of a similar jellyfish first noticed off Israel’s western coast in 1977. Bella identified the animal as a new species, probably native to the Indian Ocean, and surmised that it had traveled to its new Mediterranean home through the Suez Canal, a 120-mile channel from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. Completed in 1869, the canal was one of the greatest technological achievements of the era, saving sailors months of time in rough seas and shipowners piles of money by quicker transit of their goods. Instead of traveling all the way around Africa to reach Europe from Asia, ships could take a shortcut through the Red Sea.

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All those jellyfish stalled operations: This short video shows a large bloom of nomadic jellyfish that infiltrated a power plant in Israel: “Israeli Power Plants Threatened by Jellyfish,” Agence France-Presse, July 5, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsUNZBxzddY&feature=player_embedded. The article explained that the Suez Canal: Bella S. Galil et al., “‘Double Trouble’: The Expansion of the Suez Canal and Marine Bioinvasions in the Mediterranean Sea,” Biological Invasions 17 (2015): 973–976. When the piece was published: Juli Berwald, “Under the Ships in the Suez Canal,” The New York Times, November 12, 2014. Irukandji syndrome: Lisa-Ann Gershwin et al., “Biology and Ecology of Irukandji Jellyfish (Cnidaria: Cubozoa),” Advances in Marine Biology 66 (2013): 1–85.

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And despite Bella’s continued efforts—she collected several hundred signatures from scientists around the world protesting the lack of oversight and also petitioned the European Parliament—no environmental assessment was performed. No plans to prevent the spread of invasive species were developed. The Suez Canal expansion was completed in record time. The project was supposed to take five years, but just one year later, military planes flew overhead during the ceremonies in which Egyptian president Sisi inaugurated the New Suez Canal. A massive amount of water with all the species it carried with it was already flowing freely through the enlarged channel. Bella said, “We are playing a Russian roulette, not with a bay or a river but with the Mediterranean Sea.”

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

In addition, because of the Clyde’s pre-eminence at the cutting edge of shipbuilding and ship propulsion, Scottish ship-owners were able to fully exploit the maritime revolution in steamship design at an early stage. The technological lead in marine engineering, hull design and dockside cargo-handling machinery meant the Scottish and other British companies were extremely well placed to exploit the new opportunities in Asia and Australasia when the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 cut 4,000 miles off the old route around the Cape of Good Hope. The shipping firms were among the best customers of the Clyde yards. The Mackinnon group, for example, was the first to transfer Scottish technology in iron-hulled steamers to the East. Indeed, no shipping magnate ordered more tonnage from Clyde yards after c.1850 than William Mackinnon’s five companies.44 It was also common for the shipbuilders and ship-owners to make common cause.

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The entire system was lubricated by the revolution in transportation and the flow of information: improvements in the design and speed of sailing ships; the arrival of the ocean-going steamships; the crucial invention of the telegraph, at a stroke providing instant commercial intelligence; and the construction of transcontinental railways, such as the Canadian–Pacific. These unlocked the production potential of vast territories, from the prairies of North America to the plains of India, while the opening of the Suez Canal transformed the connections with Asia and the East. In the centre of all this, like the proverbial spider in the web, was Britain, as the main entrepôt for world trade and finance.13 At the same time, the system of tariffs, regulations and controls which had been at the heart of the old imperial system in the eighteenth century were all swept away by the 1850s.

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In consequence, the number of letters flowing between Britain and the USA, which had reached 2 million by 1854, had tripled to 6 million twenty years later. Mail times from the UK to Australia halved between the 1830s and 1850s and halved again in the 1870s as a result of the expansion in steam services and the opening of the Suez Canal.40 By 1851 telegraph wires traversed the USA and five years later a transatlantic submarine cable successfully linked Britain and America. A striking feature of the investment saga was how agents and managers from Scottish companies were able to travel abroad regularly to check on the performance of their shareholdings to an extent that would have been impossible in the days of the sailing ship and the horse and carriage.41 Information on financial markets also became abundant and more detailed in the national and regional press, the periodical literature, such as The Statist and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and in specialist pamphlets.

Frommer's Egypt by Matthew Carrington

airport security, bread and circuses, centre right, colonial rule, Easter island, Internet Archive, land tenure, low cost airline, Maui Hawaii, open economy, rent control, rolodex, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, Yom Kippur War

Amenities: Pool; 24-hr. room service; laundry service; Wi-Fi. In room: TV, kitchen. 08_259290-ch05.qxp 102 7/22/08 12:30 AM Page 102 CHAPTER 5 . CAIRO EXPENSIVE Cairo Marriott Hotel This former palace was built especially for France’s Empress Eugenie, who came to Egypt for the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The main building has retained much of its 19th-century charm, but there have been several modern renovations, including two somewhat out-of-character towers. The Marriott has a limited business center, but its lush gardens and pool are attractive for those looking for a relaxing vacation.

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Pharaohs sent trading fleets from this little town to the land of Punt to collect precious cargos of gold, ebony, and slaves. Later, after the Arab invasion, it became a vital stop on the hajj as well as a thriving commercial hub for the trade to India and the Gulf. The area slowly declined after the height of its importance in the 10th century, and though the Suez Canal brought back some life when it opened in 1869, today Quseir is a forgotten place. The only industry, a phosphorus mine set up by an Italian company in 1916, hasn’t done much since the 1960s, when the deep-water port in Safaga to the north displaced Quseir’s relatively small facilities. Nowadays, the old buildings slump a little lower each year as neglect takes its toll on mud-brick walls and the once-grand wooden facades along the waterfront.

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P L A N N I N G YO U R T R I P TO E G Y P T 12 The Regions in Brief Marsa Matruh As Sallum LIBYAN N O PLATEAU Alexandria R T Alexandria H C QATTARA DEPRESSION Siwa Egypt A F R I C A 0 Bawiti S T W E 0 Fa O Siwa Oasis 2000 mi 2000 km Bahareya Oasis Farafra E Farafra Oasis SEA B Qasr D I N SAND L R GREAT L I B Y A E Y A N T S E R D E 0 100 mi N 0 100 km SUDAN Dakhla Dakhla Oasis Mut S E R T 05_259290-ch02.qxp 7/28/08 8:30 AM Page 13 REGIONS IN BRIEF Jerusalem Mediterranean Sea Rosetta Port Said Alexandria H C A S T O ISRAEL Suez Canal JORDAN Ismalia Giza RA ION Al Arish CAIRO Suez SINAI ' Pyramids of Giza Nile Taba Gu lf Beni Suef Nuweiba St. Catherine’s Monastery Dahab of A A Minya ez D RE I A N Asyut Sharm el Sheikh Hurghada R D Quseir S e CO ST Aswan Baranis Aswan Dam Lake Nasser e istrativ Adminundary o b Abu Simbel SUDAN Marsa Alam a A Baris Edfu Nile T T R Luxor YP Kharga Oasis EG Kharga d R Dakhla Dakhla Oasis e R T S E E Qina A SE Suhaj P Safaga E UP SAUDI ARABIA Mt.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

They had also been quick to give their backing to Mehmet Ali, the modernizing Egyptian leader who sought to flout, if not to overthrow, the Ottoman Sultan’s authority. Above all, it was French investors who took the lead in the economic development of Turkey and Egypt. The man who designed and built the Suez Canal was a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and the greater part of the capital invested in that vast and strategically portentous undertaking – opened in November 1869 – was French. Time and again, however, the British were able to insist that the future of the Ottoman Empire was a matter to be decided between the five great powers: not just Britain and France, but also Russia, Austria and Prussia.

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When it became clear in 1874 that the governments of both Egypt and Turkey were bankrupt, it seemed at first that matters would be settled by the usual great-power confabulation. However, first Disraeli and then his arch-rival Gladstone could not resist the temptation to take unilateral action to give Britain the edge in the region. When the Khedive of Egypt offered to sell his shares in the Suez Canal Company for £4 million, Disraeli seized the opportunity, turning to his friends the Rothschilds – who else? – for the colossal cash advance necessary to close the deal. True, ownership of 44 per cent of the Canal Company’s original shares did not give Britain control over the canal itself, especially as the shares had no voting rights until 1895 and had only ten votes thereafter.

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A full-scale default on the country’s external debt became a serious possibility. The very lives of the 37,000 Europeans resident in Egypt seemed under threat. As leader of the Opposition, Gladstone had objected violently to Disraeli’s foreign policy in the Near East. He had instinctively disliked the purchase of the Suez Canal shares; he also accused Disraeli of turning a blind eye to Turkish atrocities against Christian communities in Bulgaria. Yet now that he was in power, Gladstone executed one of the great U-turns of Victorian foreign policy. True, his instincts were to stick to the system of Anglo-French dual control in Egypt.

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, California gold rush, Etonian, facts on the ground, haute couture, Khartoum Gordon, Mount Scopus, place-making, plutocrats, sexual politics, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, Yom Kippur War

In 1860, Muslims massacred Christians in Syria and Lebanon, furious at the sultan's laws in favour of Christians and Jews, but this only attracted further Western advances: Napoleon III sent troops to save the Maronite Christians of the Lebanon, refreshing French claims to the area that had survived from Charlemagne, the Crusades and King Francis in the sixteenth century. In 1869, Egypt, backed by French capital, opened the Suez Canal at a ceremony attended by the French empress Eugenie, the Prussian crown prince Frederick and the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph. Not to be outdone by the British and Russians, the Prussian Frederick sailed up to Jaffa and rode to Jerusalem, where he vigorously promoted a Prussian presence in the race to grab churches and archaeological prizes: he bought the site of the Crusader St Mary of the Latins, close to the Church, and Frederick (the father of the future Kaiser Wilhelm II) backed the aggressive archaeologist Titus Tobler, who declared: 'Jerusalem must be ours.'

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Disraeli claimed Alroy's adventure was 'his ideal ambition' but actually he was far too ambitious to risk his career for anything Jewish: he wanted to be prime minister of the greatest empire on earth. Over thirty years later when he had reached the 'topof the greasy pole', Disraeli did guide British power into the region by gaining Cyprus and buying the Suez Canal.8 Not long after Disraeli had returned to embark on his political career, an Albanian warlord who was the ruler of Egypt conquered Jerusalem. THE ALBANIAN CONQUEST 1830-40 IBRAHIM THE RED In December 1831, the Egyptian army marched through the city as 'happy and delighted' Jerusalemites 'celebrated with illuminations, dancing and music in every street.

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His crackdown was immediately felt in Jerusalem: Yusuf Khalidi was expelled from Istanbul, sacked as mayor and replaced by Umar al-Husseini. When the Khalidis were down, the Husseinis were up. Meanwhile, Russia prepared finally to destroy the Ottomans. The British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, intervened to save them. JERUSALEM TATTOOS: BRITISH PRINCES AND RUSSIAN GRAND DUKES He had just bought the Suez Canal, borrowing PS4 million from Lionel de Rothschild. 'What is your security?' asked Rothschild. 'The British government,' replied Disraeli's secretary. 'You shall have it.' Now in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, Disraeli guided the cabinets of Europe to curb Russia and enforce a settlement, in which Britain was able to occupy Cyprus.

Railways & the Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India by Christian Wolmar

Beeching cuts, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, James Dyson, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, Meghnad Desai, Ponzi scheme, railway mania, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, women in the workforce

The sheer size of the workforce, together with the high casualty rate, ensured the railway had an unprecedented number of deaths for such a project. As soon as work started in 1856, 10,000 people were taken on at the Bhor Ghat alone and this reached a peak of 42,000 in January 1861, more than were ever employed on, for example, the Suez Canal, constructed almost simultaneously. Kerr estimates that if numbers working on the Thal and Bhor Ghats, as well as the sections of line leading up to them, are taken into account, the total workforce may have reached a remarkable 100,000 at its peak. The difficulty of recruiting such an enormous number of workers was compounded by the fact that the great majority were sent home during the four months of the wet season when conditions made most work, other than tunnelling, impossible to undertake.

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After the short Channel crossing to Calais, they proceeded by rail to Brindisi on the Italian Adriatic Coast. From there, a small P&O steamer would take the passengers – and the mail bound for India which had travelled in a second train – to Port Said in Egypt, where a larger liner would convey them through the Suez Canal and on to Bombay. The Indian boat train services would meet this train precisely two weeks after the passengers had left London and transport them and the mail through to India’s other major cities at average speeds of around 36 mph. In comparison, in the UK during the interwar period the best trains routinely ran at an average speed of between 50 and 60 mph.

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The rest of the contracts, interestingly, were undertaken by the companies themselves as they found it was often the most efficient way to ensure the work was completed, and was ultimately cheaper as there was less need for oversight and double-checking. Note, however, that at this time, until the basis of the contracts was changed in 1869, the guarantee system ensured a good rate of return for the shareholders, while placing few constraints on the contractors carrying out the work. Costs, therefore, were not as low as might be expected given the cheapness of labour. The average construction expenditure per mile in the period up to the end of 1868, by which time 4,000 miles of track had been completed, was £18,000, more than double the estimate of £8,000 on which Dalhousie had based his calculations.

Tel Aviv 2015: The Retro Travel Guide by Claudia Stein

illegal immigration, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, machine readable, New Urbanism, Suez canal 1869, urban planning

Most could not maintain themselves, lived mainly for the study of the Torah and were dependant on payments from the diaspora. When the Ottomans defeated Muhammad Ali Pasha in 1841, Jaffa became an economic center once more. The construction of the Jaffa light house in 1865 was very foresightful: only 4 years later in 1869, the Suez Canal opened and Jaffa became even more important, soon even indispensible: the growing production of Jaffa oranges were exported to many countries. In the meantime (September 1866) George Jones Adams, founder of the “Church of the Messiah,” and his 156 followers had come from Boston to Jaffa. They bought a plot of land, erected the wooden prefabricated houses they had brought from home and started a community in the north of Jaffa that can still be seen today around Bar Hoffman Street.

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After this tragedy the Temple Society planned very carefully and strategically to where to move. The following settlements were finally realized: Haifa: 1869 Jaffa: 1869 (purchase of the American settlement) Sarona: 1871 (purchase of 60 hectares of non-arable land from Arabic owner) Neuhardthof: 1888 (extension of Haifa) Walhalla: 1888 (extension of Jaffa) Rephaim: 1873 (close to Jerusalem) Wilhelma: 1902 (today Bnei Atarot) Bethlehem: 1906 After the purchase of the American settlement in 1869, the Templers bought the plots that were later known as Sarona, east of Jaffa. Today Kaplan Street crosses the former Sarona and connects Dizengoff Square with the Azrieli Center and its surrounding business district.

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They bought a plot of land, erected the wooden prefabricated houses they had brought from home and started a community in the north of Jaffa that can still be seen today around Bar Hoffman Street. None of them had been prepared for the hardship of agricultural life abroad and only a few months later, in winter 1867 most of them wanted to leave Jaffa and go back home. The majority of them had already left when in the beginning of 1869 some Southern German “Templers” arrived and offered to buy from Adams’ group their settlement that would later be known as the “(American-) German Colony of Jaffa.” The Templers founded a new settlement east of Jaffa in 1871, Sarona. At the same time there were plans to open a railway connection from Jaffa to Jerusalem and in 1888, the Templers added another little compound close to the future train station.

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

What follows is based on my Great Sea , pp. 545–55, where the creation of the Suez Canal is discussed at greater length. 8. M. Parker, Hell’s Gorge: the Battle to Build the Panama Canal (2nd edn of Panama Fever (London, 2007), London, 2008), p. 15. 9. Z. Karabell, Parting the Desert: the Creation of the Suez Canal (London, 2003), pp. 28–37; J. Marlowe, The Making of the Suez Canal (London, 1964), pp. 44–5. 10. Karabell, Parting the Desert , pp. 131–2; Lord Kinross, Between Two Seas: the Creation of the Suez Canal (London, 1968), pp. 98–9. 11. Karabell, Parting the Desert , p. 260; Kinross, Between Two Seas , p. 287. 12. Marlowe, Making of the Suez Canal , pp. 255–75; Karabell, Parting the Desert , pp. 262–5; R.

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The solution was to use machines rather than men, and a French machine-tool factory jumped at the opportunity to design a whole range of diggers and dredgers suitable for different soils, so that, by the time work was completed late in 1869, most of the hard work had been done by machine. The financial situation was less satisfactory. Ismail spent 240,000,000 francs on the canal, and the political price was high: the Suez Canal Company assumed ever greater powers over the project and over the affairs of the Europeans living in the canal zone, to Ismail’s consternation. The viceroys were promised 15 per cent of the profits, but by the time the canal was open Ismail had run out of money, and was paying hefty rates of interest on loans that de Lesseps had secured in Paris.

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They not merely outpaced the tea clippers, which was to be expected, but they beat the steamships of rival companies. In 1869 his ships carried nearly 9,000,000 lb of tea to England, and, having beaten all competitors, Holt was able to take advantage of a seller’s market and dispose of his tea at 2d per pound more than his late coming rivals.18 In 1914 the Blue Funnel Line, as Holt’s company came to be known, used more berths in Liverpool docks than any other cargo line and was the most frequent user of the Suez Canal, dominating the export of British textiles to east Asia.19 Holt’s operations in China were boosted by his decision to work alongside a British merchant company based in China, Butterfield and Swire, which set up an office in Shanghai on 1 January 1867, and specialized not just in tea but in raw American cotton, which formed the bulk of the cargo of the Achilles when it left Shanghai a couple of weeks later.20 The relationship with John Swire enabled the Blue Funnel line to draw goods from deeper inside China, as Swire’s steamboats penetrated down the Yangtze River, bringing Chinese goods to Shanghai for trans-shipment.

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place) by Tim Marshall

9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, Charlie Hebdo massacre, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Hans Island, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, market fragmentation, megacity, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transcontinental railway, Transnistria, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, zero-sum game

Russian naval ships do transit the strait, but in limited numbers, and this would not be permitted in the event of conflict. Even after crossing the Bosporus the Russians need to navigate the Aegean Sea before accessing the Mediterranean, and would still have either to cross the Strait of Gibraltar to gain access to the Atlantic Ocean, or be allowed down the Suez Canal to reach the Indian Ocean. The Russians do have a small naval presence in Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast (this partially explains their support for the Syrian government when fighting broke out in 2011), but it is a limited-supply and replenishment base, not a major force. Another strategic problem is that in the event of war the Russian navy cannot get out of the Baltic Sea, either, due to the Skagerrak Strait, which connects to the North Sea.

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This is because most of us use the standard Mercator world map. This, as do other maps, depicts a sphere on a flat surface and thus distorts shapes. Africa is far, far longer than usually portrayed, which explains what an achievement it was to round the Cape of Good Hope, and is a reminder of the importance of the Suez Canal to world trade. Making it around the cape was a momentous achievement, but once it became unnecessary to do so, the sea journey from Western Europe to India was reduced by six thousand miles. If you look at a world map and mentally glue Alaska onto California, then turn the United States on its head, it appears as if it would roughly fit into Africa with a few gaps here and there.

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Modern Egypt now has the most powerful armed forces of all the Arab states, thanks to American military aid; but it remains contained by deserts, the sea, and its peace treaty with Israel. It will remain in the news as it struggles to cope with feeding 84 million people a day while battling an Islamist insurgency, especially in the Sinai, and guarding the Suez Canal, through which passes 8 percent of the world’s entire trade every day. Some 2.5 percent of the world’s oil passes this way daily; closing the canal would add about fifteen days’ transit time to Europe and ten to the United States, with concurrent costs. Despite having fought five wars with Israel, the country Egypt is most likely to come into conflict with next is Ethiopia, and the issue is the Nile.

Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross

game design, informal economy, intentional community, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, the built environment

It was thus impossible, pragmatically or theoretically, to measure the exact value of an individual’s labor: “The tools or knowledges that allow us to accomplish our activities necessarily derive from other workers, from preceding generations … and the evaluation of the recompense that should be attributed to each is necessarily arbitrary.”16 In this passage Reclus is discussing the way that scientific and scholarly advancement is dependent on the store of previous labor, but his remarks pertain to other kinds of labor as well. Kropotkin, too, insisted on the “common inheritance” made up of past creative labor: The Italians who died of cholera while making the Suez Canal, or of anchylosis in the St Gothard Tunnel, and the Americans mowed down by shot and shell while fighting for the abolition of slavery, have helped to develop the cotton industry in France and England, as well as the work-girls who languish in the factories of Manchester and Rouen, and the inventor who, following the suggestion of some worker, succeeds in improving the looms.

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Guillaume Fils, 1871), p. 46. 8Gustave Lefrançais, Souvenirs d’un révolutionnaire [1902] (Paris: La Fabrique, 2013), pp. 266–7. 9Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 90. 10Sébille, Club Folies-Belleville, January 30, 1869, cited in Dalotel et al., Aux origines de la Commune, p. 13. 11Elie Reclus, La Commune de Paris, au jour le jour, 1871, 19 mars–28 mai (Paris: Schleicher frères, 1908), p. 46. 12Ernest Merson, Fermez les clubs! (Paris, 1871), cited in Wolfe, “The Origins of the Paris Commune,” p. 163. 13Dalotel et al., Aux origines de la Commune, p. 96. 14Les Orateurs des reunions publiques de Paris en 1869. Compte rendu des séances publiques (Paris: Imprimerie Town et Vossen, 1869), p. 38. 15Elisée Reclus, letter to Pierre Faure, undated from 1869, Correspondances, vol. 3 (Paris: Librairie Schleicher, 1914), p. 63. 16Dalotel et al., Aux origines de la Commune, pp. 255–6.

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For a sense of the effects of Chernyshevsky’s novel on readers at that time, see Sonia Werner, “The Reality Effect and Real Effects of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?,” in Novel 47:3 (2014). 29Narodnoe Delo, nos. 4–6 (May 1869), cited in Woodford McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles: The Russians in the First International and the Paris Commune (London: Frank Cass, 1979), p. 58. 30Narodnoe Delo, no. 1 (September 1, 1868), cited in McClellan, Revolutionary Exiles, p. 15. 31Chernyshevsky, cited in Narodnoe Delo, nos. 7–10 (November 1869), p. 137. 32Dmitrieff, letter to Hermann Jung as conduit to Marx on April 24: “In general, the internationalist propagandizing I am doing here, in order to show that all countries, including Germany, find themselves on the eve of the social revolution, is a very pleasing proposition to women.”

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

In the nineteenth century it was used as a staging port on the way to the harbours on the west coast of Africa, before docking at the Cape of Good Hope. From there it was up along Africa’s east coast and on to the jewel in the crown – India. After that, Malaysia gave the British access to the Strait of Malacca, the maritime gateway to China. This unrivalled geographical power was increased by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869; now British ships could cut through the canal to reach India, and the empire was at its height. It was, at least for Britain, a virtuous circle: increased wealth led to increased military and political power. The UK dodged most of Europe’s wars and revolutions, but its army was busy elsewhere: South Africa, Burma, Crimea and India are some of the many faraway places about which the public knew little, but from which the country benefited a lot.

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The conflict demonstrated that the modern world now relied absolutely on oil, not just for industry and prosperity but also to fight wars. A single US mechanized division (about 250 tanks) was burning through 25,000 gallons of fuel just to travel 160 kilometres. Ibn Saud knew it, President Roosevelt knew it. It was time to meet. Both men were pragmatists. In February 1945 they met on board a US warship in the Suez Canal. They were of similar age, both heads of state and each stricken with infirmity, and they appear to have bonded. The wounds Ibn Saud suffered in the battles he had fought were catching up with him and he had trouble walking, while FDR was in a wheelchair and had just weeks to live. They agreed that the Americans would be guaranteed access to Saudi oil, the Saudis would stay within their borders, and the safety of Saudi Arabia would be guaranteed by the Americans.

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Strategically, Saudi Arabia surely has to stick with the Americans for many years to come, assuming, that is, that the Americans stick with them. Without a security guarantee from the USA the country’s maritime borders are insecure because the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea are narrow, and each has choke points. In the absence of a strong Saudi Arabian navy, a hostile power could block Saudi exports from reaching the Indian Ocean or the Suez Canal. However, despite the security relationship with the USA, economic ties with China will strengthen. China has sold the kingdom intermediate-range ballistic missiles, its oil imports have grown rapidly in the past few years, and Saudi Arabia has signed one of the twelve 5G contracts Huawei has won in the region.

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

On July 26, 1956, Nasser addressed an enormous crowd in Alexandria and told the Americans to “go choke on your fury.”20 Then he played his trump card and announced that Egypt was nationalizing the Suez Canal (see Map 8), the revenues from which he would use to finance the construction of the Aswan Dam. Instantaneously, Nasser was the hero of the Arab world. British prime minister Anthony Eden was infuriated. British ships used the waterway (which had opened in 1869) daily. Having the canal under Nasser’s control threatened critical interests of both France and England. British and French stockholders of the Suez Canal Company were also enraged at the “theft” of their asset. If Nasser had been hoping to dent the prestige of the colonialist power that had previously held Egypt, he had succeeded perfectly.

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If his forces could establish a beachhead on the east bank of the Suez Canal and overrun the Israeli defenses and the symbolic Bar-Lev Line, the campaign would be a success. To ensure that Israel’s air power would have limited impact, the plan was to stay within the twelve-kilometer range of safety afforded by the SAMs that the Soviets had provided him. Even while he was planning for war, Sadat may have been pursuing an alternate, parallel track, as well. In early 1971, Sadat made overtures to Israel suggesting that Israel and Egypt could come to an interim agreement if Israel withdrew to a distance of forty kilometers from the Suez Canal. Golda Meir, utterly confident in Israel’s security and dubious that Sadat had any serious intent of making peace, rejected the suggestion out of hand.8 In late 1972 and unbeknownst to most Israelis, Sadat appointed Hafez Ismail, a longtime diplomat, to the position of national security adviser.

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Sykes had previously recommended that Palestine should come under Britain’s control, though without stipulating what the boundaries of its territory should be. The agreement reached by Sykes and Picot, technically called the “Asia Minor Agreement” but commonly known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, gave the French control over modern-day Syria and Lebanon. Britain, which needed unfettered access to the Suez Canal (see Map 8) because of the importance of India to the empire (Britain’s need for the canal would later figure centrally in Israel’s 1956 war, the Sinai Campaign), was to get control of the coastal strip from the Mediterranean Sea to the river Jordan, an area of land that comprises modern-day Jordan, southern Iraq, the ports of Haifa and Acre and the entire Negev.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages by Carlota Pérez

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, distributed generation, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, full employment, Hyman Minsky, informal economy, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, late capitalism, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, new economy, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, post-industrial society, profit motive, railway mania, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, technological determinism, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

Maturity: Planting the Seeds of Turbulence 89 When the signs of exhaustion appear in the space opened by the reigning paradigm as the ‘normally’ profitable innovation possibilities, financial capital becomes more and more willing and ready to take risks exploring the emerging new attractions. It thus lifts one of the limits for radical innovations outside the well-trodden paths and opens opportunities in the truly new technologies, some of which are likely to come together into the next technological revolution. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 there was wide availability of investment money for the rapid development of the steamship, of international telegraph lines and everything that contributed to swifter world trade. After Ford’s first assembly line, there were funds available for further applications of mass-production methods in and out of the automobile industry as well as for the expansion of oil refining, roads and urban development and so on.

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The iron railways of the second Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital 14 Table 2.2 The industries and infrastructures of each technological revolution Technological revolution New technologies and new or redefined industries New or redefined infrastructures FIRST: From 1771 The ‘Industrial Revolution’; Britain Mechanized cotton industry Wrought iron Machinery Canals and waterways Turnpike roads Water power (highly improved water wheels) SECOND: From 1829 Age of Steam and Railways In Britain and spreading to Continent and USA Steam engines and machinery (made in iron; fueled by coal) Iron and coal mining (now playing a central role in growth)* Railway construction Rolling stock production Steam power for many industries (including textiles) Railways (Use of steam engine) Universal postal service Telegraph (mainly nationally along railway lines) Great ports, great depots and worldwide sailing ships City gas THIRD: From 1875 Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering USA and Germany overtaking Britain Cheap steel (especially Bessemer) Full development of steam engine for steel ships Heavy chemistry and civil engineering Electrical equipment industry Copper and cables Canned and bottled food Paper and packaging Worldwide shipping in rapid steel steamships (use of Suez Canal) Worldwide railways (use of cheap steel rails and bolts in standard sizes). Great bridges and tunnels Worldwide Telegraph Telephone (mainly nationally) Electrical networks (for illumination and industrial use) FOURTH: From 1908 Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production In USA and spreading to Europe Mass-produced automobiles Cheap oil and oil fuels Petrochemicals (synthetics) Internal combustion engine for automobiles, transport, tractors, airplanes, war tanks and electricity Home electrical appliances Refrigerated and frozen foods Networks of roads, highways, ports and airports Networks of oil ducts Universal electricity (industry and homes) Worldwide analog telecommunications (telephone, telex and cablegram) wire and wireless FIFTH: From 1971 Age of Information and Telecommunications In USA, spreading to Europe and Asia The information revolution: Cheap microelectronics.

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When the core products of a technological revolution start coming together, they inevitably clash with the established environment and the ingrained ways of doing things. Arkwright’s water frame was a clear threat to hand spinners both in England and in India. The Liverpool–Manchester railway announced the demise of the horse-drawn carriage for long-distance passenger travel, affecting various occupations from innkeepers to veterinarians.53 The Suez Canal practically eliminated sailing ships from the route to India, while, by cutting travel time from three months to one, it made obsolete the network of huge cargo depots in England, threatening the power of the big 53. Contrary to what one would have expected, the number of horses actually increased for more than 50 years because of the need for horse transport from railway stations to ships, houses, inns and so on.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? Each generation’s inventors and visionaries surpassed their predecessors. In 1843, the London public was invited to make its first crossing underneath the River Thames by a newly dug tunnel. In 1869, the Suez Canal saved Eurasian shipping traffic from rounding the Cape of Good Hope. In 1914 the Panama Canal cut short the route from Atlantic to Pacific. Even the Great Depression failed to impede relentless progress in the United States, which has always been home to the world’s most far-seeing definite optimists.

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Kaczynski, Ted Karim, Jawed Karp, Alex, 11.1, 12.1 Kasparov, Garry Katrina, Hurricane Kennedy, Anthony Kesey, Ken Kessler, Andy Kurzweil, Ray last mover, 11.1, 13.1 last mover advantage lean startup, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 Levchin, Max, 4.1, 10.1, 12.1, 14.1 Levie, Aaron lifespan life tables LinkedIn, 5.1, 10.1, 12.1 Loiseau, Bernard Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) luck, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 Lucretius Lyft MacBook machine learning Madison, James Madrigal, Alexis Manhattan Project Manson, Charles manufacturing marginal cost marketing Marx, Karl, 4.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Masters, Blake, prf.1, 11.1 Mayer, Marissa Medicare Mercedes-Benz MiaSolé, 13.1, 13.2 Michelin Microsoft, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 5.1, 14.1 mobile computing mobile credit card readers Mogadishu monopoly, monopolies, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.1, 7.1, 8.1 building of characteristics of in cleantech creative dynamism of new lies of profits of progress and sales and of Tesla Morrison, Jim Mosaic browser music recording industry Musk, Elon, 4.1, 6.1, 11.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 Napster, 5.1, 14.1 NASA, 6.1, 11.1 NASDAQ, 2.1, 13.1 National Security Agency (NSA) natural gas natural secrets Navigator browser Netflix Netscape NetSecure network effects, 5.1, 5.2 New Economy, 2.1, 2.2 New York Times, 13.1, 14.1 New York Times Nietzsche, Friedrich Nokia nonprofits, 13.1, 13.2 Nosek, Luke, 9.1, 14.1 Nozick, Robert nutrition Oedipus, 14.1, 14.2 OfficeJet OmniBook online pet store market Oracle Outliers (Gladwell) ownership Packard, Dave Page, Larry Palantir, prf.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1, 12.1 PalmPilots, 2.1, 5.1, 11.1 Pan, Yu Panama Canal Pareto, Vilfredo Pareto principle Parker, Sean, 5.1, 14.1 Part-time employees patents path dependence PayPal, prf.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 8.1, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 11.1, 11.2, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1 founders of, 14.1 future cash flows of investors in “PayPal Mafia” PCs Pearce, Dave penicillin perfect competition, 3.1, 3.2 equilibrium of Perkins, Tom perk war Perot, Ross, 2.1, 12.1, 12.2 pessimism Petopia.com Pets.com, 4.1, 4.2 PetStore.com pharmaceutical companies philanthropy philosophy, indefinite physics planning, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2 progress without Plato politics, 6.1, 11.1 indefinite polling pollsters pollution portfolio, diversified possession power law, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 of distribution of venture capital Power Sellers (eBay) Presley, Elvis Priceline.com Prince Procter & Gamble profits, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 progress, 6.1, 6.2 future of without planning proprietary technology, 5.1, 5.2, 13.1 public opinion public relations Pythagoras Q-Cells Rand, Ayn Rawls, John, 6.1, 6.2 Reber, John recession, of mid-1990 recruiting, 10.1, 12.1 recurrent collapse, bm1.1, bm1.2 renewable energy industrial index research and development resources, 12.1, bm1.1 restaurants, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1 risk risk aversion Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) Romulus and Remus Roosevelt, Theodore Royal Society Russia Sacks, David sales, 2.1, 11.1, 13.1 complex as hidden to non-customers personal Sandberg, Sheryl San Francisco Bay Area savings scale, economies of Scalia, Antonin scaling up scapegoats Schmidt, Eric search engines, prf.1, 3.1, 5.1 secrets, 8.1, 13.1 about people case for finding of looking for using self-driving cars service businesses service economy Shakespeare, William, 4.1, 7.1 Shark Tank Sharma, Suvi Shatner, William Siebel, Tom Siebel Systems Silicon Valley, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 10.1, 11.1 Silver, Nate Simmons, Russel, 10.1, 14.1 singularity smartphones, 1.1, 12.1 social entrepreneurship Social Network, The social networks, prf.1, 5.1 Social Security software engineers software startups, 5.1, 6.1 solar energy, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4 Solaria Solyndra, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5 South Korea space shuttle SpaceX, prf.1, 10.1, 11.1 Spears, Britney SpectraWatt, 13.1, 13.2 Spencer, Herbert, 6.1, 6.2 Square, 4.1, 6.1 Stanford Sleep Clinic startups, prf.1, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1 assigning responsibilities in cash flow at as cults disruption by during dot-com mania economies of scale and foundations of founder’s paradox in lessons of dot-com mania for power law in public relations in sales and staff of target market for uniform of venture capital and steam engine Stoppelman, Jeremy string theory strong AI substitution, complementarity vs. Suez Canal tablet computing technological advance technology, prf.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 American fear of complementarity and globalization and proprietary technology companies terrorism Tesla Motors, 10.1, 13.1, 13.2 Thailand Theory of Justice, A (Rawls) Timberlake, Justin Time magazine Tolkien, J.R.R.

A History of France by John Julius Norwich

centre right, German hyperinflation, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, Monroe Doctrine, Peace of Westphalia, power law, Suez canal 1869

He reported to Lord Stanley, the Foreign Secretary, on 11 August: It is even asserted that he is weary of the whole thing, disappointed at the contrast between the brilliancy at the beginning of his reign and the present gloom – and inclined, if possible, to retire into private life. This is no doubt a great exaggeration but, if he is really feeling unequal to governing with energy, the dynasty and the country are in great danger. He was certainly in no state to accompany Eugénie when, in November 1869, she attended the opening by the Khedive Ismail of the Suez Canal. The ceremony was not without a moment of serious embarrassment. The khedive had graciously invited the empress, in the French imperial yacht, the Aigle, to be the first to pass through the canal. On the night before the opening, however, HMS Newport, under Captain George Nares RN, slipped without lights through the mass of waiting ships till it was in front of the Aigle.

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., 352–3 Stanislas Leszczyński, King of Poland and Duke of Lorraine, 177–8, 179n Stanley, Edward Henry, Lord (later 15th Earl of Derby), 297 Stavisky, Serge Alexandre, 335–7 Steinheil, Marguerite, 325 & n Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 262 Stephen II, Pope, 11 Stephen, King of England, 23 Strasbourg, 314, 352, 354 Stratford, John, Archbishop of Canterbury, 71 Stresemann, Gustav, 335 Sudetenland, 339–40 Suez Canal: opened (1869), 297–8 Suffolk, William de la Pole, Earl of, 92–3 Suger, Abbot of Saint-Denis, 21 Suleiman I (‘the Magnificent’), Ottoman Sultan, 128–9, 133, 139 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, Duke de, 148 Sweden: in Thirty Years’ War, 154 & n, 155 Swiss Guards: defend Tuileries in Revolution, 207 syphilis, 111 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de: in French Revolution, 192, 199; proposes Egyptian expedition, 230; as prime minister under Louis XVIII, 249; Thiers meets, 253; witnesses 1830 revolution, 254; as ambassador to London, 259–60; attends Fieschi trial, 262 Tancred of Lecce, King of Sicily, 40, 42–4 Templars, Order of, 57–60, 209, 232 Temple (Paris), 209–10 tennis (or jeu de paume), 65 & n, 137, 193n Thiers, Louis-Adolphe: background and career, 253; calls for 1830 revolution, 253; supports Louis-Philippe, 257, 266; and assassination attempt on Louis-Philippe, 262; premiership and resignation, 262–4; defeats Louis-Napoleon in 1848 election, 271; on Sadowa defeat, 297; builds defensive Paris wall, 307; attempts to negotiate peace treaty with Prussians, 314; elected to 1871 national government, 314; and Paris Commune, 315–16; alliance with Gambetta, 319; and founding of Third Republic, 319–20; History of the French Revolution, 253, 262 Thiers Wall, 307 third estate, 190–3 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), 151–2, 159 Thompson, Sir Henry, 302 Thunderball (film), 138n Tocqueville, Alexis de, 248 Torch, Operation (1942), 345, 347 Torcy, Jean Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de, 162, 170 Tour de Nesle, 62, 65 Tours: Battle of (732), 10; and siege of Paris (1870), 309 Tourzel, Louise Elisabeth, Duchesse de, 202 Trafalgar, Battle of (1805), 240 Trémoille, George de la, 93 Triple Entente (France–Britain–Russia, 1907), 327–8 Trochu, General Louis Jules, 306, 308, 311n Troyes, Treaty of (1420), 91 Tuileries: Louis XVI and family detained in, 198; mob marches on and attacks, 206–9; burnt down in 1871 Commune, 273n Turenne, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de, 160 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 187–9 Tuscany, Leopold, Grand Duke of, 274 Ulm, Battle of (1805), 240 Ultra codebreakers (British), 354 & n United Nations: founding, 355 United States of America: enters First World War (1917), 332; enters Second World War (1941), 345 Urban II, Pope, 19–20 Utrecht, Treaty of (1712), 172–3 Valmy, Battle of (1792), 210, 213 Valois dynasty, 18 Vandals, 5–6 Varennes, 203–4 Vaubois, General Claude, 232 Vendée, 214, 217 Vendôme, Louis Joseph, Duc de, 170 Venice: in territorial disputes with Louis XII, 114; Napoleon ends republic, 229–30 Vera Cruz, Mexico, 292 Vercingetorix, 2–4 Verdi, Giuseppe: Aïda, 298n Verdun: partition of Carolingian Empire, 14; Battle of (1916), 330–2, 341 Versailles, Château de: life at, 162–4, 170, 174; Petit Trianon, 182; women march on in Revolution, 197–8; Prussians occupy (1870), 308 Versailles, Treaty of (1919), 332, 334, 338 Vézelay, 24, 37–8 Vichy government, 342–3 Victor Emmanuel II, King of Sardinia (later of Italy), 289 Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, 326 Victoria, Queen (formerly Princess) of Great Britain, 260, 265, 268, 285–7, 299, 303–5 Vieillard, Nicholas, 280 Vieilleville, François de Scépaux, Marquis de (1543), 134 Vienna, Congress of (1815), 242 Vienna, Peace of (1738), 177–8 Villafranca, Treaty of (1859), 291–2 Villars, Marshal Claude Louis Hector, Duc de, 171 Villèle, Joseph, 252 Villeneuve-le-Hardi, 76 Visconti, Duchess Valentina, 109 Visigoths, 6 Vitry-le-François, 22 Voisin, Madame (Marguerite Monvoisin), 166 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet: on Louis XIV, 157, 174; regard for Mme de Pompadour, 181–2; on loss of Canada, 183; on attempted assassination of Louis XV, 184; praises Turgot, 187; meets Benjamin Franklin, 188; anti-clericalism, 190 Vosges: annexed by Dagobert I, 9 Wagram, Battle of (1809), 240 Waldensians: persecuted, 132–3 Walpole, Sir Robert, 177 Wars of the Roses, 101 Warwick, Richard de Beauchamp, Earl of (‘the Kingmaker’), 94, 101–2 Washburne, Elihu B., 307, 309 Washington, George, 255 Waterloo, Battle of (1815), 243–4 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 243–4, 246, 249, 270 Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 138n, 159 Weygand, Jean, 295n Weygand, General Maxime, 295, 340, 356 William (‘the Bastard’), Duke of Normandy (King William I of England), 19, 21 William II Rufus, King of England, 21 William III (of Orange), King of England, 167 William I, King of Prussia and first German Kaiser, 296, 299, 313 William II, Kaiser of Germany, 333n William II, King of Sicily, 40 Wilson, Woodrow, 332 Wolfe, General James, 183 Yalta Conference (1945), 355 Ypres, second Battle of (1916), 330 Zengi, Imad-ed-Din, Atabeg of Mosul, 22–3, 28 Zola, Emile: La Débâcle, 301n; J’Accuse!

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There was, inevitably, a pious section about delivering the Egyptian people from the oppression that it had so long endured; worthier of attention was the suggestion that with an army of 20,000 to 25,000, which would land at Alexandria and occupy Cairo, a further expedition might be launched against India – possibly even by means of a hastily dug Suez canal. On 2 March 1798 the Directory gave its formal approval. Not only would the proposal keep the army employed and its terrifying young general at a safe distance from Paris; it also offered an opportunity to take over the British role in India, while providing France with an important new colony in the eastern Mediterranean.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Formally an Egyptian dynasty ruled the country under a loose connection to the Ottoman Empire, but practically it remained within the European sphere of influence. This humiliating arrangement became a bone of contention for Egyptian nationalists, whose agitation introduced social turmoil that threatened Great Britain’s huge investment in Egypt. On top of this, more and more of the British commercial fleets began using the Suez Canal after its opening in 1869. This hundred-mile waterway joined the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Its vulnerability to violence was unacceptable to British investors. The British government ordered an invasion of Egypt in 1882, demonstrating the fusion of public and private economic interests that became increasingly conspicuous.

…

By the end of 1940 Britain was confronting Germany alone, saved from invasion by the Royal Air Force working with the new radar and antiaircraft defenses. After Germany forced the evacuation of all English forces from the Continent in June 1940, most of Europe was his. The British turned to defending the Suez Canal and India while the United States began tooling up to send them material support. This decision gave Britain something of a breather. Fresh from victory over France, Germany invaded Russia a year later. Hitler’s expectation of another quick victory got ground down by the unexpected ferocity of the Russian defenders of their homeland.

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The United States had lost all its spare capacity at a time when world oil consumption was growing 7.5 percent a year. American production hit its high in 1955, and after that the United States turned increasingly to Mexico, Canada, and Venezuela for its oil. By 1955 two-thirds of the oil going to Europe was passing through the Suez Canal, which had regained the strategic importance lost when Britain left India a decade earlier. By 1973 the days of plentiful, and therefore cheap, oil were a thing of the past. Middle Eastern oil reserves were vast, but the actual production capacity of Arab states met 99 percent of demand, leaving a margin of 1 percent!

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

While Reinhart and Rogoff set an inflation rate of 40 percent as the threshold for describing an inflationary “crisis,” their work also suggests that since the 1970s a larger and larger percentage of nations have been captured by global financial crises. As the use of what Reinhart and Rogoff describe as repression of domestic markets and price controls ended in the 1970s and 1980s, and the U.S. deficit and debt grew, the frequency and number of nations affected by periodic economic crises also increased.40 From the closing of the Suez Canal in 1956, the United Kingdom and France had been the primary recipients of adjustment loans. Even in those times, the availability of dollars was so limited that it would have been difficult in a practical sense for foreign nations to incur large amounts of dollar debt. As late as December of 1973, the total of all U.S. bank claims on foreigners was just $20 billion—about in the same neighborhood as the U.S. budget deficit in that year—and one third of this amount was held against Japan.

…

Stevenson, Adlai Stewart, John Fat Years and the Lean Stewart, William Silver Knight (pamphlet) Stillman, James Stock investment New Era theory perspective, change Stock markets human nature, impact purchases (financing), short-term loans (usage) Stocks, decline Strong, Benjamin Bankers Trust Company exit Delano/House meeting Morgan control replacement Strong, William Subprime debt bubble, blame Subprime Debt Crisis (2008) Subprime debt crisis, Fed/Treasury assistance Subprime financial crisis, perspective (Raynes) Subprime housing crisis (2007-2009), issues Suez Canal, closing (1956) Sugar Equalization Board Summers, Larry Swanberg, W.A. Sylla, Richard Systemic risk, moral dilemma Szymczak, M.S. Taft, William Howard government debt Taleb, Nassim Tammany Hall Roosevelt, impact Tansil, Charles Callan America Goes to War Tariffs competitiveness, FDR promise FDR maintenance imposition increase protection, increase reduction FDR endorsement Hoover opposition Republican party position Tariffs for revenue only Taxes FDR increase reduction, passage Tennessee Iron & Coal Company U.S.

…

Even though Gould and Fisk understood by the last week in September 1869 that their political scheme was doomed to failure, Fisk made one last attempt to ramp the market higher by using funds he obtained from the Tenth National Bank, which he and Gould had come to control. As the posted price of gold displayed in the Gold Room in lower Manhattan rose past $150 greenbacks for $100 worth of gold, Fisk and his confederates in the gold market bid prices up even higher. This sent a panic through the market and caused financial ruin for many gold bears, who were short the metal at lower prices. On September 22, 1869, Fisk and his surrogates in the gold market made it clear via public statements that President Grant himself supported their cause and would not sell gold from the Treasury’s stock.

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

In the 1860s, Muhammad Ali’s grandson Isma’il Haussmannized Cairo, transforming it into a city of boulevards and avenues, and built that ultimate symbol of openness to other (European) traditions, an opera house. In the meantime, work was progressing on that most literal opening between east and west, the Suez Canal. Its inauguration in 1869 proved that, whatever Kipling would think, the twain could meet – at least for a brief time at the opening ceremony, in a mad carmagnole . . . with Kaisers and Dervishes, Emperors and Almey girls, Patriarchs and buffons, Emirs and engineers, Mussulman high priests and Italian sailors all mixed up helter skelter . . .

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Sa’ud late 18th century British navy protects merchantmen in Gulf from Arab raids 1783 Bedouin raiders conquer Bahrain 1798 Wahhabis defeat an Ottoman army sent to subdue them French under Napoleon invade Egypt, defeat Mamluks French introduce Arabic printing to Egypt 1800 French in Cairo print the first, short-lived Arabic newspaper 1801 Ottoman-British forces expel French from Egypt 1802 Wahhabis devastate Shi’i sites in S Iraq 1805–12 Wahhabis occupy Mecca 1812 Muhammad Ali Pasha exterminates Mamluk remnants in Egypt 1813–18 Muhammad Ali defeats Wahhabis in Arabian Peninsula 19th century Muhammad Ali re-orientates Egypt intellectually towards Europe Arabic replaces Turkish as official language in Egypt printing begins to spread slowly through the Arabic world the ‘Awakening’: a renewal of Arab identity reinvigoration, among intellectuals, of written high Arabic idea of an Arab ‘nation’, part-inspired by European nationalisms 1822 government press founded in Cairo 1826 a group of young Egyptians is sent to study in Paris 1828 the first enduring government newspaper is established in Cairo 1830 French begin takeover of Algeria 1835 Cairo ‘House of Tongues’ founded to translate European books 1839 British take Aden mid-19th century Ottomans re-occupy parts of Yemen the steam railway introduced to Egypt first Arabic newspapers outside Egypt 1860s Cairo gets a Parisian-style street-plan and an opera house 1869 opening of the Suez Canal 1870s on British-ruled Aden flourishes with increased sea traffic Ottomans impose strict censorship on burgeoning Arabic press 1876 Egypt bankrupt: European powers impose financial control 1881 revolt of Egyptian army officers under Ahmad Urabi 1881 on N Algeria brought under metropolitan French administration French suppress use of high Arabic, especially in Algeria 1882 British enter Egypt at Ottoman behest, assume administration 1883 French take Tunisia 1890s on Levantine Arabs migrate to Europe, W Africa, the Americas Yemenis found first Arab communities in Britain Germans woo Ottomans to gain presence in Arab lands 1908 Hijaz Railway (Damascus–Medina) completed revolution of the nationalist ‘Young Turks’ Turkish enforced as sole official language of Arab lands 1912 French protectorate over much of Morocco Spanish protectorates in N and SW Morocco 1916 British recognize Sharif Husayn as King of the Hijaz Sharif Husayn promotes himself to ‘King of the Arabs’ Husayn’s British-backed ‘Arab Revolt’ against Ottomans France and Britain agree to divide Ottoman-ruled Arab lands 1917 Balfour Declaration, promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine 1918 on the victorious powers divide the Ottoman empire 1920 French mandate over Syria, including Lebanon British mandate over Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq Faysal b.

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It was the first Victorian addition to the empire, and the first steam-driven event in the region: the British were looking for a coaling station for the nascent generation of India-bound steamships, and Aden, with its superb natural harbour just round the corner from the mouth of the Red Sea, was strategically perfect; as long as one didn’t mind the absence of fresh water, the burning heat, and a volcanic backdrop that made it look to Kipling like a barrick-stove That no one’s lit for years an’ years. For generations of British it would be the perfect dump in both senses, coal-hole and hell-hole. In time, however, Aden grew on the British, particularly when, thirty years after they took the port, the Suez Canal transformed the Red Sea from a dead end into a live issue and a major seaway. Nor was it long before they got another toe in that new and highly convenient back door to India. Because of all those debts incurred in digging the canal – not to mention boulevardizing Cairo, hosting the Empress Eugénie and the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, hiring Stephenson, Verdi and a firmament of grand opera stars, and converting the Mamluk-era military into a model army – Egypt was bankrupt.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

On the other hand, there was probably a huge business supplying parts to these companies. I would have looked long and hard at propellers: every ship needed one, and there must have been fifty years of innovations in size, efficiency and quality to invest in. Suez Canal: The next barrier to be broken was the distance to India and the Far East. After 10 years of construction, the Suez Canal opened in 1869. Transportation costs dropped yet again, by a factor of three or more, and as importantly, distance and time became deterministic. The trip from Malaya to England to deliver tin took exactly three months, which was the same time it took for copper to arrive from Chile.

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As other investors starting hearing about 98 Running Money General Magic’s new service, the stock started trading close to $2, still less than the cash in the bank. In our first 12 months, we managed to scrape up barely $20 million in capital—how lame. But thanks to NetApp and Pinnacle and General Magic, we turned it into $25 million, a 25% gain. Maybe this investment thing really is going to get off the ground. > > > IR Is Dead “And then the Suez Canal and turbines drove transportation costs even lower and . . .” I was on my pre-7:00 a.m. phone call with Mr. Zed. I think I had this industrial stuff figured out. “Very good. Now forget about all of that,” Mr. Zed told me. “Forget it? I just figured it out,” I said. “I think you figured out how it was, not how it will be.

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., 172 Sloan Foundation, 172 smelting, 52–53 Smith, Adam, 54, 279 Smith, Junius, 93–94 Social Security, 261 software, 118, 120, 196–99 company blowups, 177–78 investment factors, 136, 146, 197 payment for, 137 Soho Manufactory, 55 Sony, 44, 206, 251, 253, 277 Soros, George, 10, 14, 117, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 261, 276, 295 Soros Management, 112, 113, 293 Southwest, 292 spinning frame, 65, 66, 125 spinning jenny, 64–65 spinning mule, 65, 125, 272 Sprint, 72 Sputnik I, 101 Sri Lanka, 246 Ssangyong, 3–6, 166, 208, 234, 260 Stac, 97 standard of living, 234–35, 246, 256, 279 Stanford Research Institute, 120, 185, 187 Stanford University, 152, 187, 191 steam engine, 64, 78, 91–95, 183 industrial significance of, 55–56, 58–59, 65–67, 68, 123, 125, 190, 271, 272 microprocessor parallel with, 125 Watt designs, 53–55, 57, 89, 91, 95, 125–26, 190 steam locomotive, 92 steamships, 92, 93–95, 183 Steen-Seligman Happiness Index, 280, 282 Steinhardt, Michael, 10 Stephenson, George, 92 stock market, 10, 180, 208, 256–58, 261, 262, 269 art of stock buying and, 181–82 British, 92–93 bubble, 209–16, 223–27 burst of bubble, 227, 234, 248, 290–93 drop in, 166, 168, 169, 224–25 foreign investors in, 29, 275, 276 function of, 89–90 industrial economists and, 237 intellectual property’s profitability and, 269 international economic role of, 279 on-line trading, 84–85 September 11 attacks and, 288 shorting, 171 software blowups, 177 theory of efficient, 176 stock options, 261 Stockton and Darlington Railway, 92 stress, 280, 282, 287 Suez Canal, 94 Sullivan, Scott, 225 Sun Microsystems, 191, 194, 245 Sure Thing, The (film), 218 Index Taiwan, 68, 204, 251, 252, 281 low manufacturing costs, 130–35, 136, 148, 175, 235, 259 offshore subsidiaries and, 251, 252 U.S. debt and, 257 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, 130, 131–35, 148, 252, 259 Take Two Interactive, 176–77 tariffs, 272, 277–78 Tartikoff, Brandon, 196 TASS, 169 taxes, 254, 272, 288 T-bill, 254 technology, 16, 42–43, 73, 168, 290 changes from, 67–68, 79 development factors, 79 human relationship with, 246–47 lowered prices from, 187 textile manufacture, 64–65 top market cap companies, 111 See also intellectual property; specific technologies technology stocks, 11, 109, 223–27, 228–29, 293 telecommunications industry, 61–62 Telecosm conference, 183 telegraph, 187 telephone, 183–84, 185–86 teleputer, 193, 194 Telesave, 72–73 television sets, 127, 158, 277 Teligent, 179 Texas Instruments, 11, 101, 126, 128, 154 textile manufacture, 64–68, 78, 89, 272 311 Thailand, 117, 234, 270 13-D filings, 204 Tiger Management, 11, 112, 113, 117, 276, 292–93, 295 yen and, 162–66, 168, 169 TimeWarner, 194, 223, 229 Titanic (ocean liner), 95 Token Ring, 191 Tolkien, J.

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

The same could not be said for the self-inflicted wounds that resulted from the aggressive Middle Eastern policy of the Lloyd George coalition. Here Britain’s ambitious pursuit of excessive imperial strategic goals provoked local resistance, outrage throughout the empire and a debacle of British policy in Europe. II From its opening in 1869 down to the Franco-British intervention of 1956, the Suez canal was to be a consistent focus of British strategic attention. But power could be exercised in different ways. It was the uneven momentum of the Great War that launched Britain on the most aggressive and disastrous phase of its career as a Middle Eastern power.12 From the spring of 1918, faced with Germany’s dramatic advance, Lloyd George’s chief advisor Alfred Milner had advocated a retreat to the imperial periphery.

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How far America would underwrite Britain’s wider effort to reconstruct its empire remained a question still to be resolved. VI The most consequential effort to explore how far America might go was made in the Middle East, the main zone of imperial expansion during the war.69 From the mid-nineteenth century British policy in the region had been torn between the desire to protect the Suez canal, by shielding the ailing Ottoman Empire against Tsarist expansion, and liberal indignation over ‘Turkish atrocities’ in the Balkans. Turkey’s decision to join the Central Powers in October 1914 turned London’s policy in a decidedly turkophobic direction. In December, London declared a protectorate over Egypt, triggering the Russians into expansive claims on Ottoman territory, which Britain and France sought to contain in the spring of 1916 with the so-called Sykes-Picot agreement.70 This allocated a slice of northern Mesopotamia, Syria and Lebanon to France.

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They seriously underestimated the force that this promise might acquire as a challenge to Britain’s own power in the region, nowhere more so than in Egypt. In the 1880s Egypt had been at the centre of the new imperial competition in Africa. Britain had ousted both the Ottomans and the French from the country and secured dominance over the French-financed Suez canal. As war approached in 1914 there was talk of outright annexation. Instead, leaving open all possibilities, in December 1914 London declared a protectorate, whilst at the same time promising progress towards self-government.14 This produced contradictory expectations. The French-orientated Egyptian elite took the liberal rhetoric of the Entente and the United States at face value, whereas Britain’s most expansive imperialists expected the ‘dissolution of the Ottoman Empire’ to ‘make Egypt the lodestar in any new Afro-Asian imperial constellation’.15 In 1918 the man who was rapidly emerging as the leader of the new nationalism, Sa’d pasha Zaghloul, a former Minister of Education and Minister of Justice, demanded representation at Versailles in the name of his patrician national delegation, or Wafd.

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Characteristically, what the British had seen as ‘independence’ was merely independence from the rest of Europe. The relationship with the United States was merely one of being free to do as they pleased, as long as Washington did not object, as the British discovered in 1956 when they tried to invade Egypt to secure the Suez Canal, without American approval. But by then, the die was cast; Britain had thrown in her lot with what was seen as a kindred Anglo-Saxon culture across the Atlantic. In the context of British history it was understandable: Europe meant war, America the aid which ended war. But the price of British overdependence on the United States was that the country closed its eyes to much else happening in Europe and aggravated its estrangement from the European Community to which, belatedly, it sought admission.

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., 148 Prince of Wales (ship), 39 Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (Swift), 237 Punch (magazine), 51, 222 privacy, 115–40 ‘privacy of indifference’, 129 Private Eye (magazine), 14 prosperity, 136–7 prostitution, 212–15 Protestant Association, 249 Purcell, Henry, 125 Pym, John, 133 Quarterly Review, 223 Quayle, David, 123 Queensberry, Marquess of, 195 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 145 Quilter, Roger, 167 Racine, Jean, 27 Racing Demon (Hare), 107 railways, channel tunnel and, 132–3 Ramblers Association, 148 Ranjitsinghji, Prince, 260 Raven, Simon, 17, 76, 201–6 Rawlinson, Thomas, 13 Raymond, Paul, 229–30 Reagan, Ronald, 41 Reece, Arthur, 185 Reform Act, 222 Reformation, 137 art in, 110 Reith, John, 47, 231 ‘Respectable Society’, 228–9, 254–5 reticence, 115–19 Rhodes, Cecil, 1, 66, 180 Richard II, King, 257 Richard II (Shakespeare), 30, 77 Richard of Hexham, 45 Richards, Frank (Charles Harold St John Hamilton), 36 Ridley, Nicholas, 89–91 Rights of Man (Paine), 249 riots, 248–51 Riots, Risings and Revolution (Gilmour), 247 roads, 151 Robertson, John, 44 Robinson, John, 108 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 34 Rochester, John, 228 Roman Catholic Church, 89–90 anti-Catholicism and, 96 Romans, 53–4 Roosevelt, President, 39 Rosebery, Earl of, 66 Rosenthal, Abi, 75 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 208–9 Royal family, death of Diana and, 240–3 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, 139 rudeness, towards women, 221 ‘Rule Britannia’, 172–3 Runcie, Dr Robert, 100–101 ruralism, 142–75 Ruskin, John, 66, 162, 226 Sackville-West, Vita, 196 Sadowa, battle of, 32 Saturday Review, 207 St Augustine, 54–5 St George, 81–2 St George’s Day, 11, 12, 21 St Patrick’s Day, 12 St Paul’s Cathedral, 88 St Thomas Becket, 45 Salford University, 127 Sandford, Elizabeth, 222 Santayana, George, 125 Sapper, 176–7 Sassoon, Siegfried, 147 Schama, Simon, 194 Scotland, Scots, 20, 43–4, 45, 46, 48 Scott, Cyril, 167 Scott, Peter, 150 Scott, Sir George Gilbert, 8–9 Scott, Sir Walter, 13, 228 sea, importance of, 29–35 seafarers, English as nation of, 30–31 Selkirk, Alexander, 33–4 Sellon, Captain, Edward, 67 Set in a Silver Sea (Bryant), 168 sex, 45, 179–80, 180, 207–31 French and, 24–5 overseas, 66–9 Shadwell, Thomas, 209 Shakespeare, William, 27, 82–3, 192 Shaw, George Bernard, 93 Shaw, Norman, 120 Shell Guides, 148 Shell Oil Company, 148 Shropshire Lad, A (Housman), 147, 261 Shukla, Hari, 75 Silences du Colonel Bramble, Les (Maurois), 129 Singh, Ray, 46 Sitwell, Osbert, 198 Smith, John, 49 Smith, Dr Richard, 90 Smith, Sidney, 225 soccer, see football socialism, 163–5 Soil Association, 168 ‘Soldier, The’ (Brooke), 146 Somme, battle of, 199 ‘Sons of the Sea, All British Born’ (Reece), 185 Sorley, Charles, 147 Southgate, Gareth, 50 Spain, 25–6 spanking, 207–10 Sprat, Bishop, 191 Spring-Rice, 144 Stanley, Henry Morton, 180 Starkey, Dr David, 264 state, role of, 133 Stead, W. T., 214 Steele, Sir Richard, 34 Steiner, George, 188–90, 253 Sterne, Laurence, 211 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 13, 33 Stewart, James, 80 ‘stiff upper lip’, 240–43 Stopes, Marie, 229 Story of O, 208 Strong, Sir Roy, 17, 37 Struther, Jan, 223 Studying British Cultures (Byatt), 14 Suez Canal, 41 suicide rates, 126 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 76 Sun (newspaper), 21, 131, 132 Sunday Telegraph, 76 Sunday Times, 46, 78 Sutton’s Hospital, 206 Sutton, Thomas, 205–6 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 94, 173 Swift, Jonathan, 33, 237 swimming, 195 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 208 ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, 11 Sydney, Algernon, 133 Tacitus, 56 Taine, Hippolyte, 190, 213, 229 Take a Girl Like You (Amis), 210–11 Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 218 Taylor, Robert, 74 tennis, 195 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 35 Thatcher, Margaret, 41, 122, 138, 139, 220 Thesiger, Wilfred, 180 Thirty-Nine Steps, The (Buchan), 177 This England (magazine), 77–81, 91–2 Thomas, Dylan, 52 Thomas, Edward, 160–61 Thompson, Joseph, 215–16 thrashing, 207–10 Three Guineas (Woolf), 227 Time (magazine), 239 Times, The, 139, 168, 172, 220, 223, 226 Times Educational Supplement, 15 Tockenham Wick, 248 Tom Jones (Fielding), 96, 186 towns, 8–9 Trafalgar, Battle of, 44 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 33 Treaty of Utrecht, 184 Tribune, 233 Trollope, Mrs Frances, 24 Turley, W., 225 Turner, J.

…

The famous signal at the Battle of Trafalgar, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty,’ is said to have been hoisted by John Robertson, a sailor from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. ‘In British settlements from Dunedin to Bombay, for every Englishman who has worked himself up to wealth from small beginnings, you find ten Scotchmen,’ wrote Sir Charles Dilke in 1869, adding mischievously, ‘It is strange indeed that Scotland has not become the popular name for the United Kingdom.’2 The last words of Lieutenant General Sir John Moore – a Glasgow-born Scot – say it all. As he lay mortally wounded by a blast of grapeshot at the battle of Corunna in 1809, he certainly had no doubts about whom he was serving.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

Now Anglo-America could bring the full weight of its power to bear on the Axis.79 Determined to win the war before the United States could intervene in strength, or at least acquire the critical mass to force a stalemate, the Axis surged forward. The Japanese occupied much of South-east Asia, including Hong Kong and Singapore, and menaced India. In North Africa, Rommel advanced as far as El Alamein, just inside Egypt, threatening the Suez Canal. On the Russian front, German armies penetrated deep into the Caucasus and nearly captured Stalingrad, on the Volga. At sea, U-boat wolf-packs came close to cutting Britain off from the global supply of food and war materials. By the beginning of 1943, however, it was clear that continental supremacy would be beyond Hitler’s grasp.

…

Otherwise, we shall be embarking on a war which will doubtless be economic at first but which runs the risk of gradually spreading into other fields.’40 The new European solidarity was about to be sorely tested. In the face of intense US scepticism about her ‘imperial’ ambitions, Britain decided to stand her ground against Egyptian president Nasser’s ambition to nationalize the Suez Canal. What was at stake, London believed, was not just Egypt, or even the wider Middle East, but Europe itself. Nasser’s challenge, as prime minister Anthony Eden put it, was a direct threat to ‘Western Europe’s economic security’. Moreover, dealing with Egypt was seen as vital to the success of the ‘Eurafrican’ project of collectively mobilizing the continent in support of European power.41 France was totally supportive.

…

Some other European states – like Italy, which expected to move into the vacuum left by Britain and France – were opposed to action against Nasser. Most, including the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, strongly supported military intervention on the grounds of ‘European raison d’état’.42 In July 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal. London and Paris were outraged. In early September, the French prime minister Guy Mollet secretly proposed a Franco-British Union of states – a revival of the Churchill scheme of 1940 – in order to present a united front to the world. London rejected these overtures as a dilution of national sovereignty, but she did agree to joint action against Nasser in (covert) conjunction with the Israelis.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

Symbolizing the centrality of cotton to the colonial project in Berar, the viceroy eventually “drove to the cotton market, in which a monster triumphal arch, composed chiefly of cotton bales, had been erected” in his and the new railroad’s honor.37 With the railroad came the telegraph. Now a Liverpool merchant could wire an order for cotton to Berar and receive it on the docks of the Mersey just six weeks later, the journey on a steamer from Bombay to Liverpool accomplished in twenty-one days thanks to the newly opened Suez Canal.38 The impact of such infrastructure projects was staggering, with Berar cotton commissioner Harry Rivett-Carnac expecting that soon the cotton grown around Khamgaon, purchased at the market there, and pressed at the adjoining factories, may not have to leave the rails, from the time that it is rolled from the press-house into the wagon, until its arrival on the wharf at Bombay; and it will not be difficult to calculate the time that will be necessary, with the assistance of the telegraph which joins Khamgaon and Liverpool, the complete railway communication between the market and the port of shipment, and with, perhaps, the Suez Canal to assist still further in the transport of our cotton, to execute an order sent from Liverpool and to land the required number of Khamgaon bales in Lancashire.39 British India might indeed be considered the archetype for the flexible pragmatism by which states helped capitalists gain access to cotton-growing labor, and how capitalists then found ways to mobilize that labor.

…

Now a Liverpool merchant could wire an order for cotton to Berar and receive it on the docks of the Mersey just six weeks later, the journey on a steamer from Bombay to Liverpool accomplished in twenty-one days thanks to the newly opened Suez Canal.38 The impact of such infrastructure projects was staggering, with Berar cotton commissioner Harry Rivett-Carnac expecting that soon the cotton grown around Khamgaon, purchased at the market there, and pressed at the adjoining factories, may not have to leave the rails, from the time that it is rolled from the press-house into the wagon, until its arrival on the wharf at Bombay; and it will not be difficult to calculate the time that will be necessary, with the assistance of the telegraph which joins Khamgaon and Liverpool, the complete railway communication between the market and the port of shipment, and with, perhaps, the Suez Canal to assist still further in the transport of our cotton, to execute an order sent from Liverpool and to land the required number of Khamgaon bales in Lancashire.39 British India might indeed be considered the archetype for the flexible pragmatism by which states helped capitalists gain access to cotton-growing labor, and how capitalists then found ways to mobilize that labor.

…

Smith, James Monroe Smith, John Benjamin, 9.1, 9.2 Smith, Samuel, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1 soap social democracy, 12.1, 13.1 social inequality, itr.1, itr.2 social status, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, 13.1 Société Anonyme Egyptienne pour la Filature et le Tissage du Cotton Société Industrielle de Mulhouse, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 9.2 Société Royale d’Agriculture Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures Somers, Thomas sorghum South America, itr.1, itr.2, 1.1, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1, 6.2 South Carolina, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 10.1, 12.1, 13.1, 14.1 Southern Cotton Association Southern Cultivator Soviet Council of Work and Defense Soviet Union, itr.1, 13.1 cotton production in, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1 sowkars, 10.1, 11.1 Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SPD) Spain, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1, 14.1 Catalonia, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 13.1, 13.2, 14.1 Christian Reconquista in conquistadores of, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 cotton industry of, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 8.1, 13.1, 13.2 spice trade spindles, 1.1, 1.2, 6.1, 6.2, 10.1, 12.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 13.5, 13.6, 13.7 hand mechanical, itr.1, 3.1, 6.1, 6.2, 9.1, 10.1 spindle whorls, 1.1, nts.1 Spinnerei Aktiengesellschaft spinning bowls, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2 spinning jennies, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 7.1 spinning machines, itr.1, 1.1, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 destruction of manufacture of, 3.1, 13.1 water frame, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2 spinning mules, itr.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.1, 7.2, 13.1 spinning wheels, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 13.1, 13.2 water-powered, 3.1 Sprunt, Alexander Stanley, Amy Dru State Department, U.S. Statistical Society of London steam engines, itr.1, itr.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 6.1 steamships, itr.1, 5.1 steel, itr.1, 5.1, 13.1 Steinfeld, Robert Sudan, 1.1, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2 Suez Canal suffrage rights sugar, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 5.1, 6.1, 10.1 Supf, Karl E., 12.1, 12.2, 12.3 Supreme Court, Georgia Supreme Court, U.S. Surat, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 4.1, 6.1, 8.1, 11.1 Swadeshi movement Swanton, William Swiss Confederation Switzerland, 1.1, 5.1, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 cotton imports of labor organizing in weavers revolt in Sydney, Lord Sydney Evening News Syria, 1.1, 6.1 Christians in Taiwan Tanganyika Tariff Act (1883) tariffs, itr.1, 2.1, 6.1, 6.2, 11.1, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4, 14.1 Tarleton, John, 4.1, 4.2 Tarleton brothers, 4.1, 4.2, nts.1 Tartary Tashkent Tata, Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata, Naval, 13.1 Tata, Ratanji Dadabhoy, 13.1, 13.2 taxation, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 2.1, 3.1, 10.1, 10.2, 11.1, 13.1 forced labor payments for Taylor, John tea telegraphy tenant farming, 10.1, 11.1 Tennessee Teotihuacán, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 4.1 Teotitlán Texas, 3.1, 5.1, 5.2, 11.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 14.1 Textile Ordinance of 1824 Thackersey, Vithaldas Damodar, 13.1, 13.2 Thakurdas, Purshotamdas, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 Thayer, William, 9.1, 9.2 Thirty Years War Thorp, John Tilak, Bal Gangadhar, 13.1, 13.2 timber Timbuktu, 1.1, 1.2 Times (London) Times of India tobacco, itr.1, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 8.1, 8.2, 10.1 Tobago, 4.1, 4.2 Tocqueville, Alexis de Togo, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 9.1, 10.1, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 12.5 cotton industry in, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 12.4, 14.1 Tokat Tokugawa samurai Tokyo Tomich, Dale Tossizza Frères et Cie Tove, 12.1, 12.2 Toyo Menka Kaisha Ltd., 11.1, 11.2 Trabulsi, Ayoub Bey trade associations trade embargoes, 6.1, 6.2 trade regulations Tradesman Trade Union Congress Transcaucasia Travancor, Rajah of Treasury Department, U.S.

Lonely Planet Panama (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy

California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, land tenure, low cost airline, megaproject, off-the-grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, women in the workforce

The rationale for the expansion is that the demands of the international maritime shipping community have changed. Although as much as 5% of the world’s total sea commerce traverses the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal in Egypt, which is capable of handling larger vessels, serves more than 6%. Furthermore, the Panama Canal is already operating at more than 90% of its maximum capacity and will reach its saturation point in less than five years. The biggest challenge the Panama Canal faces is luring the enormous post-Panamax vessels, which currently depend on either the US Transcontinental Railroad or the Suez Canal. But those in favor of the canal expansion are hoping that this lucrative market will adopt the Panama route, especially as trade volumes between Asia and the continental east coast increase.

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As early as 1524, King Charles V of Spain had ordered a survey to determine the feas­ibility of constructing a trans-isthmian water route. But it wasn’t until the 1880s that any country dared to undertake the momentous project of carving a trench through these dense jungles and mountains. The first canal attempt came from a French team led by Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps, bolstered by his prior success building the Suez Canal. Sadly, the French team grossly under­estimated the difficulties and some 22,000 workers died during the construction attempt. Most lives were lost to yellow fever and malaria, which led to the establishment of an enormous quarantine on Isla Taboga. It was not yet known that mosquitoes were the disease vector.

…

The idea of a canal across the isthmus was first raised in 1524 when King Charles V of Spain ordered that a survey be undertaken to determine the feasibility of constructing such a waterway. In 1878, however, it was the French who received a contract from Colombia to build a canal. Still basking in the warm glory of the recently constructed Suez Canal in Egypt, French builder Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps brought his crew to Panama in 1881. However, Lesseps severely underestimated the task at hand, and over 22,000 workers died from yellow fever and malaria in less than a decade. By 1889, insurmountable construction problems and financial mismanagement had driven the company bankrupt.

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, trade route

The Sultan and Egypt's other leaders refused to accept mere autonomy or even nominal independence; they demanded full and complete independence, which Britain—dependent upon the Suez Canal—would not grant. Though British officials tried to reach some kind of agreement with Egypt's leadership, they failed; and so in the years to come, Britain was obliged to maintain her armed presence and her hegemony in Egypt without the consent of the country's politicians. On the other side of the Middle East, however, in Afghanistan, a real question arose as to whether Britain could preserve her hegemony without the consent of local leaders. 45 AFGHANISTAN: THE SPRING OF 1919 Egypt, with its vital Suez Canal, was one of the key strategic positions on Britain's road to India; Afghanistan, with its mountain passes leading into the Indian plains, was another.

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On 28 July 1914, the same day that he initiated the seizure of the Turkish vessels, Churchill held a luncheon meeting with Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener to discuss the deepening inter-national crisis. As proconsul in Egypt, the veteran commander of Britain's imperial armies was responsible for the security of the Suez Canal and of the troops from India who were to be transported through it in the event of war. Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, was responsible for the naval escort of the troopships on their long voyage to Europe; and over lunch the young politician and the old soldier exchanged views. Churchill told Kitchener that "If war comes, you will not go back to Europe."1 It was not what the field marshal wanted to hear.

…

He would spend the first years methodically creating, training, and equipping an army of overwhelming strength, and would concentrate his forces, not dissipate them in sideshows. The impending Ottoman war, he felt, would be a sideshow; it would be a waste of resources to send additional troops to fight the Turks. He feared a Turkish attack on the Suez Canal—his only military concern in the Middle East— but he believed that the British forces in Egypt could deal with it. The Middle East played no role in his plans for winning the war. But that did not mean that Kitchener had no Middle Eastern policy; as will be seen presently, he held strong views about what role Britain should play in the region once the European war was won.

Energy and Civilization: A History by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, business cycle, carbon-based life, centre right, Charles Babbage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kibera, knowledge economy, land tenure, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, phenotype, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

But by 1957 airlines carried more people across the Atlantic than ships, and the introduction of regular jetliner service in the same year sealed the fate of long-distance passenger shipping: a decade later regularly scheduled transatlantic service came to an end. Commercial steamships got early boosts from the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and from the introduction of effective refrigeration during the 1880s. Its later growth was stimulated by the opening of the Panama Canal (1914), the deployment of large diesel engines (after 1920), and the transport of crude oil. Since the 1950s larger specialized ships have been needed to move not only oil but also widely traded bulky commodities (ores, lumber, grain, chemicals) and growing shipments of cars, machinery, and consumer goods.

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Lenoir) Milking machine (L. O. Colvin) 1864 Open-hearth steelmaking process (W. and F. Siemens) 1865 Nitrocellulose (J. F. E. Schultze) 1866 Carbon-zinc battery (Georges Leclanche) Transatlantic cable in permanent operation Torpedo (Robert Whitehead) 1867 Refrigerated railway wagons in service 1869 Suez Canal completed U.S. transcontinental railroad completed 1870s Refrigerated transport of meat by ocean ships Phosphate fertilizer industry begins 1871 Ring-wound armature dynamo (Z. T. Gramme) 1875 Dynamite (Alfred Nobel) 1874 Photographic film (George Eastman) 1876 Four-stroke internal combustion engine (N.

…

The Universe Apollo was the first 100,000 dwt ship, in 1959; in 1966 the Idemitsu Maru reached 210,000 dwt, and when OPEC quintupled its oil prices in 1973, the largest vessel could carry more than 300,000 t (Kumar 2004). Building ships capable of carrying a million tonnes of crude was technically possible but impractical for many reasons: their draft restricts their routes and ports of call (they cannot go through the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal), they need long distances to stop, they are very expensive to insure, and they have caused such catastrophic oil spills as those of the Amoco Cadiz (France 1978), Castillo de Belver (South Africa 1983), and the Exxon Valdez (Alaska 1989). The world’s largest tanker, the Seawise Giant, was built in 1979, enlarged to 564,763 dwt, hit in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq War, relaunched as the (nearly 459 m long) Jahre Viking (1991–2004), renamed Knock Nevis and used as a floating storage and offloading unit off Qatar (2004–2009), then sold to Indian ship-breakers and renamed Mont for its final journey to Alang in Gujarat (Konrad 2010).

The Habsburgs: To Rule the World by Martyn Rady

Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, night-watchman state, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

Had they done so, Austria today might be an exporter of gas and oil.2 Instead of planting the flag, Franz Joseph and his ministers chose to wave it, and Austrian and then Austro-Hungarian warships routinely sailed into the Pacific and to the Americas and Arctic. Franz Joseph and the empress travelled to Port Said in 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal. Twenty-five years later, Archduke Franz Ferdinand joined the circumnavigation of the globe by the Austro-Hungarian warship Kaiserin Elisabeth, visiting Africa, Australia, and the Far East before returning home by commercial liner via the United States. Franz Ferdinand’s observations were acute, and he was critical of colonial ventures overseas, not least on account of the harm done to the local population.3 The Austrian and, after 1867, Austro-Hungarian navy saw little action before 1914.

…

Former public buildings decorated with the twin pillars recall to this day the short time when Tianjin was for the Habsburg Empire ‘our place in the sun.’1 Visitors to Habsburg Tianjin lamented Vienna’s reluctance to exploit the city’s commercial potential. Elsewhere, however, merchants from Austria-Hungary were pressing ahead. In terms of tonnage, their ships ranked fourth in use of the Suez Canal, while in 1913 alone the Austrian Lloyd made fifty-four voyages to India and the Far East. The Austro-Americana line, founded in 1895, also conveyed annually about a million tons of cargo across the Atlantic. The Austro-Hungarian Colonial Society, which first met in 1894, pushed the government to build on this foreign trade by establishing colonies.

…

Anthropologische Diskurse in Österreich 1850–1960 (Frankfurt and New York, 2003), 127; Mathieu Gotteland, ‘Les Conséquences de la Première Guerre mondiale sur la présence impériale austro-hongroise en Chine’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 256 (2014), 7–18 (8). 2. Vasárnapi Újság, 1 May 1904, 294–5; Ferdinand de Lesseps, A History of the Suez Canal: A Personal Narrative (Edinburgh and London, 1876), 23; Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918 (West Lafayette, IN, 1994), 186–7; Simon Loidl, ‘Colonialism Through Emigration: Publications and Activities of the Österreichisch-Ungarische Kolonialgesellschaft (1894–1918)’, AS, 20 (2012), 161–75. 3.

The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order by Bruno Macaes

active measures, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, computer vision, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global value chain, illegal immigration, intermodal, iterative process, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, open borders, Parag Khanna, savings glut, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Suez canal 1869, The Brussels Effect, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, young professional, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Imagine visiting the Arctic fifty years from now and finding a belt of large cities, heavily populated and linked by some of the busiest sea lanes in the world – perhaps punctuated here and there by new sea resorts and summer beaches where tourists can bathe in the sunlight around the clock. The northern sea route is 37 per cent, or 7,400 kilometres, shorter than the southern route via the Suez Canal and thus offers, in theory at least, a very tempting alternative to the shipping lines currently dominating global trade. In 2017 the Christophe de Margerie became the first ever icebreaking LNG carrier, designed to break up to two metres of ice without assistance as it transports liquefied natural gas from the Yamal peninsula along the northern sea route, through the Bering Strait and south to Japan and China.

…

Many of the most important questions of our time will be decided in this long arc of heavily populated coastlines and busy shipping lanes: the relation between Islam and its neighbours in Europe and Asia; the growth of global trade and the struggle for energy security; the competition between India and China for the top place as the great economic success story of the century. In the west, the Suez Canal has traditionally been seen as the sea gate to Europe. In the east the Strait of Malacca can open or close the route to China and Japan. Even as it quickly becomes the most important body of water in the world, the Indian Ocean is increasingly the focus of competition between different actors, none of which can play a hegemonic role.

…

More generally, Chinese observers foresee the emergence of a powerful rival aiming to control the Indian Ocean, the mirror image of the Eurasian landmass to the north. For them, India is developing its overall capacity to ‘enter east’ (东进) into the South China Sea and the Pacific, ‘exit west’ (西出) through the Red Sea and Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, and ‘go south’ (南下) toward the Cape of Good Hope and the Atlantic.10 In 2016 news emerged that India and Japan were secretly planning to install a sea wall of hydrophones between Indira Point in the Nicobar Islands and Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia, aimed at tracking undersea movement and effectively plugging the entry to the Indian Ocean for Chinese submarines.

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture by Orlando Figes

Anton Chekhov, British Empire, Charles Babbage, glass ceiling, global village, Honoré de Balzac, Internet Archive, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Journalism, Open Library, Republic of Letters, Suez canal 1869, wikimedia commons

Verdi was delighted by his worldwide fame. ‘Were you to go to India, or to the depths of Africa, you can hear Il Trovatore,’ he boasted to a friend in 1862.54 Opera houses in the European style opened all around the world – from Algiers to Cairo, where one was built to mark the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Verdi’s Aida was first performed; from Calcutta, where the British had an opera house from 1867, to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hanoi, where the French had a theatre modelled on the Palais Garnier from 1901. Even in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, in Manaus in Brazil, there was an opera theatre, a distant outpost of European civilization, built with Tuscan marble, Glaswegian steel and cast iron from Paris, all paid for by Brazil’s rubber barons between 1884 and 1896.

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Semmering Semper, Gottfried Seneca Sensier, Alfred serfdom; abolition serialized fiction Sert, Misia Sevastopol, siege of (1854–55) Severini, Carlo Seville Shakespeare, William; birthplace; commemoration; translated editions; children’s editions Shanghai Sheepshanks, Joseph sheet music see music publishing Sheffield Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shevchenko, Taras Shvarts, Anna Siècle, Le (newspaper) Siems, Margarethe Silcher, Friedrich, Die Lorelei Simms and McIntyre (publishers) Simon, Jules singing clubs and choirs Sinzig Sisley, Alfred Sketches from a Hunter’s Album (Turgenev): writing of; style and literary influences; publication; censorship; commercial success; impact and importance; translations and new editions Slovo (journal) Smetana, Bedřich; The Bartered Bride Smith, William Henry Smith and Elder (publishers) Smolensk Società Promotrice delle Biblioteche Popolari Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques Société des Concerts du Conservatoire Société des Gens de Lettres Société Franklin Société Nationale de Musique Society of Lovers of Russian Literature (OLRS) Society for the Mutual Aid and Patronage of Russian Artists in Paris Sologub, Vladimir, Bouquets Solothurn Sonzogno, Edoardo Sophie of the Netherlands, Princess, Grand Duchess consort of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach Sophie of Württemberg, Queen consort of the Netherlands Sorbonne University Soufflot, Jean-Jacques Soult, Jean-de-Dieu Soyer, Alexis spa resorts; see also Baden-Baden Spanish Inquisition Spasskoe; Turgenev family estates Spengler, Oswald, The Decline of the West Spontini, Gaspare stagecoaches standards, international agreements on Stanford, Sir Charles Stangen, Carl Stasiulevich, Mikhail: publisher of The Messenger of Europe; Turgenev acts as agent for; publication of Flaubert and Zola; ‘Russian Library’ series; and Turgenev’s final illness and death Stasov, Vladimir Statue of Liberty steamships and steamboats Stella, Jacques Stendhal; Life of Rossini; Mémoires d’un touriste Sterling, Antoinette Stettin Steuben, Bruno Stevens, Alfred Stillman, Marie Spartali Stirling, Jane Stockhausen, Julius Stockholm Stolz, Rosine Stolzenfels Castle Storm, Theodor Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Strasbourg Stratford-on-Avon Strauss, Anna Strauss, Eduard Strauss, Johann I Strauss, Johann II; ‘Blue Danube’ Strauss, Josef Strauss, Richard Stravinsky, Igor Strindberg, August Stuttgart ‘style hongrois’ (in music) Sue, Eugène; Le Juif errant; Mathilde; Les Mystères de Paris Suez Canal Sukhotina, Kleopatra Sullivan, Sir Arthur; Cox and Box; ‘The Lost Chord’; Thespis Sundays, in England Suvorin, Aleksei Svyatogorsk Monastery Swinburne, Algernon Szymanowski, Wacław Taillandier, Saint-René Taine, Hippolyte Talfourd, Sir Thomas Tallandier, René Taneyev, Sergei Tatars Tauchnitz, Bernard Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tcherepnin, Nikolai, Le Pavillon d’Armide telegraph telephone Temple, Félix du Temps, Le (journal) Tenisheva, Princess Maria Klavdievna Tennyson, Alfredst Baron Terni Falls Thackeray, William Makepeace Thalberg, Sigismond Théâtre Italien (opera company) Théâtre Lyrique (opera company) Thérésa (Emma Valldon) Thiers, Adolphe Thomas, Ambroise Thomas Cook and Son (travel agency) Thomson, George Thoré, Théophile Three Choirs Festival Thun, Lake Time (Russian journal) time, standardization of Times, The (newspaper) Tissot, James, Plate Tiutchev, N.

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They were expensive to produce and demanding on his singers, and postponements of the opening night were often necessary. Although Die Meistersinger had been performed in Karlsruhe (Turgenev had seen it there in January 1869), Devrient thought it was ‘a tormented, self-contradictory and boring monster, palmed off and forced upon the stupidity of the world with dazzling effrontery. The fact that it has achieved dissemination is a question of fashion, like chignons or Chinese dresses; nobody considers them beautiful, but everybody wears them.’129 The animosity between Devrient and Wagner became public in March 1869, when Wagner published a revised edition, this time in his own name, of his notorious essay of 1850, ‘Jewishness in Music’.

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

Across the face of the Earth, technology was manifesting itself in new ways. The Erie Canal, dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World, was completed in 1825 and twice enlarged in the second half of the nineteenth century. France had been heavily involved in the creation of the Suez Canal, a maritime shortcut around Africa that opened in 1869. In 1881, the French also commenced work in Panama on a new passage to link the Atlantic with the Pacific. Flammarion analyzed the canals in the context of other observations and concluded in a massive compendium of all the sketches of the planet made through 1892 that “the habitation of Mars by a race superior to ours seems…very probable.”

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Schiaparelli, Astronomical and Physical Observations of the Axis of Rotation and the Topography of the Planet Mars: First Memoir, 1877–1878 (San Francisco: Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers Monograph Number 5, 1994). COMPLETED IN 1825 Jonathan Pearson, “Erie Canal Timeline,” Union College (2003). OPENED IN 1869 Charles Gordon Smith and William B. Fisher, “Suez Canal,” Encyclopedia Britannica (updated Feb. 13, 2019). WORK IN PANAMA Enrique Chaves, et al., “French Panama Canal Failure (1881–1889),” The Panama Canal: A Triumph of American Medicine, The University of Kansas Medical Center (March 13, 2019). “HABITATION OF MARS” Flammarion, Camille Flammarion’s The Planet Mars, pp. 373–382, 512.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

The next morning the first passenger car passed from the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific tracks, and the inaugural batch of imported tea departed for the East, linking West Coast international trade to the nation’s financial centers via rail. This was more branding than anything else—goods from the East were just as easy to send to New York by boat, especially with the Suez Canal up and running—but the settler nation celebrated nonetheless. The shopkeepers from Sacramento proved the railroad industry wrong, and they got rich doing it. Now everyone else wanted in on the game too, and money from around the world poured into speculative new lines. Sketchy stocks floated on international markets as newly global capital stretched its railroad limbs.

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Since they directed both but owned much more of the Southern outright, they had the Central lend its line to the Southern, leaving no dividend payment worth mentioning for the Central shareholders, the bulk of whom were in London. Eventually the frustrated British shareholders deployed as their representative Sir Charles Rivers Wilson, the former government director of the Suez Canal Company and railroad finance expert. He negotiated a settlement with Huntington on behalf of the Central Pacific’s stockholders, proving that British bondholders could protect themselves in the American West.ii They were caught with their hands in the cookie jar, but the Associates did not drop the pretense of their good character.

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This story is not a product of men’s choices, a series of psychic coin flips that results in the world as it is, one piece of fruit among many on a branching tree of equally probable outcomes. With the advent of the integrated world system, in which the transcontinental line was, along with the Suez Canal, a decisive link, investment flows determined the shape of what was to come. Capital’s ravenous hunger for higher returns carved a new physical and social geography out of the earth. It figuratively flattened space, blowing holes in some mountains as well. But contrary to some progressive expectations, it failed to dissolve barriers between peoples.

I Never Knew That About London by Christopher Winn

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Clapham omnibus, Desert Island Discs, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869

One man was killed and five others were injured. It took another 13 attempts, and a name change to Great Eastern, before the huge ship finally took to the water on 31 January 1858. The Great Eastern was never a success as a passenger ship. Originally built for taking passengers to Australia, she was too big to go through the new Suez Canal and she was too slow to compete with the smaller and faster vessels that dominated the Atlantic route to New York. Her owners went bankrupt and Brunel’s health was ruined – he died in 1859. In 1866, however, the Great Eastern was used for laying THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL TRANS-ATLANTIC CABLE, from Valentia Island in Ireland to Newfoundland.

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After being occupied by the Guardian Royal Exchange and the London International Financial Futures Exchange, the Royal Exchange has been redeveloped as a luxury shopping centre and has returned to its original role as a place for City workers to meet and discuss business over coffee. In Royal Exchange Buildings at the back of the Exchange there is a statue of a seated GEORGE PEABODY (1795–1869), a grocer from Massachusetts who spent his fortune building houses for the poor of London. Peabody Buildings can still be found all across the capital. PAUL JULIUS REUTER set up his news agency at No. 1 Royal Exchange Buildings in 1851. The agency later moved to Fleet Street and is now at Blackwall (see Tower Hamlets).

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Nearby is the London Troops Memorial by Sir Aston Webb, which commemorates the men who died in the First World War. At the top of Cornhill, where it tends to go unnoticed, is a statue of South African-born engineer JAMES HENRY GREATHEAD (1844–96), inventor of the GREATHEAD TUNNELLING SHIELD. This was used to build the Tower Subway under the Thames in 1869 (see Tower Hamlets) and later for THE WORLD’S FIRST ELECTRIC RAILWAY, the CITY AND SOUTH LONDON RAILWAY, which became the Northern Line. Underneath the pavement here is THE WORLD’S FIRST MUNICIPAL PUBLIC LAVATORY, which was also THE WORLD’S FIRST UNDERGROUND PUBLIC LAVATORY, opened in 1855. The charge was 1d, which became the standard fee and the origin of the expression to ‘spend a penny’.

Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay

Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk

Some people perceive the choices as identical; others do not. What is consistent is subjective, and it is possible to have too much consistency, or too little. Too much consistency is seeing situations as similar when they are in fact different—identifying the specter of Munich with Nasser’s seizure of the Suez Canal or Saddam’s regime of terror in Iraq. Too little consistency is pragmatism without structure or discipline. The world is too complex and uncertain for consistency to be possible—or even a well-defined concept. The favorite poet of the Dead Poets Society, Walt Whitman, appreciated the dilemma: “Do I contradict myself?

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Chapter 13: The Flickering Lamp of History—How We Mistakenly Infer Design from Outcome 1 M. Meyer, “From a Champ to a Chump,” Newsweek, July 26, 1993. 2 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edition (London, Gerald Duckworth, 1994), p. 75. 3 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869; reprint, Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1993), book X, chapters 27 and 28. 4 M. Carré, T. Asai, T. Akatsuka, and S. J. Haake, “The Curve Kick of a Football I: Impact with the Foot,” Sports Engineering 5, no. 4 (2002); M. Carré, T. Asai, T. Akatsuka, and S. J. Haake, “The Curve Kick of a Football II: Flight Through the Air,” Sports Engineering 5, no. 4 (2002). 5 See, for example, T.

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Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Fooled by Randomness. New York: Texere, 2001. Tetlock, Philip E. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. 1869. Reprint, Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1993. Tomlinson, R., and P. Hjelt. “Dethroning Percy Barnevik.” Fortune International (Europe), April 1, 2002. Trump, Donald J., with Tony Schwartz. Trump: The Art of the Deal. New York: Warner Books, 1987. Tucker, Spencer C., ed. Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War.

Money: Vintage Minis by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, call centre, credit crunch, DeepMind, European colonialism, Flash crash, Ford Model T, greed is good, job automation, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, lifelogging, low interest rates, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Ponzi scheme, self-driving car, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country’s population, were opium addicts. Egypt, too, learned to respect the long arm of British capitalism. During the nineteenth century, French and British investors lent huge sums to the rulers of Egypt, first in order to finance the Suez Canal project, and later to fund far less successful enterprises. Egyptian debt swelled, and European creditors increasingly meddled in Egyptian affairs. In 1881 Egyptian nationalists had had enough and rebelled. They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt. Queen Victoria was not amused.

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Though scholars may quibble about the exact relations between them, in the following two centuries a common argument in defence of democracy explained that giving citizens political rights is good, because the soldiers and workers of democratic countries perform better than those of dictatorships. Allegedly, granting political rights to people increases their motivation and their initiative, which is useful both on the battlefield and in the factory. Thus Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, wrote on 5 August 1917 in the New York Times that ‘democratic armies fight better than armies aristocratically organised and autocratically governed’ and that ‘the armies of nations in which the mass of the people determine legislation, elect their public servants, and settle questions of peace and war, fight better than the armies of an autocrat who rules by right of birth and by commission from the Almighty’.

Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright

Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, colonial rule, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, power law, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment

And the 1979 Iranian revolution introduced Islam as an alternative political idiom. All three had spillover worldwide. By coincidence, I first landed in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, arriving in Beirut during the chaotic outbreak of the fourth modern Middle East war. The Arabs had just launched a surprise attack on Israel. “Egyptian troops have crossed the Suez Canal,” an American tourist leaned over and whispered to me. Oil was then only $3.12 per barrel—yes, barrel, not gallon—and the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Peninsula were considered poor developing countries. In Saudi Arabia, schools for girls had only been around for nine years and a single-channel television service for seven; both had been introduced over serious objections by conservative clergy.

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The apartment-office is a deceptively modest facility for the most organized political movement in the Middle East and, almost certainly, in the wider Islamic world.1 It was founded in 1928 by Hassan al Banna, a disillusioned twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher, whose first followers were six disgruntled workers in the Suez Canal Company. Eight decades later, the Brotherhood had spawned eighty-six branches and affiliates in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Most Islamic political groups are a by-product, directly or indirectly, of Banna’s unlikely little band. Hamas originally emerged in 1987 as the militant Palestinian wing of the Brotherhood, whose branch in Syria had become so strong by 1982 that former President Hafez al Assad launched a military crackdown against its stronghold in Hama, killing tens of thousands of people and leveling whole sectors of the city.

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Indeed, when the new class of Brotherhood members showed up for parliament in 2006, its early focus was not on stereotypical issues associated with Islamic rule, such as banning alcohol or imposing Islamic dress on women. They instead went after a government decision to let a retired French aircraft carrier loaded with tons of asbestos sail through the Suez Canal en route to India, where it was to be disassembled for scrap metal. A Brotherhood politician angrily warned of the environmental hazards to Egypt.4 To call for a chance to speak in the People’s Assembly, legislators have to wave a copy of Egypt’s constitution at the parliamentary speaker. With eighty-eight members, the Brotherhood delegation literally began a wave of challenges about reform issues that secular parties had been unable or unwilling to tackle.

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt

British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, digital map, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, land reform, late capitalism, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Republic of Letters, side project, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The recently completed large-scale map of London that had been made for the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission had so impressed the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, that he had called for a similar survey to be made of Jerusalem, ‘to improve the sanitary state of the city’ and protect pilgrims from water-borne diseases. The Palestinian territories were then under the rule of the Ottoman government, who voiced no objection to the presence of British surveying parties in the area. And the War Office may have seen in the proposed survey an opportunity to spy on French engineers’ construction of the Suez Canal, which, despite fierce hostility from the British, was under way in Egypt. But it is hard in retrospect not to grow a little exasperated with the Ordnance Survey’s easy distraction from the task in hand, even if such digressions were the result of an admirable intention to engage with geography in its fullest sense and piece together a complete image of the world in which we live.

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Hollar), 1 Home, John, 1 Hooke, Robert, 1 Hopetoun House, 1 hot-air ballooning, 1 Hounslow Heath: as basis for Ordnance Survey’s primary triangulation, 1, 2; as basis for Paris–Greenwich triangulation, 1 Howse, Thomas, 1 Hughes, John, 1 Hume, David, 1 Hundred Acres, 1 Hunter, Joseph, 1 Hurd, Thomas Hannaford, 1 Hutton, Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Hutton, James, 1 Hydrographic Office, 1 Imber, 1 Imperial System of measurement, 1 India, 1, 2; mapping of, 1, 2; and George Everest, 1; Great Indian Arc of the Meridian, 1; Trigonometrical Survey, 1 Industrial Revolution, 1, 2 Ingleborough, 1 Institution of Civil Engineers, 1, 2 instruments see names of specific instruments e.g. theodolite interior surveying, general, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 Interior Survey, division of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Inverness, 1 Inversnaid Barracks, 1 Ireland: early maps, 1; first Ordnance Survey maps published, 1; idea of mapping proposed, 1; place names, 1; survey and mapping of, 1, 2; individual locations are listed by place-name Ireland, William Henry, 1; Henry II: An Historical Drama, 1 Irish Society, 1 Isle of Man, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Isle of Wight, 1, 2; Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 isopleths, 1 Jacobins, 1 Jacobite Rebellion (1745–46), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 James II, xiii, 1 James, Henry: appointed superintendent of Ordnance Survey, 1; and map scales, 1, 2; and First Series, 1; and letter to The Times, 1; and Jerusalem survey, 1; Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem (with Wilson), 1 Jefferys, Thomas, 1 Jerusalem, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Johnson, Samuel, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Kant, Imannuel, 1 Kent, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2 Kéroualle, Louise de, Duchess of Portsmouth, 1 Kettlewell, 1 King’s Arbour, 1, 2 King’s Sedgemoor, 1, 2, 3 King’s Topographical Collection at the British Library, 1 Kinloch Rannoch, 1 Knox, Vicesimus, 1 Kuhn, Thomas, 1 Lake District: and Coleridge, 1; Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1; and Wordsworth, 1 Lamb, Charles, 1 lamps, as used to illuminate surveying staffs, 1 Land’s End, 1 landscape, Ordnance Survey’s representation of, 1, 2, 3, 4; and relationship to inhabitants’ behaviour, 1; and roads, 1; qualities and appearance of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; and painting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; militarisation of, 1, 2; sight of through instruments’ sights, 1; and literature, 1, 2, 3; and enclosure, 1; and emotions, 1, 2; and industrialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4; and traces of Ordnance Survey’s presence, 1; and gardening, 1; views of from above, 1, 2; and the sublime, 1; aesthetic theories of, 1; and the picturesque, 1, 2; and imagination, 1, 2, 3, 4; and the prospect, 1; and pedestrianism/hiking, 1, 2, 3; and the Bible, 1; individual locations are listed by place-name; for mapping of, see mapping; for measurement of, see measurement; for naming of, see toponymy Langdon Hill, 1 Larcom, Thomas Aiskew, 1; and mapping of Ireland, 1, 2, 3, 4; learns Gaelic, 1, 2; and memoir project (of Ireland), 1, 2, 3, 4; and Irish toponymy, 1; Ordnance Survey of the County of Londonderry (with Colby), 1 latitude, calculation of, 1, 2, 3 Laurent d’Arlandes, François, 1 Leiden, University of, 1 Leith Hill, 1, 2 Lennox, Charles, 1rd Duke of Richmond, 2; with Roy at Dunkirk, 1, 2; sculpture gallery at Goodwood, 1; on need for maps of British Isles, 1; education, 1; and James Sampson, 1; interest in military defence, 1, 2, 3, 4; enmity of George III, 1, 2; and Reform, 1, 2; as Master-General of the Board of Ordnance, 1; and Fortifications Bill, 1, 2; and Ordnance Survey’s primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3; and foundation of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3; and remeasurement of Hounslow Heath base, 1, 2; and Great Theodolite, 1; leaves Board of Ordnance, 1; on map-making, 1 Lennox, Sarah, 1, 2 lenses, xxii, 1, 2, 3, 4 Les Estables (French village), 1 levelling, 1; see also primary levelling of Great Britain Liddle Moat, 1 limelight, 1 Lincolnshire, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Lind, James, 1 Lindley, Joseph, 1 Lisburn, 1 Liskeard, 1 literature, and maps, 1, 2, 3 Llanelian, 1 Llangeinor, 1 Lloyd, Humphrey, 1 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 1 Llyn Cau, 1 Loch a’Mhuillidh, 1 Loch Leven, 1 Loch Morar, 1, 2 Loch Rannoch, 1 Lockhart, John Gibson, 1 London, cartographic depictions of, 1, 2, 3; and roads, 1; and societies and sociability, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and nature of urban environment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; William Roy’s mapping of, 1, Ordnance Survey’s maps and mapping of, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; Ordnance Survey’s move away from, 1; for Ordnance Survey’s London headquarters, see Board of Ordnance, and Tower of London London Review, 1 Longford, 1, 2 Longham Common, 1 longitude, calculation of, 1, 2; see also Board of Longitude Lorraine, Claude, 1, 2; see also Claude Glass Lough Foyle baseline, 1, 2 Louis XIV, 1 Louis XVI, 1, 2, 3, 4 Lovat, Simon Fraser, 1th Lord, 2, 3, 4, 5 Lunar Society, 1 Lunardi, Vincenzo, 1 Lundy Island, 1, 2; Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2, 3 Lyell, Charles, 1 McAdam, John Loudon, 1 McCulloch, John, 1 MacGowan, John, 1 MacGregor, Robert (Rob Roy), 1 Mackenzie Sr, Murdoch, 1; Nautical Survey of the Orkney Islands and Hebrides, 1 Maclaurin, Colin, 1 MacPherson, James, 1 Malkin, Benjamin Heath, 1; Father’s Memoirs of his Child, 1 Malkin, Thomas Williams, 1 Malvern, 1 Mangan, James Clarence, 1, 2, 3 Manson, John, 1 map-makers: as antiquarians, 1; enjoying positive experiences, 1, 2, 3; as spies, 1; trials and tribulations of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; unpopularity among general populace, 1; unpopularity in Ireland, 1; individual mapmakers are listed by surname mapping: with alidade and plane-table, 1, 2, 3, 4; and availability of data, 1, 2; metaphorical,1, 2; and National Grid, 1; and perspective, 1; and picturesque, 1; training and instruction in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; see also cartography; interior surveying, general; triangulation maps: appearance of, 1, 2, 3, 4; and art, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11; and digital technology, 1, 2, 3; early British, 1, 2; and Enlightenment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; errors in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and literature, 1; publication process, 1, 2, 3; recognition of military need for, 1, 2; scales, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also mapping; maps; individual maps are listed under their titles and the surnames of their principal creators Marie Antoinette, 1, 2 Mark, George, 1, 2 Martello towers, 1 Martin, Ellis, 1 Maskelyne, Nevil, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; ‘An Account of Observations Made on the Mountain Schehallion for Finding its Attraction’, 1; Nautical Almanac, 1 Mason, Charles, 1, 2 Maton, William George, 1; ObservationsRelative Chiefly to the Natural History, Picturesque Scenery and Antiquities of the Western Counties of England, 1 Maupertius, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 1 May Hill, Gloucestershire, 1 Mealy, Ann Elizabeth, 1 measurement, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13; see also mapping; meridian arcs; metre unit of measurement; plane-tabling; triangulation measuring chain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14; see also Gunter’s chain Méchain, Pierre François André, 1, 2, 3 Menzies, William, 1 meridian arcs, measurement of, 1, 2, 3 metre unit of measurement, 1 Metropolitan Sanitary Commission, 1, 2 militarisation of landscape, 1, 2 military see Artillery, Royal Regiment of; Board of Ordnance; Engineers, Corps of; Tower of London; uniform; individual battles are listed by name Military Academy, High Wycombe see High Wycombe Military Academy Military Academy, Woolwich see Woolwich, Royal Military Academy Military Survey of Scotland (1747–55), 1 militia, xiv, 1, 2, 3, 4 Militia Act (1757), 1 Milton, 1, 2 Minden, Battle of, 1 Misterton Carr, 1, 2 Moelfre, 1 Montgolfier, Joseph and Jacques, 1 Montlambert, 1 Morning Chronicle, 1, 2 Morris, Lewis, 1 Mortella Point, Corsica, 1 Mostyn, John Armstrong, 1; Scotch Atlas, 1 Mount Pleasant House, Thanet, 1 mountains: classification, 1.n2; gravitational attraction, 1; volume, 1; Munros, 1; individual mountains are listed by name Mountjoy House, Phoenix Park, 1 Mudge, Jane (sister of William), 1 Mudge, Jane (wife of John), 1 Mudge, Jenny (daughter of William), 1 Mudge, John (father of William), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Mudge, Margaret Jane (née Williamson) (wife of William), 1, 2 Mudge, Richard Zachariah (son of William), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Mudge, Thomas (uncle of William), 1, 2, 3 Mudge Jr, Thomas (cousin of William), 1, 2 Mudge, William, 1; appointed director of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3; background and character, 1, 2; joins Board of Ordnance, 1, 2; remeasures Hounslow Heath base, 1, 2; and primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and secondary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; searches for second baseline, 1; chooses Salisbury Plain as second baseline, 1, 2; assumes full control of Ordnance Survey, 1; makes maps available to general public, 1, 2, 3; and toponymy, 1; presents first map to George III, 1; surveys West Country, 1; measures London baseline, 1; reservations about Interior Survey, 1; family pressures, 1; and Colby, 1, 2; sits for portrait, 1; pressures of work, 1; fears French invasion, 1; surveys Wales, 1, 2, 3; surveys northern England, 1; appears before Commission of Military Enquiry, 1; depression, 1, 2; on Phipps’s decision to withhold maps from public, 1; measures meridian arc through Britain, 1, 2, 3; and Shetland Islands extension, 1; illness and death, 1; legacy, 1 Mudge, William: publications: ‘An Account of the Measurement of an Arc of the Meridian’, 1; An Account of the Operations Carried on for Accomplishing a Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales … from … 1797, to … 1799 (vol 1), 2, 3; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1797 [to] 1799’, 1; with Colby: An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … in the Years 1800 [to] 1809 (vol 3), 1, 2, 3, 4; with Dalby: An Account of the Operations Carried on for Accomplishing a Trigonometrical Survey of England and Wales, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; with Williams and Dalby: ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1791, 1792, 1793, and 1794’, 1; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1795 and 1796’, 1, 2 Mudge, Zachariah (grandfather of William), 1, 2, 3, 4 Muirhouse, 1 Mulgrave, 1st Earl of see Phipps, Henry Muller, John, 1 Munro classification of mountains, 1 Munster, siege of, 1 Murray, Lord George, 1 Museum of Practical Geology, 1 Mynydd Maen, 1 naming see toponymy Napoleon Bonaparte, 1, 2, 3 Napoleonic Wars, 1, 2, 3 National Grid Reference System, 1 nationalism, xx, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 national triangulation see triangulation Nautical Almanac, 1; see also Maskelyne, Nevil Neal, John, 1 neoclassicism, 1 New Annual Register, 1 Newlyn, 1 Newton, Isaac, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Nidd, River, 1 Ninebarrow Down, Dorset, 1 Norden, John, 1 Northcote, James, 1, 2 Northern Echo, 1 Norwood, 1 Observer, 1 O’Connell, Daniel, 1 O’Curry, Eugene, 1, 2 O’Daly, Aengus, 1 O’Donovan, John, 1, 2, 3, 4 O’Donovan, Patrick, 1 Office of Works, 1 Ogilby, John, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Britannia Depicta, 1, 2, 3, 4 Ogmore, 1 O’Keeffe, Patrick, 1 Old Sarum, 1 Ordnance Survey: database, 1; establishment (1791), 1, 2, 3; in Ireland, 1, 2; move to Southampton, 1; origins, 1, 2; possible birth dates, 1; primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3; reference works, 1; safe passage of Ordnance Survey – continued surveyors, 1; secondary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; individual personnel are listed under surnames; for general issues see mapping, maps, cartography, map-makers Ordnance Survey: maps and other publications: Cornish maps, 1; early, 1, 2, 3, 4; Essex maps, 1; expense, 1; Explorer series, 1, 2; faults in, 1; first map published (1801), 1; First Series, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15; Glamorgan maps, 1; Gower maps, 1; Irish maps, 1, 2, 3; Isle of Man sheet, 1; Isle of Wight map, 1; Jerusalem maps, 1; Kent maps, 1, 2, 3; key to symbols, 1, 2; Landranger series, 1, 2; Lincolnshire sheets, 1; Lundy Island map, 1, 2, 3; New Series, 1; Ordnance Survey of the County of Londonderry, 1, 2; Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, 1; OS Master-Map, 1; Pembrokeshire maps, 1; publication process, 1; scales, 1, 2; Sinai peninsula maps, 1; Somerset maps, 1; street atlases, 1; Suffolk maps, 1; Surrey maps, 1; toponymy, 1, 2; towns, 1; Welsh maps, 1, 2; Wiltshire maps, 1; for general issues see maps Ordnance Survey Bench Marks (OSBM), 1 O’Reilly, Andreas, 1 O’Reilly, Edward, 1 Otway, Caesar, 1; Sketches in Ireland, 1 ‘pacification’ of the Highlands see Highland reform painting, and cartography see art, and cartography panopticism, 1 Paris, Treaty of, 1 Paris Exhibition, 1 Paris–Greenwich triangulation, 1, 2, 3 Pasley, Charles, 1, 2; Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, 1 Paterson, Daniel, 1, 2; New and Accurate Description of the Roads in England and Wales, and Part of the Roads of Scotland, 1 patriotism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 pedestrianism, 1, 2, 3; see also hiking Pembrokeshire, Ordnance Survey maps of, 1 Penicuik, 1 Penn Beacon, 1 Penygadair, 1 perambulators, 1, 2; see also waywisers; surveyors’ wheels perspective, in art, 1 Perth, 1 Peru, French expedition to (1735), 1 Petrie, George, 1, 2, 3, 4 Petty, William, 1, 2; ‘Down Survey’, 1 Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Phipps, Henry, 1st Earl of Mulgrave, 1, 2 Picard, Jean, 1 picturesque, 1 Pilâtre de Rozier, Jean-François, 1 Pilsden Hill, 1 Pink, George, 1 Pitt the Younger, William, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 place-names see toponymy; specific locations are listed by place-name plane tables, 1 plans see maps, surveys plantation (of Ireland), 1 Playfair, John, 1 Plymouth, 1 Plympton St Maurice, 1 Poor Law Commission, 1, 2, 3, 4 Portland, 1 Post Office, 1 Poussin, Nicolas, 1 Preseli Mountains, 1 Prestonpans, Battle of, 1 Price, Richard, 1, 2 primary levelling of Great Britain, 1; see also levelling primary triangulation see triangulation Pringle, Sir John, 1 ‘prospect’ poetry and painting, 1 see also landscape Quiberon Bay, 1 Raglan, Lord, 1 railways, mapping of, 1 rambling, 1; see also pedestrianism Ramsay, Allan, 1 Ramsden, Jesse: and deal rods, 1; and glass rods, 1; and dividing engine, 1; and lateness, 1; and theodolites, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; accused of negligence, 1; and measurement of Hounslow Heath baseline, 1; and zenith sector, 1 Rawthmell’s coffee-house, London, 1 Reagh, Stephen, 1 Reform, 1, 2; see also Highland reform; Lennox, Charles, 3rd Duke of Richmond Regiment of Artillery see Artillery, Royal Regiment of Reid, William, 1 relief, cartographical representation of, 1, 2, 3 Rennell, James, 1 repeating circle, 1, 2, 3 Repton, Humphry, 1 Revolutionary Tribunal, 1 Reynolds, Joshua, 1, 2, 3, 4; Discourses on Art, 1 Reynolds, Samuel, 1 Reynolds, Theophila, 1 Reynolds, Thomas Vincent, 1; ‘Military Map of Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Part of Hampshire’, 1 Rhoades, James, 1 Rhuddlan Marsh, 1 Richmond, 1rd Duke of see Lennox, Charles, 2rd Duke of Richmond Ringswold Steeple, 1 road-books, 1 roads, state of in eighteenth century, 1 Rob Roy see MacGregor, Robert (Rob Roy) Robertson, Duncan, 1 Robertson, William, 1 Robespierre, Maximilien, 1 Robinson, Thomas Romney, 1, 2 Rochefort, 1 Rodriguez, Don Joseph, 1, 2, 3 Romanticism, 1, 2 Rombalds Moor, 1 Romney Marsh, 1, 2, 3 Rook’s Hill, 1 Rosa, Salvator, 1 Roscommon, 1 Rosdew, Richard, 1, 2, 3 route surveying, 1, 2, 3, 4; see also traverse surveying Roy, James, 1 Roy, John, 1, 2 Roy, William: birth and early life, 1, 2; and Watson, 1, 2, 3; and Military Survey of Scotland, 1, 2, 3; study of antiquities, 1; survey of England’s south coast, 1; and Seven Years War, 1; map of Minden, 1; anecdote of Warley Common, 1; as Surveyor-General of Coasts, 1; at Dunkirk, 1; proposes military map of whole country, 1, 2, 3, 4; house in Argyll Street, London, 1; and Royal Society, 1; barometric observations, 1; and Schiehallion, 1; and Greenwich–Paris triangulation, 1, 2; criticisms of Ramsden, 1; illness and death, 1 Roy, William: publications and principal texts: ‘An Account of the Measurement of a Base on Hounslow-Heath’, 1, 2, 3; ‘An Account of the Mode Proposed to … Determin[e] the Relative Situation of … Greenwich and Paris’, 1, 2; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Operation … between … Greenwich and Paris’, 1, 2, 3; ‘Considerations on the Propriety of making a General Military Map of England’, 1; ‘Experiments and Observations … with the Barometer’, 1; Mappa Britanniae Septentrionalis, 1, 2; Military Antiquities of the Romans in North Britain, 1, 2, 3, 4; ‘Military Description of the South-East of England’, 1; ‘Plan Shewing the Situation of the Base Measured on Hounslow Heath in Summer 1784’, 1 Royal Academy, 1 Royal Geographical Society, 1 Royal Irish Academy, 1, 2, 3 Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Royal Philosophers’ Club, 1, 2 Royal Regiment of Artillery see Artillery, Royal Regiment of Royal School of Artillery, 1 Royal Society, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Royal Society Club, 1, 2 Russell, John, 1 Sage, Mrs, 1 St Ann’s Hill, Chertsey, 1, 2 St George’s Channel, 1 St James’s Chronicle, 1, 2, 3 St Paul’s Cathedral, 1, 2, 3 Salisbury, Lord, 1 Salisbury Plain, 1 Sampson, James, 1 Sinai Peninsula, maps and surveys of, 1, 2 Sandby, Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; Party of Six Surveyors, Highlands in Distance, 1; View Near Loch Rannoch, 1 satnav systems, 1, 2 Satterthwaite, James, 1 Saxton, Christopher, 1, 2 Scafell, 1 scales, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Scales Dispute, 1, 2 Scar House Reservoir, 1 Schiehallion, 1, 2, 3, 4 Scilly Isles, 1 Scotland, Colby’s experience of mapping, 1; Lowland gentry and aristocracy, 1; 2; Highlanders, 1, 2, 3, 4; landscape, 1, 2; language, 1; midges, 1; outlaws, 1; place-names, 1; poor state of maps of Highlands before and during Jacobite rebellion, 1, 2; surveyors’ experiences of Lowlands, 1; see also annexed estates; Highland reform; Military Survey of Scotland; specific locations are listed by place-name Scott, Frederick, 1 Scott, Walter, 1, 2; Old Mortality, 1 Scurry, James, 1 secondary triangulation see triangulation Sedgwick, Adam, 1 Seven Years War, 1, 2, 3 Severndroog Castle, 1, 2, 3 Sgurr Dearg, 1 Shelburne, 1nd Earl of, 2 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 Shetland Islands meridian arc extension, 1 Shooter’s Hill, 1, 2, 3 Short, James, 1, 2 Shrapnel, Henry, 1, 2 Simcoe, General John Graves, 1, 2 Sinai Peninsula, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2 Skiddaw, 1 Skinner, William, 1 Skye, Isle of, 1 Slieve Donard, 1, 2, 3 Slieve Snaght, 1 Smeaton, John, 1 Smith, Adam, 1 Smith, Charlotte, 1, 2, 3; The Young Philosopher, 1 Smollett, Tobias, 1 Smyth, James Carmichael, 1 Snowdon, Mount, 1 Snowdonia, Robert Dawson’s map of, 1 Society for Constitutional Information, 1 Society for the Commemoration of the Revolution in Great Britain, 1 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (later Royal Society of Arts), 1, 2, 3, 4 Society of Antiquaries, 1, 2 Soldi, Andrea, 1 Somerset, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 South Sea Bubble, 1 Southampton, 1 Spaniard’s Inn, Hampstead, 1 Speed, John, 1; Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, 1 Spilsbury, John, 1 Spring Rice, Thomas, 1, 2 stagecoaches, 1 Stamp Office, 1 Stanford, Edward, 1 Stanford’s (map retailer), 1, 2 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 1 Statute of Rhuddlan (1284), 1 Steel, James, 1 Sterne, Laurence, 1 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1 Stewart, Dugald, 1; Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1 Stonehenge, 1, 2 strip maps see traverse surveying Stuart, Charles Edward (‘Young Pretender’), 1, 2 sublimity, notion of, 1 Suez Canal, 1 Suffolk, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Sun, 1 Surrey, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 surveying, xxvi, 1; see also mapping; planetabling; triangulation surveyors see map-makers surveyors’ wheels see waywisers, perambulators surveys see maps, Ordnance Survey, Military Survey of Scotland Survey Act (1841), 1 Sussex, maps and surveys of, 1, 2, 3 Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 1 Swift, Edward, 1 symbols, used in early Ordnance Survey maps, 1, 2 telescopes, as used in map-making, 1; see also theodolites Templemore, 1, 2 terrestrial refraction, 1 Test, William, 1 Thames, River, 1 Thelwall, John, 1 theodolites, 1, 2, 3, 4; Jesse Ramsden’s ‘Great Theodolite’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Interior Survey’s eighteen-inch theodolite, 1 Thomas, Alfred, 1 Thomson, James, 1; Liberty, 1 Thomson, Thomas, 1; Annals of Philosophy, 1 Tickell, Thomas, 1; An Epistle, 1 The Times, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Tintern Abbey, 1, 2 Tiptree Heath, 1 Tipu Sultan, 1 Tithe Commission, 1 Tithe Communication Act (1836), 1 Topographical Branch (Ordnance Survey of Ireland), 1, 2, 3 topographical surveying, general see interior surveying Topographical Survey, division of Ordnance Survey see Interior Survey topography, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also landscape; relief toponymy, 1, 2, 3 Torbay House, Paignton, 1 tourism, 1, 2 Tower of London: fire at (1841), 1; map-making at, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; see also Artillery, Royal Regiment of; Board of Ordnance; Engineers, Corps of townlands (Ireland), 1, 2 towns, mapping of, 1 traverse surveying, 1, 2, 3, 4 Trellech Beacon, 1, 2, 3, 4 Trembley, Abraham, 1 triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; benefits over positional astronomy, 1, 2, 3; Ordnance Survey’s primary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21; Ordnance Survey’s secondary triangulation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; importance of in Enlightenment, 1, 2; and relation to perspective, 1; see also Paris–Greenwich triangulation triangulation stations, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24; trig points at specific locations are listed by place-name Trigonometrical Survey, division of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 trigonometrical surveying, general see triangulation trigonometry, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; for trigonometry used in triangulation see triangulation trig points see triangulation stations Tucker, James Walker, 1; Hiking, 1 Tummel, River, 1 Tummock, 1 turnpikes, 1, 2 Twiss, Brigadier-General, 1 Ultima Thule, 1 uniform, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Union, Anglo-Scottish (1707), 1, 2, 3 Union, Anglo-Irish (1800), 1 Unst, 1 Upper Hardes, 1 Upper Nidderdale, 1 Upper Ward of Lanarkshire, 1, 2, 3, 4 Usher, Henry, 1 Vallancey, Charles, 1 Victoria Dock, Liverpool, 1 Wade, George, 1, 2, 3, 4 Wakeman, William, 1 Wales: Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1, 2, 3; place names, 1; specific locations are listed by place-name Walpole, Horace, 1, 2 War Office, 1, 2, 3 Warley Common, Essex, 1 Wast Water, 1 Water Crag, 1 Waterloo, Battle of, 1, 2, 3, 4 Watson, David, 1; birth and early life, 1, 2, 3; and Robert Dundas, 1, 2, 3; joins Army, 1; joins Corps of Engineers, 1, 2; in Flanders, 1; and Jacobite Rebellion, 1, 2; proposes survey of Scottish Highlands, 1; and William Roy, 1, 2, 3; work in Scottish Highlands, 1, 2; and Military Survey of Scotland, 1, 2, 3, 4; illness and death, 1; last will and testament, 1 Watson, Robert, 1 waywisers, 1 Wedderburn, Alexander, 1 Wellesley, Richard, 1st Marquess, 1, 2 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 1, 2, 3 Wemyss, 1th Earl of, 2 Wickham, William, 1 Wilkie, William, 1 William IV, 1 Williams, Edward: appointed deputy director of Ordnance Survey, 1, 2, 3; life and character, 1; remeasures Hounslow Heath base, 1, 2; and national triangulation, 1, 2, 3; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1791, 1792, 1793, and 1794’ (with Mudge and Dalby), 1; ‘An Account of the Trigonometrical Survey … 1795 and 1796’ (with Mudge and Dalby), 1, 2; death, 1 Williams, John, 1 Wilson, Charles, 1; Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem (with James), 1 Wilson, Sophia, 1 Wiltshire, Ordnance Survey maps and surveys of, 1 Winchelsea, 1 Windham, William, 1, 2, 3 Windsor Castle, 1, 2 Wingham, 1 Wollaston, Francis, 1, 2 Woolcot, Simon, 1, 2, 3 Woolwich, Royal Military Academy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Wordsworth, Christopher, 1 Wordsworth, John, 1 Wordsworth, Mary, 1 Wordsworth, William: on Salisbury Plain, 1; on ‘Engineer agents’, 1; suspected of being a spy, 1; on City of London, 1; on the landscape, 1; interest in Ordnance Survey of England and Wales, 1, 2; in Lake District, 1, 2, 3; on maps, 1, 2, 3, 4; and William Rowan Hamilton, 1; interest in Ordnance Survey of Ireland, 1; in Ireland, 1; buys Templemore memoir, 1 Wordsworth, William: publications: TheExcursion, 1, 2; ‘Guilt and Sorrow, or Incidents upon Salisbury Plain’, 1; ‘Inscription: Written with a Slate Pencil on a Stone, on the Side of the Mountain of Black Combe’, 1, 2; The Prelude, 1, 2; ‘View from the Top of Black Combe’, 1 World and Fashionable Advertiser, 1 Wrotham Hill, 1 Wye Valley, 1, 2 Wyld, James, 1 Yeakell, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; ‘Actual Topographical Survey of Sussex’ (with Gardner), 1 Yolland, William, 1, 2 Yorkshire, maps and surveys of, 1 Young, Arthur, 1 Zach, Francis Xavier Baron de, 1 zenith sector, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (A) David Watson by Andrea Soldi, finished after Watson’s death in 1762, showing him pointing to his crowning glory: a military survey of Scotland.

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In his letter to The Times the previous year, James had promised that ‘this year I shall be able to get the survey of the north of England finished, and complete the 1-inch map of England and Wales’. But many of his readers had heard similar promises before and, like its forerunners, James’s assurance failed to materialise in the time he had predicted. The reason for the delay, however, was unprecedented. Between 1864 and 1869, Ordnance Survey map-makers were sent to the Middle East, to Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula. The recently completed large-scale map of London that had been made for the Metropolitan Sanitary Commission had so impressed the Dean of Westminster, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, that he had called for a similar survey to be made of Jerusalem, ‘to improve the sanitary state of the city’ and protect pilgrims from water-borne diseases.

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

Robert Hunter writing that ‘the tourist enterprise accompanied British armies to Egypt and the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s. Tourism was inseparable from the West’s conquest of the Middle East.’ Nearly two centuries after the company’s foundation and more than 150 years after the opening of the Suez Canal, which permitted wealthy Britons to visit Asia in comfort and style, the British are the world’s fourth most enthusiastic tourists, spending $71.4 billion on tourism every year, behind Germany, the USA and China, but ahead of France, Canada and Korea.9 More than three-quarters of residents in England and Wales hold passports, according to the last Census in 2011, compared to just 40 per cent in the USA.10 In 2018, when global pandemics were merely the stuff of dystopian fiction, the British took over 71.7 million trips abroad and in the month of August 2019 alone11 British travellers made 9.4 million trips abroad.12 Five per cent of these trips were to America, which has remained a popular destination for the British since the colonies were settled in the early seventeenth century.13 But it’s not just our predilection for travel and relocation that has been shaped by our imperial history – the way we travel and live abroad has been influenced by it too.

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Not least there has been the significant political energy expended on the task of letting so much of our empire go its own way: the Balfour Declaration of 1926 granting Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa their independence, for instance, India and Pakistan becoming free in 1947, Sudan in 1956, Ghana in 1957, Zambia in 1964, Hong Kong, which had been a Crown colony since 1841, being handed over to China in 1997, and so endlessly on. Then there are the two significant moments of the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Israel, the UK and France invaded Egypt with the ostensible aim of regaining Western control of the Suez Canal, and the Falklands War of 1982. The former proved rather more humiliating and traumatic than the latter, Suez being generally accepted as one of the key moments in the shaping of Britain’s post-war psychology, Samir Puri arguing that the ‘debacle’ in 1956 was ‘the moment that Britain’s status as a global superpower was revealed as fiction’, and other analysts even arguing that it marked the true end of British empire.

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Armed with ample funds, he outdid all in most things but Colonel Frazer ran him hard because he was buying for a wealthy regimental mess … and when anything belonging personally to Theodore [Tewodros] was offered for sale, there were private gentlemen who outbid both …’ The haul was so vast that fifteen elephants and almost 200 mules were needed to transport it home. All treasures were put on display at the South Kensington Museum in 1868, and they subsequently ended up in all kinds of places, from the collection of the press baron William Randolph Hearst to being loaned out to the South Staffordshire Exhibition in Wolverhampton in 1869, to the British Museum, to the Bodleian Library and to the V&A, which has since 1872 displayed the famous Maqdala Crown, an intricate work of African craftsmanship commissioned by the Ethiopian Empress Mentewab in the 1740s. The discomfort in Britain was acute. William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that he ‘deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of all concerned, that these articles … were thought fit to be brought away by a British army’.

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton

Albert Einstein, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, facts on the ground, financial independence, Ida Tarbell, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois

Russia, whose southward push throughout the nineteenth century had so worried generations of British statesmen, was finished as a power, at least in the short run, and all along its southern boundaries, in Persia and the Caucasus, were British forces and British influence. 19 So much of prewar British policy had been devoted to protecting the routes to India across the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea, either by taking direct control, as in the case of Egypt, or by propping up the shaky old Ottoman empire. That empire was finished, but thanks to a secret agreement with France, Britain was poised to take the choice bits it wanted. There were new routes, at least in the dreams of the Foreign Office and the military, perhaps across the Black Sea to the Caucasus and then south, or by air via Greece and Mesopotamia, but these, too, could be protected if Britain moved quickly enough to seize the territory it needed.

…

His prime minister shared his sentiments; like many Liberals, Lloyd George had inherited his hostility to the Turks from the great Gladstone.20 For Curzon the question was, What would replace the Ottoman empire? Britain still wanted to ensure that hostile warships did not use the straits. It still needed to protect the route to India through the Suez Canal. There was a new factor, too: the increasingly important supplies of oil from Mosul in the Ottoman empire and from Persia. Britain did not want to take on the whole responsibility itself, and Greece certainly could not; on the other hand, it did not want another major power moving in, such as its ally France.

…

The agreement appeased the French, who had considerable investments along the Syrian coast and who saw themselves as protectors of the area’s large Christian communities, such as the Maronites around Mount Lebanon. It suited the British equally well, and they had cleverly placed the French between themselves and the Russian empire as it reached southward.7 Almost as soon as the deal was made, the British nevertheless began to regret it. Would it not be wiser to control Palestine, so close to the Suez Canal, directly? This was much urged by British officials in Egypt. Why should the French get Mosul? When Russia dropped out of the war in 1917, it suddenly seemed less essential to have France as a buffer. Sykes, reported a colleague as news of the Ottoman surrender came in, “has evolved a new and most ingenious scheme by which the French are to clear out of the whole Arab region except the Lebanon and in return take over the protectorate of the whole Kurdo-Armenian region from Adana to Persia and the Caucasus.” 8 In France, a heterogeneous colonialist lobby—fabric manufacturers in Lyon, who wanted Syrian silk; the Chamber of Automobile Manufacturers, who noted that Mosul was wonderful country for driving; Jesuit priests, whose order ran a university in Beirut; the financiers, officials and intellectuals in the Comité de l’Asie Française—urged their government to stand firm.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Other feats of engineering that seemingly served more prosaic purposes also defined who could coordinate with whom. The Great Wall separated the Chinese empire from the encroaching Mongol hordes and kept a lid on centuries of Chinese technological advances in metallurgy and agriculture. When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it cut the sea route from Europe to Asia by 30 percent and opened the floodgates to globalization. The monuments to our power to coordinate are not limited to large physical structures. The library of Alexandria and its hundreds of thousands of scrolls, too, was a testament to human coordination, as it pooled the knowledge of the ancient world—it is said, by forcing visiting merchants to surrender their original books in exchange for a freshly transcribed copy.

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Peter’s Basilica, 21 Stalin, Joseph, 177 standard operating procedure (SOP), 100–101, 106 start-ups, 141, 146, 199 increased capital available for, 142–143 network effects and, 165–166 See also fintechs Stash, 151, 215 steam engine, 111, 113 steel industry, 161 Stitch Fix, 208–212, 215 stock markets, 146 decreased investment options in, 143 share prices in, 2–3, 6, 196 Stripe and Square, 147 Stucke, Maurice, 166 subprime mortgage crisis, 6, 41, 55–56, 134, 155, 173 Suez Canal, 21 superstar firms, 195–197 Suzuki, 30 Switzerland, 136 Synco. See Cybersyn Systemized Intelligence Lab, 115 Taj Mahal, 21 talent management, internal, 126–129 tax credits, 200–202, 218 taxes, 197–202 capital gains, 187 data, 199–200, 203, 218 negative income, 190 nominal rate, 198 progressive consumption, 198 robo, 186–187 wealth, 187 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 89, 95–96 Taylorism, 89, 95–96, 112 telecommunications industry, 162–163 Tesla, 78, 110, 120, 169, 189 thalidomide, 42 thick markets, 2, 82–83, 164, 213 Thiel, Peter, 203 time firm reorganization and, 112–113 meaningful use of, 221–222 Tinder, 83, 163 µ Torrent, 122 TransferWise, 135 transparency, 172, 173, 178 Trump, Donald, 186, 203 Trunk Club, 211 T-shaped skill set, 118 Tversky, Amos, 102 Twitter, 163 Uber, 163, 182 UBI.

Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World by Mark Pendergrast

business climate, business cycle, commoditize, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Honoré de Balzac, it's over 9,000, land reform, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open economy, out of africa, profit motive, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, The Great Good Place, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, vertical integration, women in the workforce

For many years to come, the production of the Dutch East Indies determined the price of coffee in the world market. During the 1700s Java and Mocha became the most famous and sought-after coffees, and those words are still synonymous with the black brew, though little high-quality coffee currently comes from Java, and Mocha ceased operation as a viable port in 1869 with the completion of the Suez Canal. At first Europeans didn’t know what to make of the strange new brew. In 1610 traveling British poet Sir George Sandys noted that the Turks sat “chatting most of the day” over their coffee, which he described as “blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.” He added, however, that it “helpeth, as they say, digestion, and procureth alacrity.”

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See also Coca-Cola; Pepsi-Cola Somoza García, Anastasio Songs Spain Spanish-American War Special Commission on Coffee Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) embezzlement in Speculators Spice Mill (trade journal) Spindler, Susie Stamberg, Susan Stamp Act of 1765 Standard Brands Starbucks critics of Starbucks Passion for Coffee (Olsen) States and Social Evolution (Williams) Stiller, Bob Stock market crash (1929) Suez Canal Sugar Sumatra Superior Tea & Coffee Company Supermarkets Supreme Court, U. S. Surveys Sustainable Coffee Criteria Group Sustainable Harvest Swann, Sandy Sweden Swift, Jonathan Swift & Company Switzerland Tanganyika Taster’s Choice coffee Tattler and Spectator newspapers Taxation Tchibo company Tea Tea & Coffee Trade Journal TechnoServe Teenagers Television.

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They also had recourse to diplomatic intervention and maintained close ties to foreign-controlled export and import houses. Nonetheless, the coffee industry of Latin America has never resolved the credit problem satisfactorily. Many of the Germans who came to make their coffee fortunes in Guatemala were not wealthy men when they first reached the country. Bernhard Hannstein, born in Prussia in 1869, left Germany “to get away from the military habits of Germany, to flee the tyranny of [my] eccentric father and to be a free man.” In 1892 Hannstein found work at La Libertad, one of the huge coffee plantations owned by ex-president Lisandro Barillas, where he received $100 a month plus free room and board—many times more than the Indians.

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, Potemkin village, profit motive, rent control, Shenzhen special economic zone , SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, starchitect, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor

Premchand Roychand, once a celebrated philanthropist and business mogul, became reviled as “the best abused man in Bombay.” Yet for all the excesses of the boom, Bombay had laid a foundation for future prosperity. Frere had built civic institutions like the university and invested in the new railway and telegraph infrastructure that firmly established Bombay as India’s gateway to the world. When the Suez Canal opened in Egypt in 1869, green shoots finally appeared after the long economic bust. The new shortcut between Europe and Asia put Bombay at the center of the global trading system. Recognized by his superiors, Frere was promoted to the India Council, which oversaw the jewel of the empire from London. As Frere sailed from Bombay to Britain, the buildings he had commissioned, which would come to be known as “Frere Town,” were rising on the skyline behind him.

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Petersburg), 35, 158, 229, 236, 271 Sobchak, Anatoly, 274, 275, 276–77, 278, 280, 281 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 274 Sonapur labor camp (Dubai), 367–68 Song Jiaoren, 89 Sony, 262 Souk Al Bahar (Dubai), 374 South Africa, Gandhi’s experiences in, 219 Soviet Union, 229–39 anti-Westernism in, 230, 231–32, 234, 237, 281 architecture of, 160, 161–64, 229, 232–34 Chinese relations with, 180, 247, 300–301 creation of, 157–60 cultural conservatism in, 163, 238 cultural repression in, 238 downfall of, 275–76, 281, 282, 304, 328, 354 German nonaggression pact with, 234 Gorbachev’s reforms in, 271–72, 273–74 Great Purge in, 230–32, 273 Indian trade with, 328 industrialization of, 232 Maoist China’s emulation of, 247 Nehruvian India’s emulation of, 255 political protests in, 273 secret police in, 230, 233, 236 Stalin’s rule over, 229–37 television in, 274, 275 Western contact with, 160, 161, 238 World War II in, 234–37 see also Russia Stalin, Joseph, 163, 229–37 Standard Oil, 180 Starbucks, 374 Stasi, 281 Stellar International Complex, 318 Stevens, Charles Frederick, 215 Stevens, Frederick William, 116–18, 124 Stiglitz, Joseph, 278 Strelna, Russia, Constantine Palace in, 286 Suez Canal, 115–16 Sverdlovsk, Russia, anti-Soviet demonstrations in, 276 Sweden, Neva River port of, 21, 23 Syria, Western heritage in, 392 Tagore, Rabindranath, 176 taipans, 68 Taiping Rebellion, 63, 65, 74 Taiwan, 310, 312 Taj Mahal (Agra), 210 Taj Mahal Hotel (Mumbai), 210–11, 214, 349 Taj Mahal scale model (Shenzhen), 394 Taliban, 356 Talreja, Priyanka, 346, 347 Tao Chengzhang, 89 Tata, Jamsetji Nusserwanji, 203, 210 Tata, J.

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“There have been cases of fatal alcohol poisoning . . . even among fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds.” Without the gracious homes of the rich or even, for some, a bed that was their own for more than an eight-hour sleeping shift, public intoxication was a chronic problem; there were 35,000 arrests for drunkenness in 1869. Crime more generally was rampant. In 1866, 130,000 Petersburgers were arrested and jailed—nearly a quarter of the city’s population. Prostitution was legal and ubiquitous. During the mid-nineteenth century, there were 150 officially licensed brothels. The number of registered sex workers topped 4,400 in 1870.

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace by H. W. Brands

California gold rush, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, disinformation, industrial cluster, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, retrograde motion, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway

“The proposition was to pay me”: to Sherman, Jan. 5, 1869. “People looking at it”: New York Times, March 7, 1869. “The office has come to me unsought”: Inaugural address, March 4, 1869, Public Papers. CHAPTER 58 “I have come to the conclusion”: Speech to congressional delegation, Feb. 13, 1869. “I would ask”: to the Senate, March 6, 1869. “It is a matter for profound consideration”: New York Times, March 11, 1869. “It has been my intention”: to Fish, March 10, 1869. “I cannot … forbids it”: from Fish, March 11, 1869 (telegram and letter), Papers of Grant, 19:150n. “Not receiving your dispatch”: to Fish, March 11, 1869. “You have exceptional qualifications”: Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish (1957 ed.), 1:112.

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“The President conversed”: New York Times, Oct. 4, 1869. “The committee find”: Investigation into the Causes of the Gold Panic, 20. CHAPTER 60 “What a wonderful shot … and earnest”: Borie to Badeau, Oct. 3, 1869, Papers of Grant, 19:220n. “Your beloved husband”: to Mary Rawlins, Sept. 6, 1869. “Yet his final taking off”: to Washburne, Sept. 7, 1869. “You and I know”: Wilson to Babcock, Oct. 13, 1869, Papers of Grant, 19:257n. “The executive department”: John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years (1896), 375. “I think it advisable”: to Fish, Aug. 14, 1869. “The United States are willing”: Memorandum, Aug. 31, 1869. “For more than a year”: Annual message, Dec. 6, 1869, Public Papers.

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The fact is we are the most progressive, freest, and richest people on earth but don’t know it or appreciate it. Foreigners see this much plainer than we do.” The travelers headed east again, embarking from Marseilles in January 1879. “Anchored outside the harbor of Alexandria last night,” Grant wrote at the end of the month in a journal he had just started keeping. They proceeded toward the Suez Canal. “Weather charming, fields green and flourishing. Party much pleased with the picturesque dress and manners of the people.” A sunken ship delayed their passage of the canal, but eventually they made the Red Sea. “Heat increasing.… Light clothing coming into requisition.” They reached Aden at the end of the first week of February.

Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J. E. Gordon

double helix, haute couture, pattern recognition, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Though not, of course, the sole factor, the loss of the Captain had a powerful effect in accelerating the change from sail to steam, or rather on the abolition of the full sailing rigs in big battleships. Whatever the technical consequences, the political ones were extensive. It will be remembered that the Suez Canal, which was opened just before the Captain was launched, originally belonged effectively to France. Disraeli bought the Suez Canal shares for the British government in 1874, and the acquisition of a worldwide chain of coaling stations became a political necessity. The whole story of the Captain disaster is complicated, but the immediate technical cause was undoubtedly the determination to ensure that the masts and hull of the ship should have really adequate strength – regardless of weight.

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wooden Shute, Nevil Siloam, Tower of Skiamorphs Ski-ing Soane, Sir John Solomon, King Space-frames Stephenson, Robert Strain: shear, definition of tensile and compressive: definition of; expression of Strain energy: as a cause of fracture definition of storage capacity, table of units of Strength: of a material, definition of of solids, tables of of a structure, definition of Stress: factor shear, definition of tensile and compressive, definition of units of Stress concentrations passim how to live with Stress trajectories Stringed musical instruments Structure loading coefficients Suez Canal Surface tension Surgery, orthopaedic Telford, Thomas Temple of the Olympian Zeus Tendon: Achilles or calcaneal in bows in catapults in kangaroos in legs and arms strain energy in strength of Test pieces, tensile Thompson, Sir D’Arcy Thrust lines passim in backbones in bridges Torsion: in aircraft in bridges in cars in chickens in legs Trees: deflections of growth of height of names of scarcity of strength of Trusses: Bollman bowstring Fink hogging hupozomata Pratt or Howe in shipbuilding Warren See also Roof-trusses Tyres Vincent, Dr Julian Vionnet, Mlle Vitruvius Vocal cords Voussoirs Wagner tension field Wainwright, Prof.

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If this had not been the case it is at least possible that the ship would have been a success and comparatively safe. As it was, the Captain was much too deep in the water and her C.G. was much too high up. Subsequent calculations showed that the ship would capsize if allowed to heel beyond an angle of 21°. However, the ship was commissioned in 1869 with much publicity. She made two deep-water cruises to the great satisfaction of The Times and of the First Lord of the Admiralty, who had his own midshipman son transferred into her. It looked as if the problems of world power, without the encumbrance and potential embarrassment of world bases, were going to continue to be soluble.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow

Alan Greenspan, always be closing, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bolshevik threat, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, death from overwork, Dutch auction, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, interest rate swap, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, paper trading, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the payments system, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Yom Kippur War, young professional

From their Saint Swithin’s Lane townhouse, the Rothschilds financed Wellington’s peninsular campaign and the Crimean War. A familiar adage said that the wealth of the Rothschilds consisted of the bankruptcy of nations. In 1875, Lionel Rothschild would arrange the £4-million financing that permitted Britain to wrest control of the Suez Canal from France. Disraeli laughingly confided to Queen Victoria, “I am of the opinion, Madame, that there never can be too many Rothschilds.”15 Besides bankrolling the Louisiana Purchase, Barings financed the French indemnity payment after Waterloo, prompting a lapidary tribute from the due de Richelieu: “There are six great powers in Europe: England, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Baring Brothers.”16 After the failure of Ireland’s potato crop in 1845, the Peel government used Barings to buy American corn and Indian meal to relieve the famine—so-called Peel’s brimstone.

…

Although Alexander was the most domestically oriented chairman in Morgan history—he came in after the foreign loans of the twenties and never lived abroad—he fully internalized the Morgan identification with Britain. This was patent during the Suez affair. On July 26, 1956, Egypt’s prime minister Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The next day, the British prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, informed Eisenhower that Britain was drawing up military contingency plans to reclaim the canal. By early November, Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt, to the great dismay of Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.

…

Allegedly worried about a two-tier Arab world in which Saudi sheiks drove Cadillacs while the masses starved, Khashoggi told the Saudi royal family that they couldn’t live so luxuriously while the Sudan lay poverty stricken. The conservative oil states feared Sudan’s flirtation with socialism. To correct this, Khashoggi wanted to introduce agribusiness into the region. With the blessings of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, he planned to create a seventeen-thousand-acre dairy farm near the Suez Canal and a millionacre cattle ranch near the Blue Nile in Sudan. Needing the appropriate technology, Khashoggi eyed an American company called Arizona-Colorado Land and Cattle, which had huge property tracts and cattle herds out West. But the company wouldn’t sell until Morgan Stanley came in and negotiated a $9-million stake for him.

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

Chapter Four : Going Global Travelling faster over long distances has transformed our perception of the planet. Columbus took five weeks to sail across the Atlantic Ocean. The opening of the trans‑continental railway across the US, the linking of Indian railways across the sub‑continent, and the opening of the Suez Canal, all in 1869‑70, inspired Jules Verne to write Around the World in Eighty Days. Thomas Cook arranged his first round‑the‑world trip in 1872, the beginning of organised tourism. Nowadays trans-Atlantic flight takes eight hours, and we can fly from the UK to Australia in less than a day. Unlike daily travel, long distance trips are mostly irregular, take significant chunks of time and are the result of particular decisions.

The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia by Peter Hopkirk

British Empire, classic study, disinformation, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, Suez canal 1869, trade route

One was the purchase from the Khedive of Egypt, amid intense secrecy, of 40 per cent of the shares in the newly opened Suez Canal. This waterway reduced the distance by sea between Britain and India by some 4,500 miles, and Disraeli wished to make absolutely sure that this crucial lifeline, for both troops and goods, could never be threatened or even severed by a hostile power – notably by the Russians in the event of their acquiring Constantinople and the Turkish straits. The purchase of the Egyptian ruler’s entire holding, which effectively rescued him from bankruptcy, made Britain the largest shareholder in the Suez Canal Company. A second major improvement in communications with India was the opening, in 1870, of a direct submarine cable link with London.

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Men and supplies could then be shipped down the Volga and across the Caspian to this point. They could also be ferried there from the Russian garrisons in the Caucasus. Eventually, when Khiva had been conquered and the troublesome Turcomans pacified, a railway could be constructed across the desert to Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Khokand. So it was that, in the winter of 1869, just eighteen months after the submission of Bokhara, a small Russian force set sail from Petrovsk, on the Caucasian side of the Caspian, and a few days later landed in a desolate bay on its eastern shore. The spot was known as Krasnovodsk, and it was here that the Oxus was said to have once flowed into the Caspian.

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In Yarkand the two men studiously ignored one another, occupying separate lodgings, while keeping a close watch on the other’s movements. For their part, the authorities maintained a wary eye on both of them while awaiting further instructions from Kashgar, 100 miles further on. Shaw’s careful preparations, not to mention his generous gifts, appear to have paid off, for on January 3, 1869, he was officially informed that Yakub Beg would receive him in his palace at Kashgar. Eight days later, after leaving his rival kicking his heels in frustration at Yarkand, Shaw saw in the distance across the treeless plain the great mud walls of the capital – the first Englishman ever to do so. Beyond it, on the horizon, rose the snow-capped Pamirs, while to the east stretched the endless sands of the Taklamakan.

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Writing to Camille du Locle, a close friend who had just returned from a voyage en Orient, Verdi remarks on February 19, 1868: “When we see each other, you must describe all the events of your voyage, the wonders you have seen, and the beauty and ugliness of a country which once had a greatness and a civilization I had never been able to admire.”86 On November 1, 1869, the inauguration of the Cairo Opera House was a brilliant event during celebrations for the opening of the Suez Canal; Rigoletto was the opera performed. A few weeks before, Verdi had turned down Khedive Ismail’s offer to write a hymn for the occasion, and in December he wrote du Locle a long letter on the dangers of “patchwork” operas: “I want art in any of its manifestations, not the arrangement, the artifice, and the system that you prefer,” he said, arguing that for his part he wanted “unified” works, in which “the idea is ONE, and everything must converge to form this ONE.”87 Although these assertions were made in response to du Locle’s suggestions that Verdi write an opera for Paris, they turn up enough times in the course of his work on Aida to become an important theme.

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Corry’s attack especially singled out Mazrui’s “moralistic and political ordinates,” a peculiar euphemism implying that Mazrui was little more than an unscrupulous propagandist, the better to be able to challenge Mazrui’s figures about such things as the number of people who died in building the Suez Canal, the number killed during the Algerian war of liberation, and so on. Lurking near the turbulent and disorderly surface of Corry’s prose was the (to him) disturbing and unacceptable reality of Mazrui’s performance itself. Here at last was an African on prime-time television, in the West, daring to accuse the West of what it had done, thus reopening a file considered closed.

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A fair amount of work has been done recently on the economic and political history of European involvement in Egypt during the eighty years after Napoleon’s expedition; much of this concurs with the position taken by Egyptian nationalist historians (Sabry, Rafi’, Ghorbal) that the viceregal heirs who composed Mohammad Ali’s dynasty, in a descending order of merit (with the exception of the intransigent Abbas), involved Egypt ever more deeply in what has been called the “world economy”111 but more accurately was the loose agglomeration of European financiers, merchant bankers, loan corporations, and commercial adventures. This led ineluctably to the British occupation of 1882, and, just as ineluctably, to the eventual reclamation of the Suez Canal by Gamal Abdel Nasser in July 1956. By the 1860s and 1870s the most striking feature of the Egyptian economy was the boom in cotton sales that occurred when the American Civil War closed off American supply to European mills; this only accelerated the various distortions in the local economy (by the 1870s, according to Owen, “the entire Delta had been converted into an export sector devoted to the production, processing and export of two or three crops,”112) which were part of a much larger, more depressing situation.

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

Then Central Europe would have been ruled from Vienna, not from Berlin. And there would have been no First World War, no Hitler!” I mention that Rigoletto is playing at a local theater. He tells me that the opera here was built by an Egyptian Coptic family that made its money in the Suez Canal trade, following the opening of the canal in 1869 that brought the port of Trieste, in effect, closer to the Middle East and Asia. * * * — Those who write about Trieste quote Chateaubriand’s rough statement: “The last breath of civilization expires on this coast where barbarism begins.”[11] To call the proximate Ottoman Empire—an eclectic civilization in its own right—barbarous, is of course entirely wrong, a reflection of one’s own sense of cultural superiority.

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In the present day, the port of Trieste will soon sign an agreement with Duisburg, the world’s largest inland port, located at the confluence of the Rhine and Ruhr Rivers in western Germany, with the aim of increasing traffic on the new Silk Road that China is organizing. Trieste will acquire through Duisburg access to the northern—land—part of the Silk Road that terminates at the Pacific; while Duisburg will acquire by way of Trieste access to the southern, maritime Silk Road that runs through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. A postmodern, multinational imperial system may re-emerge, this time supervised by the Chinese, and encompassing Trieste. A few months hence, I will get a message from a friend about “Chinese, Russian, American, and Mitteleuropean investors competing for bases in the port here—the second great opportunity after Maria Theresa,” during whose reign the city became a vibrant, multiethnic hub.

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See also Russia Spain, Venice and, 79 Sparta, 264–265 Spengler, Oswald, 124 Spinoza, Baruch, 56 Split, 200–204, 206–207, 238 Sponza Palace, 219 Stalin, Joseph, 88, 114 Stalinism, 252, 254, 263, 275 Stark, Freya, 194 state model, weakening of, 281–282 Stella Polare café, 100 Stepanic, Alojzije, 179–180 Stokes, Adrian, 16–17, 83, 208 Stones of Rimini (Stokes), 16–17 Stradun, 219 Strait of Otranto, 95 Stravinsky, 112 Strossmayer, Josip, 190 Styria, 101 Sueves, 38 Suez Canal, 103, 105 Svevo, Italo (Ettore Schmitz), 111–113, 121 Symbolism (movement), 13–14 Syracuse, 265 Syria, 26, 182 T Tacitus, 38 Tanjić, Željko, 179–180, 193 Tanner, Marcus, 191 Tanner, Tony, 64, 85 Taraba, Nebojša, 175 Tartini, Giuseppe, 135 Taylor, A.

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

Giuseppe Mazzini, Doveri dell’uomo (1860) THE BOUNDARIES OF IDENTITY Aron Ettore Schmitz was born in the city of Trieste at the end of 1861. His mother and father were Jews, of Italian and German origin, respectively. But Trieste was a free imperial city, the main trading port of the Austrian Empire, brought to greatness in the nineteenth century as it connected the empire to Asia. (“‘The third entrance to the Suez Canal,’ they used to call it,” Jan Morris, the English travel writer, tells us.)1 Young Ettore was, therefore, a citizen of the empire, which was rebaptized as the Austro-Hungarian Empire when he was six. Indeed, whatever the words “German” and “Italian” meant when he was born, they didn’t mean you were a citizen of Germany or of Italy.

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Helena Island, 172 San Bois Mountains, Oklahoma, 29, 30 San Francisco, California, 18 São Paulo, Brazil, xi, 132 Sarawak, 91 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 182 Savage, Mike, 165, 166 Saxony, 108, 109 Scandinavia, 76 Schmitz, Aron Ettore, See Svevo, Italo Scotland, 3, 77, 82, 86, 87, 103, 104, 114 Scott, Sir Walter, 83, 87 Sen, Amartya, 37 Seneca, 170 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 203 Sennett, Richard, 168 Septuagint, 50, 51, 52 Shakespeare, William, 17, 20, 75, 80, 207 Shama, Ghana, 134 Shelley, Frances, 148 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11 Shem (biblical figure), 112 Shepherd of Hermas, 52 Shiraz, Iran, 208 Siddhartha Gautama, 208 Sierra Leone, 117, 123 Simon, Paul, 209 Singapore, 91–98, 100, 101, 162 Slovenia, 79 Smith, Donald (first Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal), 87 Socrates, 49, 170 Sokoto Caliphate, Nigeria, 125 Soliman, Angelo, 115 Somalia, 129 Somerset, England, 200 Song of Songs, 52 South Africa, 19, 79, 101, 125, 128, 209 South America, 72, 88, 117, 126, 128, 132, 191 South Asia, 11, 15, 43, 44, 45, 78, 120, 194 South West Africa, 127 Soviet Union, 79 Spain, 28, 90, 110, 193, 206 Spengler, Oswald, 201 Stalin, Joseph, 127 Steele, Claude, 25, 28 Steiner, Rudolf, 138 Stendhal, 1 Strait of Gibraltar, 193 Strathcona and Mount Royal, Euan Howard, 87 Strauss, Johann, 206 Stroud, England, 7 Suez Canal, 71 Suleiman I (sultan of the Ottoman Empire), 195, 198 Sullivan, Arthur, 20, 64 Sunnah, 58 Surah Al-Ahzab (Quran), 59 Surah Al-Baqarah (Quran), 58 Surah An-Nisa (Quran), 58 Suriname, 118 Svevo, Italo (Aron Ettore Schmitz), 71, 72, 74, 76, 77, 79, 83–86, 90, 99, 102, 104, 139, 145, 215, 216 Svevo, Livia, 84, 104 Swabia, Germany, 84 Swann, Donald, 21 Switzerland, xii, 72 Symposium (Plato), 49 Syria, 195, 200 Tagore, Rabindranath, 137 Taine, Hippolyte, 113, 114, 119 Takoradi, Ghana, 206 Tallinn, Estonia, 206 Talmud, 55 Tangiers, Morocco, xi Tanzania, 101 Taylor, Charles, 97 Temple, William (archbishop of York and Canterbury), 38 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), 110, 219 Tertullian, 110 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 23 Thames River, 193 Thompson, E.

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Norton, 2010). 21.Don Herzog, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 206. 22.This is a point made well in Bourdieu’s discussions of what he calls “stratégies de condescendance” (strategies of condescension). See Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7 no. 1 (Spring 1989): 14–25. 23.I was led to this passage by a mention of it in Herzog, op. cit., 234. 24.See, e.g., Samuel B. James, The Church and Society (London: Houston & Wright, 1869). 25.Briggs, op. cit., 111. 26.http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab45.htm. 27.See the Seventh Schedule of the 1949 Finance Act, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1949/47/pdfs/ukpga_19490047_en.pdf. 28.Quoted in Edward Shils, The Order of Learning: Essays on the Contemporary University (New York: Routledge, 2013; originally published 1997), 79.

Rough Guide DIRECTIONS Venice by Jonathan Buckley

car-free, mass immigration, Murano, Venice glass, place-making, Suez canal 1869

By the Treaty of Campo Formio, signed in October, Napoleon relinquishes Venice to the Austrians. 1805 Napoleon joins the city to his Kingdom of Italy, and it stays under French domination until the aftermath of Waterloo. 1815 Venice passes back to the Austrians again, and remains a Habsburg province for the next half-century, the only break in Austrian rule coming with the revolt of March 1848, when the city is reinstituted as a republic under the leadership of Daniele Manin. The rebellion lasts until August 1849. 1866 Venice is absorbed into the Kingdom of United Italy. 1869 The opening of the Suez Canal brings a muted revival to the shipbuilders of Venice’s Arsenale, but tourism is now emerging as the main area of economic expansion, with the development of the Lido as Europe’s most fashionable resort. 1917 The Italian navy dismantles the Arsenale and switches its yards to Genoa and Naples. 1933 A road link is built to carry workers between Venice and the steadily expanding refineries and factories of Porto 9/29/06 2:40:33 PM C H R O NO L O G Y 188 Marghera.

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With the development of the industrial sector at VIEW OF PONTE LUNGO, LA GIUDECCA 02 Venice DIR Places.indd 152 9/29/06 2:46:38 PM 153 The Lido The Lido was an unspoilt strip of land until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Byron used to gallop his horses across its fields every day, and as late as 1869 Henry James P L A C E S The southern islands Marghera (on the mainland) after World War I, the Stucky flour mill went into a nose dive, and in 1954 it closed. It is now being restored for use as a convention centre and a Hilton hotel. Flooding and the barrier Called the acqua alta (high water), the winter flooding of Venice is caused by a combination of seasonal tides, fluctuations in atmospheric pressure in the Adriatic and persistent southeasterly winds, and has always been a feature of Venetian life.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

He was not enlightened or civilised enough to give back British gains to China in any of his four stints as prime minister, however.33 Rule by creditor The Suez canal was one of the engineering wonders of the 19th century. The idea that the Mediterranean could be linked with the Red Sea went back to ancient times, when the Persian emperor Darius first attempted it. The concept was of huge interest to the imperial powers; once opened, the sailing distance from London to Bombay was cut by 41% and to Shanghai by 32%.34 Construction began in 1859 and the canal opened in 1869. The Egyptian government put up half the capital and around 400,000 Egyptians laboured on the project, working 17-hour days.35 Some workers were unpaid.

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That proved a temporary expedient and the country defaulted on its debts in the following year. This gave an excuse for the Europeans to take control of the country, initially as a joint Anglo-French exercise but then under British rule alone. By 1889, British ships comprised 75% of shipping through the Suez canal and France just 8%. The Economist commented at the time that the Suez canal was “cut by French energy and Egyptian money for British advantage”. Evelyn Baring was appointed as consul general, and effective power behind the throne, and the British yoke was not completely thrown off until the 1950s. Egypt was not officially a British colony, but it was not independent either.36 Something similar happened in the Ottoman empire, which spent most of the 19th century in steady decline.

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Another two very significant long-term innovations were the watermill (for grinding corn) and the use of cranes to unload ships. The Persians under Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539BCE and maintained the sophisticated infrastructure of canals and roads that allowed 1,600 miles to be covered in a week.54 Darius the Great even attempted to build a version of the Suez canal, although the sources disagree on whether he completed it.55 As with many other civilisations of the time, the Persians under Darius had a dominant royal sector, which employed around 16,000 workmen, including stone masons, carpenters and blacksmiths. Under the Sasanian dynasty, which emerged around 220CE, traders were organised into guilds and allocated specific spaces in bazaars.

Lonely Planet Cape Town & the Garden Route (Travel Guide) by Lucy Corne

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, Day of the Dead, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, load shedding, Mark Shuttleworth, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, retail therapy, Robert Gordon, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl

In 1854 a representative parliament was formed in Cape Town, but much to the dismay of Dutch and English farmers to the north and east, the British government and Cape liberals insisted on a multiracial constituency (albeit with financial requirements that excluded the vast majority of blacks and coloureds). The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 dramatically decreased the amount of shipping that sailed via the Cape, but the discovery of diamonds and gold in the centre of South Africa in the 1870s and '80s helped Cape Town maintain its position as the country’s premier port. Immigrants flooded into the city and the population trebled, from 33,000 in 1875 to over 100,000 people at the turn of the century. During the first half of the 19th century, before the Suez Canal opened, British officers serving in India would holiday at the Cape. Boer War After the Great Trek, the Boers established several independent republics, the largest being the Orange Free State (today’s Free State province) and the Transvaal (today’s Northern Province, Gauteng and Mpumalanga).

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Start early and you’ll arrive at the tip of the Cape well before the bulk of the tourist buses, which tend to stop off at Boulders first (you can hit this on the way back instead). 6Drinking & Nightlife oSlow LifeCAFE ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; www.facebook.com/slowlifesouthafrica; 152 Main Rd, Muizenberg; cover charge R50-120; h9am-10pm Tue-Sat; W; dMuizenberg) Life in Muizenberg can feel pretty laid-back: this concept cafe gets the groove just right with a relaxed, arty atmosphere, long hours, a decent drinks and food menu, and live music or comedy gigs often held on Friday and Saturday nights. oTiger's MilkBAR, RESTAURANT ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %021-788 1869; www.tigersmilk.co.za; cnr Beach & Sidmouth Rds, Muizenberg; hkitchen 9am-10pm, bar to 2am; W; dMuizenberg) There's a panoramic view of Muizenberg Beach through the floor-to-ceiling window of this hangar-like bar and restaurant. Although it's open all day for food (good pizza and steaks), the vibe – with its long bar counter, comfy sofas and quirky decor (a BMW bike and a giant golden cow's head hanging on exposed brick walls) – is more nightclub.

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, full text search, government statistician, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, prediction markets, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, Teledyne, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

Cheaper and more powerful computers were transforming Bayesian searches from mathematical and analytical problems to algorithms for software programs. Stone’s book became a classic, important for the military, the Coast Guard, fishermen, police, oil explorers, and others. While Stone was writing his book, the United States agreed to help Egypt clear the Suez Canal of unexploded ammunition from the Yom Kippur war with Israel in 1973. The explosives made dredging dangerous. Using the SEPs developed in Palomares, it was possible to measure the search effectiveness to get the probability that, if a bomb had been there, it would have been spotted. But how could anyone estimate the number of bombs remaining in the canal when no one knew how many were there to begin with?

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Computing became “a piece of cake,” Richardson reported, but it proved impossible to explain the system to hardened ordinance-disposal specialists with missing fingers. In the end, no one talked about Bayes at Suez. Up to this point, postwar Bayes had searched only for stationary objects like bombs in a canal, or H-bombs and submarines on the ocean floor. Technically, these were simple problems. But shortly after the Suez Canal was cleared and Theory of Optimal Search was published, intensive efforts were made to adapt Bayesian methods to moving targets: civilian boats adrift in predictable currents and winds. The technology was a perfect match for U.S. Coast Guard rescue coordinators like Joseph Discenza, whose job in the late 1960s was to answer the telephone when someone called saying, “My husband went out fishing with my son, and they’re not back.”15 After checking area ports of call for the boat, he used a Coast Guard Search and Rescue Manual to estimate by hand the target’s location and its probable drift.

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., 198–99, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204–5, 207, 209 Strategic Air Command, 119–20, 123, 124–25, 125–26, 126–27, 182–83, 194–95 strokes, 226–27, 244 subjectivity: Bayes’ rule and, generally, ix, x, 8 belief and, 51–52 business and, 142, 145–46, 150, 151 Enigma code and, 67–68 frequentism and, 104, 129 gambling and, 185 information and, 103 insurance and, 44–45, 93 inverse probability and, 36, 37 location and, 185–86, 195, 204–5, 206–8 nuclear energy and, 180 nuclear weapons and, 185–86, 195 priors and, 129, 178 probability and, 36, 37, 50, 51–52, 103, 104–5, 106, 145 Raiffa and, 144–45 reason and, 35–36 statistics and, 50, 103, 104–5, 106, 220 submarines and, 206–8 Tukey and, 169, 173 U.S. Coast Guard and, 204–5 utility and, 103. See also belief intuition submarines: for location, 193, 194 location of, x, 3, 182, 196–203, 206–8 silencing, 141. See also U-boats Suez Canal, 203–4 Sulzberger, Arthur, 154 supernova 1987A, 238 Swinburne, Richard, 177 Swirles, Bertha, 54 Tanner, Martin A., 220–21 Tanur, Judith, 174 Taylor, Barbara L., 230 Teledyne Energy Systems, 215 telephone systems, x, 40–42 Teller, Augusta, 223 Teller, Edward, 165, 223 terminology, xi, 8, 129–30 terrorism, 241–42, 247 thinking, 248–51.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Neil Armstrong, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Suez canal 1869

He was to live with his uncle Alfred, who then ran a large crockery shop in the center of New Haven. So William was seen off from the port of Colombo on one of the regular P & O liners that made the unendurably lengthy passage between Bombay and London—via (this being in 1848, long before the completion of the Suez Canal) the long seas around the Cape of Good Hope. He later admitted to vividly erotic recollections from the voyage. In particular he remembered being “fiercely attracted” to a young English girl he met aboard ship. He seems not to have been warned that long tropical days and nights at sea—combined with the slow, rocking motion of the swell and the tendency for women to wear short, light cotton dresses and for bartenders to offer exotic drinks—could very well, in those days as well as these, lead to romance, particularly when one or even both sets of parents were absent.

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These men swiftly turned the amateur dabbler and dilettante into a serious philological scholar. Murray was introduced into membership of the august and exclusive Philological Society—no mean achievement for a young man who, it must be recalled, had left school at fourteen and had not thus far attended a university. By 1869 he was on the society’s council. In 1873—having left the bank and gone back to teaching (at Mill Hill School)—he published The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland: It was a work that was to gild and solidify his reputation to the point of wide admiration (and to win him the invitation to contribute an essay on the history of the English language for the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica).

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Furnivall’s reports to the society became shorter and shorter, his sculling expeditions with waitresses from the ABC longer and longer. In 1868 the Athenaeum, the journal that most closely followed the progress of the work, told its London readers that “the general belief is, the project will not be carried out.” But it did not die. James Murray, it will be remembered, had been a member of the Philological Society since 1869. He had already made a name for himself with publications (on Scottish dialect), with huge editing tasks (of Scottish poetry), and with noble but unfinished projects (such as a planned work on the declension of German nouns). He had left the Chartered Bank of India and had resumed his beloved teaching, this time at the distinguished London public school Mill Hill.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

The Japanese armed forces ran riot in the Pacific for the next six months, taking Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma, while threatening Australia and India. In the Atlantic, German U-boats sank numerous American ships within sight of the East Coast (indeed, they often used the lights along the shore to silhouette their victims until blackout regulations were implemented). In North Africa, German troops pushed British forces back toward the Suez Canal, vital both to holding the Mediterranean and to denying Middle East oil to the Nazis. In the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht plunged ever deeper into Russia. The huge manpower reserves of the United States, Russia, and the British Empire supplied all the military personnel that was necessary. But if the United States and its hard-pressed Allies were to win the war, this country would have to become indeed the arsenal of democracy.

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in New York there is a custom: Fraser’s Magazine, May 1869. 210 Daniel says up: Lane, Commodore Vanderbilt, p. 236. the Commodore’s word: Smith, Twenty Years, p. 119. It has been much the fashion: Harper’s Weekly, March 5, 1859. a Gaetulian lion: Fraser’s Magazine, May 1869. the brute force: Adams and Adams, Chapters of Erie, p. 6. a Tammany healot: Stedman, New York Stock Exchange, p. 200. Since they were forbidden: Ibid p. 202. If this printing press: Croffut, American Procession, p. 91. observed a squad: Fowler, Ten Years in Wall Street, p. 502. flocked to Albany: Fraser’s Magazine, May 1869. the letter of the law: Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Oct. 31, 1868.

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Finally there was an institution on Wall Street large enough and powerful enough to act as an effective regulator. Jay Gould quickly found out that he had no choice but to comply if there was to be a decent market for Erie securities, and he registered the company’s stock and bonds on September 13, 1869. It was just a start, of course. James K. Medbery, in his Men and Mysteries of Wall Street in 1870, knew what was at stake. “It remains for the brokers of the Stock Exchange,” he wrote, “to decide whether they will seek the petty profits of a speculation marred by grave faults, or will cast their influence still farther and with more strenuous emphasis against the encroachment of the cliques.

The Planets by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, Colonization of Mars, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Suez canal 1869, Thales of Miletus

The so-called “Face on Mars,” a topographical feature widely perceived to resemble a human face, appeared in Viking orbiter photos from 1976. Several media promulgated the suggestion that the face was an alien artifact, until subsequent imaging by the Mars Global Surveyor destroyed the illusion. Giovanni Schiaparelli found what he called canali on Mars in 1877, eight years after the completion of the Suez Canal. Schiaparelli, trained as a hydraulic engineer, thought the straight lines no more the product of artificial intelligence than the English Channel, but later changed his mind. When Schiaparelli’s sight failed, Percival Lowell took over observations—and interpretations—of the canals. Johannes Kepler first imagined two moons for Mars in 1610, but the moons were not seen until August 1877, when Asaph Hall, working at the U.S.

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Although the immortal Vulcan had been born lame and ever walked with a limp, Leverrier insisted his Vulcan would hasten around its orbit at quadruple Mercury’s speed, and transit the Sun at least twice a year. But all attempts to observe those predicted transits failed. Astronomers next sought Vulcan in the darkened daytime skies around the Sun during the total solar eclipse of July 1860, and again at the August 1869 eclipse. Enough skepticism had developed by then, after ten fruitless years of hunting, to make astronomer Christian Peters in America scoff, “I will not bother to search for Leverrier’s mythical birds.” “Mercury was the god of thieves,” quipped French observer Camille Flammarion. “His companion steals away like an anonymous assassin.”

The River at the Centre of the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, Deng Xiaoping, Great Leap Forward, Khartoum Gordon, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, placebo effect, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route

The Chinese monopoly – until that time broken only by Japan, Formosa and some enterprising Javans – was now ripped asunder. The Yangtze treaty ports – Jiujiang down below me here, and Hankou just a day's sailing upstream – continued to be important bases for tea sales only for another few years. By the time the Suez Canal was opened to traffic in 1869, it made sound commercial sense for Europe to buy all its teas from India. They were cheaper, of better quality, and they were rushed to the London markets with dispatch. From henceforth what was called in the drawing room ‘China tea' was to be a product of the tea industry of the Indian Empire, and all profit was to be made by the English traders and all taxes paid to the English Crown.

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., 177 Rustomjee, Heerjeebhoy, 177 Sailing Through China (Theroux), 408 Salween River, 364, 373, 393 Sampans (small boats), 47, 300, 306 Sand Pebbles, The (McKenna), 286, 410 Sandouping, 229, 231, 232–3, 245 Sanxia, 169 Satellite communications, 309–10 Savage, John L, 227, 229 Schistosomes, 195 Science and Civilisation in China (Needham), 410 Second Opium War, 204 Seeds of Change (Hobhouse), 412 Sexual morals, 145–6, 320, 332, 334–5, 378 Sexually transmitted diseases, 334–5 Shadwell, Charles, 50 Shamanism, 329, 367, 406 Shanghai Club, 36, 75, 84 Shanghai Down Express, 12 Shashi, 244 Shen-nung, Emperor, 363 Shennong Stream, 289, 290, 291 Shenyang, 216 Shigatse, 401 Shigu, 3–4, 20, 359, 362, 365, 373 Shimantan Dam, 240 Ship locks, 255–6 Shipai, 232 Shippee, David, 354, 358 Shippee, Margit, 355 Shipwrecks, 44–5 Shun, Emperor, 363 Shutung (ship), 269 Sichuan Basin, 225, 237, 375 Sichuan Corporation for International Cultural Development, 371 Sichuan province, 213, 226, 295, 297, 313, 314, 371, 377 Signal stations, 272–3,299–300 Sikhs, 72, 76 Sikkim 383 Silk industry, 123, 283 Silk Road, 313 Single Pebble, A (Hersey), 230, 254, 408 Singsong girls, 139–40 Sixteen Points for the Cultural Revolution, 201 Smedley, Agnes, 215 Snowmelts, 151, 153, 158 Soochow Creek, 72 Sourcewaters, 349–53, 404–6 South China Sea, 54 South Manchurian Railway, 129 Space programme, 309–10 Sperling, E., 134 Spratly Islands, 53 Standard Guide Book to Shanghai, 412 Star TV, 309 Steepness, 344, 349 Stilwell, ‘Vinegar Joe’, 287 Su, Mr, 67–9 Subways, 81 Suez Canal, 179 Sui dynasty, 100 Suicides, 319–20, 332 Suifu, 295 Sun Yat-sen, 51, 125, 211, 215, 225, 228 Sun Ziming, 330 Sung dynasty, 100 Swimmers, 194–203 ‘Swimming' (poem), 218, 231 Szechuan province, 284 Taco Bell, 213 Tactical Pilot Charts (TPCs), 30–31, 409 Taipan (company chief), 63, 65, 75, 86, 89 Taiping Rebellion, 121n, 134n, 142 Taipings, 121 Taipingxi, 232 Tang dynasty, 100, 114, 254, 330 Tang, Mr, 370–71, 374, 396, 397, 400 Tanggula Range, 398, 399, 405 Tanggula township, 402–3 Tannu-Tuva, 381 Taoists, 224, 330, 338–9, 341 Taotai (city official) 597183 TCBY store, 212–13 Tea clippers, 175, 205 Tea industry, 166–7, 170, 173–86, 380–81 Tea-making process, 181–2 Tectonics, 367 Telegraph cable, 58n Television, 309 Tempe, Arizona, 116 Ten thousand li Yangtze (painting), 10, 14–23 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 48 Theacea plants, 174 Theroux, Paul, 408 Thistle and the Jade, The (Keswick), 412 Three Gorges, 25, 26, 29, 97, 225, 226n, 228, 235, 243–4, 266, 287–9, 345, 366 Three Gorges Dam, 19, 164, 169, 219, 223, 225, 226–46, 249–53, 255, 257–62, 276–7, 371 Three Gorges Hotel, 247–8 Three Gorges Project Corporation, 249, 259 Through the Yangtze Gorges or, Trade and Travel in Western China (Little), 411 Tiananmen Square, 235, 239, 379 Tianjin, 131 Tibet, 322, 356, 369–70, 373–6, 379–407 Tibetan foothills, 303 Tibetan people, 278–9, 322–3, 325, 383–91 Tibetan Plateau, 150, 225, 295, 345, 351, 382, 396, 406 Tides, 124–5, 160 Tientsin, 95 Tiger Leaping Gorge, 327, 330, 346–9, 356, 366 Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, 132, 134 Tolley, Admiral Kemp, 410–11 Tongtian He, 345, 350–52, 354 Topographical maps, 30–31 Trackers, 267, 268, 277, 279, 289–90 Travel Survival Guide to China, 409 Treaty of Nanking, 142–5, 270 Trobriand Islanders, 334 Tsampa (Tibetan food), 380, 396 Tsingtao beer, 220, 311 Tuotuo stream, 322, 340–41, 374 Tuotuoheyan, 403, 405 Tuotuoheyan bridge, 404, 406–7 U.S.

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Since the 1850s Jardines and other foreign firms doing business in China had suggested building railways. It was part of the mood of the moment: Britain had started its own first commercial train service back in 1825, and railways now crisscrossed the island from Cornwall to Cromarty. In America, too, tracks were being laid as fast as the Pennsylvania steel mills could forge them. And yet by 1869, the year when thousands of labourers – Chinese labourers, no less – brought the Central Pacific metals to Utah and spiked them together with the rails from the Union Pacific in Omaha, and so knitted the country into one – by that same year not one single mile of railway had been laid in China. India was at the same time tottering under the weight of iron and brass; but China was still a nation of post roads and canals and bucolic inefficiency.

1948. A Soldier's Tale – the Bloody Road to Jerusalem by Uri Avnery, Christopher Costello

invisible hand, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Yom Kippur War

Second printing in June 1954 1953 12 December: Uri Avnery made an honorary citizen of the village of Abu-Ghosh near Jerusalem in recognition of his part in preventing the expulsion of the Palestinian inhabitants of the village 1956 29 November: Suez Campaign. In co-ordination with Britain and France, Israeli Army captures most of Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, to pressurize Egypt to reverse nationalization of Suez Canal. Israeli Army withdraws in January 1957 under US pressure “Semitic Action” founded by Uri Avnery and a number of intellectuals. Its program “The Hebrew manifesto” supports the founding of a Palestinian state next to Israel and proposes a Great Semitic Union of all the states of the Middle East 1959 Secret foundation of “Palestinian Liberation Committee,” soon renamed “Fatah” (meaning “conquest,” a reverse acronym of “Harakat Al-Tahrir Al-Watani Al-Filastini” – “the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine”) by Yasser Arafat and others 1964 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) founded with aim of destroying Israel 1965 Left-wing political party “Ha-olam Hazeh – Koah Hadash” founded Uri Avnery elected to Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) to represent the recently founded party.

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Israeli Army conquers Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, Jordanian-controlled areas West of Jordan River (West Bank), and Golan Heights, after Egyptian government forces expel UN observers from Israeli-Egyptian border and block Israeli shipping through Red Sea 22 November: UN Security Resolution 242 calls for Israeli withdrawal and peace settlement 1973 6 October: Start of “Yom Kippur War” (October War). Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat launches surprise attack on Israeli Army along Suez Canal on Jewish Day of Atonement, and Syria attacks Golan Heights. Israeli Army initially under threat but finally gains upper hand. Though a military defeat for Sadat, the war is a political success, paving the way for the first negotiations with Israel 1974 First secret contacts between Uri Avnery and official representatives of the PLO in London 1975 Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace founded 1977 19 November: Surprise visit to Israel by Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, opens new stage in relations between Israel and its neighbor.

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, article 189–90 honorary citizenship 381, 383 In the Fields of the Philistines ix–xiii, xiv, 381 joins HISH 13–16 letter to Elieser Rachmilevitch 177–80 meets Yasser Arafat 383 negotiates with PLO 382 The Other Side of the Coin xiii–xvi, 381 poetry 357–8 publications 381 as radio operator 59–62, 69–70 squad leader 190–4 visits Rachel 16–19 words to parents 125–6 wounded 92, 201, 202–7 Bab al-Wad 41, 45–6, 47, 48, 52–3, 372n Balfour Declaration 10, 371n, 380 Bamaavak xiii, 15, 371n Barsky, Issar 53, 81 Basel Program 379 Bedouins 155, 156, 157, 374n Be’er Tuvia 79–81, 130 Begin, Menachem 382 Beirut 383 Beit Affa 98, 100, 114–20, 120–3, 133, 136 Beit Daras 79–82, 83, 93, 98, 101, 108, 131, 133, 141 Beit Jibrin 120 Beit Jiz 34, 47, 48, 53 Beit Mahsir 45, 43 Beit Nabala 11 Beit Tima 182 Bendarski, Abraham 50, 118 Ben-Gurion, David xv, 53, 54, 213 Ben-Moshe, Moshe 101, 190 Ben-Shemen 11 Ben-Zion, battalion medic 122 Boas five 30–41 Borochin, Matitjahu 93 Bren carriers 116, 127, 374n brigade bulletin 107–8 British, the 247, 274–5 Balfour Declaration 10, 371n, 380 Deir Muheisin 40 Mandate for rule in Palestine 4, 371n, 372n, 380, 381 university boycott 385 Brotzki, Menachem 63–5, 67, 172, 190 Bruk, Zvi 114, 198 Bulli see Bulmann, Chaim bully beef 372n Bulmann, Chaim 25, 35, 38, 39, 42, 47, 51, 55, 56, 183, 184 “Burma Road” to Jerusalem 53, 372n Burstein, Yaakov 25, 51, 55, 183 Bush, George W. 385 Cairo Agreement 383 Calabush, the 77–8, 373n Cameri Theater 41, 89, 372n Camp Sarafand 88, 89, 373n Cassiopeia 95, 96, 97, 98 Castel 43, 187, 372n ceasefire 69–72, 82, 123–5, 142, 381 breaking of 93, 181–3 Chalek 95 Change and Reform Party 384 chocolate 206–7 Cholon 10, 11 Cohen, Ezra 47, 55, 59, 63 Cohen, Shalom 36, 63, 67, 71, 72, 86, 87, 92, 123, 149, 158, 159, 161–2, 190, 195, 196, 197, 199, 216, 219, 220 Czertenko, Czera (Tzvi Tzur) 81, 99, 109, 373n Dalugi, Danni 81 Davidsohn, Me’irke 127, 134, 157 Death March 28–9 Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (Oslo Accords) 383 Deir Muheisin 30–41, 42, 47, 48, 52, 56, 85, 140, 171, 187 Deir Mussah 146 Deir Yassin 4, 44, 372n, 381 Der Judenstaat (Herzl) 379 deserters 69 Deutscher, Isaac 2 Dreyfus affair 2, 379 Dromi, Asher 73, 74, 87, 92, 109, 116 Dudik 167 Egypt 2, 11, 30, 72, 197, 373n, 381, 382 Ekron 88, 373n election, 1949: 212–16 Eli 145–8, 214 Elimelech 84 Elisha 65–7 Ephraim, the driver 147 Eretz Israel 371n see also Israel, State of Eretz Yisrael Hatz’ira 389 Etzel see Irgun, the Europe anti-semitism in 2–3 nationalist movements in 2–3 pre-Zionist movements 379 refugees from 10 European Union xv, 385 Exodus affair 10, 370n Faluja 124, 191, 222 Farouk, King of Egypt 373n Fatah 381, 385 Fatima, Arab woman 221 Fatima, fantasy girl 94 Fatima, the dog 145–8 Fatima, the jeep 85 Fayad, Salam 385 Feinstein, Miriam 151 Feit, Dov 69, 87, 111 Fellaheen 87, 163, 167, 373n Fingermann, Jerachmiel (Jerach) 67, 71, 72–5, 79, 81 Finjan 372n Finkel, David 114 First World War 380 food 38, 42, 56, 57 France xv, 2 Friedmann, Benjamin 38, 40, 79, 121, 122 Gafni, Shraga 81 Galili, Israel 136, 374n Gal’on 59, 120, 131, 136 Gan-Yavne (Yavne) 69, 72, 75, 127, 129, 132 Gat 59, 120, 131, 144, 152, 157 Gaza Strip 381, 382, 383, 385 Gaza-Jericho agreement 383 Gedera 68, 159, 210–11, 213–14 Germany xv, 1, 2 “Givati”, Shimon see Avidan, Shimon Givati brigade 58, 67, 68, 88, 107–8, 218 Glückmann, Freddy 111 Golan Heights 382 Gossek, Israel 56, 59, 64, 72, 75, 94, 97 Greimann, Shlomo 25, 28, 31, 36, 37, 38, 49 Grisha, squad leader 21 Gush Etzion 4, 370n Gush Shalom 383, 384, 390 Haaretz x, xii Hadad, driver 94, 96, 97, 154 Haganah, the 10, 11, 136, 156, 165, 177, 371n, 374n Hamas 384, 385 Hamas Islamic Brotherhood 383 Haniyeh, Ismail 384, 385 Haolam Hazeh 381, 383, 389 Ha-olam Hazeh – Koah Hadash 382 Harel brigade 45, 88 HaShiloni, Ahijah 94, 110, 115, 152, 154, 155 Hatta 94–5, 98, 114, 124, 133 Heller, Yitzhak 29 Herzl, Theodor 379 Hill 69: 78, 81–2, 102, 130, 131 Hill 105: 108–12 HISH 12, 187, 371n, 381 home 148–50 HQ 137–40, 185 Huber, Reuven 36, 39, 64, 75, 86, 96, 97, 98, 104, 106, 111, 151, 155, 156 Hulda 26, 29, 30, 31, 40, 41, 45, 48, 49, 56, 86, 141, 186, 217, 372n Huleiqat 182, 183–6 al-Husseini, Haj Amin 10, 221, 371n Husseini, Jamal 9, 370n Ibdis 98–108, 114, 133–5 Ibn Darwish, Hassan 164–9 Idnibah 120 infantry, the 84, 189–90 Intifada 383, 384 Iraq 11 Iraq al-Manshiyya 143, 144, 154, 194 Iraq Suweidan 58, 59–65, 98, 99–100, 133, 135, 188–9, 190, 373n Irgun, the 4, 9, 69, 74, 370n, 372n, 380, 381, 389 Isdud 67, 69, 72–7, 78, 111, 116, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 170, 174, 177, 182, 183, 190, 214 Islamic Jihad 382 Israel, State of founding 55, 381 recognized 383 state declared 53 war with Lebanon 385 Israel Defense Forces 53, 373n, 381, 382, 384 Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace 382 Itshe, Explosives Officer 208 Itzik 214 Jaakobi 72 Jaari, Menasheh see Menashke Jaffa 25 Jaladiyya 97 Jassir 94, 95, 97, 152, 160, 162, 169 Jehoshua 194 Jerach 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81 Jerucham, machine gun operator 90, 91, 92, 101 Jerusalem 4, 11, 24, 187, 219, 380, 383 convoy to 41–4 Greater Jerusalem Area 380 see also Deir Yassin; Operation Maccabi Jewish Colonization Operation (JCO) 379 Jewish National Fund (JNF) 379 Jocheved 92, 158, 219 Jordan 384 Joseph, the driver 121–2 Joseph of the Palmach 33, 40, 45 Josh, company commander 69, 74, 182 Joske, squad leader 26, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 163 Julis 59, 109–11, 124, 134, 136 Kafr Qassem 383 Kalkess, David 111 Kamin, Zalman 122 Karatiyya 94–7, 98, 114, 123, 124–5, 133 Kascher, Noam 93 Kawkaba 182, 188 keffiyeh 164, 374n Keil, Elijahu 63, 82 Kfar Menachem 86, 162 Kfar Warburg 68, 133 Kibbutz Gal’on 59, 120, 131 Kibbutz Gat 59, 120, 131, 144, 152, 157 Kibbutz Hulda 53, 216, 372n Kibbutz Kfar Menachem 120 Kibbutz Naan 26, 28, 29, 31 Kibbutz Negba see Negba Kibbutz Nitzanim 78, 127, 373n Kibbutz Yavne 67, 68, 213 Kimpinski, Moshe 152–3, 165, 166–9 Kirschenbaum, Dov 89, 91, 92 Kochava 182, 188 Kochmann, Shlomo 101 Kol Israel 372n Kolker, Levy 102 Kotzer, Aryeh 53, 56, 75, 78, 115–16, 117, 118, 119, 176, 198 Kovner, Abba 69, 142 Kreismann, Sali 85 Langmann, Aryeh 197, 201, 202–3 Laskov, Chaim 26, 371n Lasky, Elieser 151–2, 153, 156 Latrun 42, 45–53, 47–8, 190, 220, 372n League of Nations Mandate for British rule in Palestine 380, 381 Lebanon 9, 383, 385 Lebertov, Israel 158, 172 Lehi, the 4, 9, 370n, 380 Levkovitz, Janek 25, 67, 79–80, 119, 167 Levkovitz, Yaakov 82 Likud Party 383 Little Yakov 48 Luger 159, 197, 374n Majdal 130, 184 Makovsky, Ephraim 34, 69, 87–8, 101, 190 Malishewitz, Yaakov 160–2 Mandler, Albert 87, 95–6, 216 Mecca agreement 385 Melech, the driver 85 Melnowitzer, Tzvi 116 Menashke 145–8, 172–6 “Meshi” 183 Milstein, Miriam 151 Mirah 59 Mishka 213, 214, 215 Molotov cocktails 67, 68, 213 Moshe, one-legged hero 207–10 motorized company 84–5, 107 Mukhtar 35, 372n Muralis 120 Na’ana 27 Nahariya 370n Napoleons, the 103 National Military Organization see Irgun, the nationalist movements 2–3 Nebi Musa 35–6, 372n Negba 71, 98–108, 112, 114, 133–5 Negev, the 10, 11, 58, 120, 124–5, 143, 152, 160, 181–2, 374n resupply expedition 151–8 Negev Animals 151, 152, 374n Negev brigade 69, 156 Ness Ziona 211 Neuhaus,Yitzhak 111 Nobel Peace Prize 382, 383 alternative 390 October War (Yom Kippur War) 373n, 382 Olmert, Ehud 384, 385 Operation Homat Magen 384 Operation Maccabi 45–53, 149, 198 Operation Nachshon 24–41, 43, 44, 46, 94, 140, 149, 171, 186–9, 198 Oslo Accords 383 Ostermann, Helmut see Avnery, Uri Ostermann, Josef see Avnery, Uri Palestine Mandate for British rule in 4, 371n, 372n, 380, 381 UN Partition Resolution 3–4, 9–13, 380, 382 Palestinian Authority (PA) 383 Palestinian Liberation Committee 381 Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) 382, 383, 384 Palmach, the 12, 69, 83, 84, 88, 89–90, 98, 131, 133, 154, 155, 371n parents 125–6, 177 Peres, Shimon 383 Peretz 47 PIAT 66, 101, 131, 373n Pole Star 32, 95 Poltruk, Chaim 114, 115, 151 Position 105: 108–12, 135–6 Position 113: 133 Potruk, Shaul 93, 115, 118 Primus 57, 372n prisoners 108, 162–5, 185 Pulvermacher, Avraham 176 Pundik, Yitzhak 177 al-Qawuqji, Fawzi 45, 57, 372n Qubab 54–7, 77, 154 Qubeiba 152, 183 Rabin, Yitzhak 383 Rachel 17, 390 Rachmilevitch, Elieser 177–80 Rachmilevitch, Yaakov 28, 33, 36, 49, 73, 74, 75, 177–80 Rafael, battalion medic 122, 204 Rafi 163–5, 166–9 rain 195–6 Ramat Aharon 371n Ramle 372n Rechtmann, Aviva 92 Rechtmann, Ovadia 50, 79, 80, 90, 91, 92, 93, 99, 101–2 Regenstreif, Freddy (Ephraim) 39, 75, 110, 111, 150, 159 Rehovot 41, 129, 130, 158, 211, 218, 371n Rice, Condoleeza 385 Rishon LeZion 212 roll call 21–3, 24–5 Rosenblatt, Micki 64, 75, 97, 111 Rotholz, Nehemiah 102 Rubke, jeep driver 167 Russia 385 sabra 375n al-Sadat, Anwar 382 Salomon 72 Samson’s Foxes 108, 113–14, 189, 216, 218, 373n, 389 Saudi Arabia 385 Sawafir 93, 98, 103, 110, 119, 125 Schack, Jack 198–200 Schiller, Johann von 198 Schwuk 115 Security Wall 384 Segal, Aryeh 100 Segal, Joseph 119 “Semitic Action” 381 Sergei brigade 88 Shaar Hagai 42–3, 372n Shaj 64, 372n Shalit, Gilad 385 Shamir, Moshe 89 Shani, David 63, 79, 100, 102, 104, 105–6, 172, 176, 181, 183 Sharon, Ariel 383, 384 Shatzky, Moshe 25, 28, 36, 43, 51, 75 Shertok, Moshe 53, 372n Shimon, squad leader 21, 93 Shmuel, the company commander 172–4 Shmuel, the squad leader 147, 148 Shmueli, Nachman 34, 42, 43, 49, 50, 56, 63 Shmulik, squad leader 74, 165 Siff, Joseph 79, 101 Silbermann,Jochanan 143–5, 150, 157 Sinai Peninsula 381, 382 Six Day War 382 sock hats 13, 15–16, 17, 140, 188, 217 soldiers on the front 137–40 and home 148–50 humor 158–60 life of 18–20 post-war plans 160–2 Spack, Aryeh 22, 24–5, 27, 30, 33, 35, 38, 46, 83, 92–3, 94, 97–8, 110, 123, 151 Spitfires 107, 373n Spitz, Asriel 34, 47, 50, 114 squad leader course 170–80, 186–9 squad leaders 20–1 stars, navigation by 95–6 Steinschneider, Amnon 59, 64, 71, 110–11 Sten gun 220, 372n Stern, Avraham 370n Stern Gang see Lehi, the Suez Campaign 381 Syria 9, 11, 372n, 382 tank, the 67 Tel Aviv 11, 12, 24, 44–5, 77, 161, assault on 126–36 Egyptian advance toward 67 Tel al-Safi 119–20, 162 Ten Plagues, the 185 Tnuva cheese 42, 372n training camp 13–16, 17–18 Transjordan 11, 371n, 384 Treblov, Ovadia 50 United Nations 3, 381 Annapolis Conference 385 General Assembly 1, 9 Observers 382 Partition Resolution 1, 3–4, 9–12, 82, 380, 382 Security Resolution 242: 382 United States of America 385 Uzi 225–6, 242 Valley of Peace Initiative 386 Vanzover, Moshe 114, 118, 119 Velichkovski, Yaakov 114, 119, 122, 183 veterans, the 196–200 Vickers 184, 185, 374n volunteers, foreign 191–4 Waadjah, Joseph 81 Wadi 372n Wadi Sarar 29, 30, 41 Wantzover, Moshe 198 Wassermann, “Musa” 183 Weisl, Wolfgang von 103 West Bank 382, 383, 384 World Zionist Organization 379 wounded, the 76, 120–3 Yadin,Yigael 136, 374n Yair see Stern, Avraham Yechiel, deputy commander 34, 39 Yehuda 31, 43 Yekkes 371n Yiftach brigade 88 Yishuv 11–12, 371n Yitzhak, Explosives Officer 207–8 Yitzhak, radio operator 70–1 Yom Kippur War (October War) 373n, 382 Yom Yom x, xii Zakariyya 120, 162, 183 Zeira, Mordechai 150, 374n Zionism 370n Zionist movement 3 Zionist Organization 379 Index: Part Two The Other Side of the Coin Abu Salem, Attalla Abdallah 281–3 Abu-Shubak 323 Acre 264, 376n Addi, company commander 324 Agal, the 244, 247, 281, 375n All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque) 228 Altalena affair 378n Amos 230–2 Avnery, Uri in the Irgun 259–75 publications 264, 313, 345–6 “The Soldier” 269 squad leader 253 visits family 310–13 visits Tel Aviv 310–18, 349–51, 362 wounded 226–8, 234–5, 276–8, 289–91, 319–20, 333, 335–6, 358–9 Bambi 337, 342–3, 344 Barchaba 342, 360 Begin, Menachem 275, 376n Beit Dagon 229, 375n Beit Jamal 292 Beit Jibrin 251–2 Beit Sarah 321 Ben-Gurion, David 245, 275, 312 Boby, company commander 329, 331 British, the Mandate for rule in Palestine 281, 376n White Paper, the 263, 268, 376n ceasefire 297 Chinaman, the 280, 341 Chudad 281, 293, 362 cicadas 235–6 cognac 326–7 Cohn, the farmer 249 cows 285–8 Daba 322, 324, 327, 329, 330, 331 Dany 334 Deir Yassin 272, 376n Dudu, the scout 297–8 Effendi 245, 248, 261, 375n Egypt 248, 251–2, 254, 341, 377n Ehud, Irgun company commander 271 Eli 294 Eretz Israel see Israel, State of Etzel see Irgun, the Faluja 253 Farouk 237–8 Fat Shmuel 280–1, 305–6 Fellaheen 240, 242, 244, 245, 286, 287, 303, 306, 313, 315, 322, 323, 329 Fini 362–3, 368 food 338–9 France 269 Freud, S. 243 Friedmann, Benjamin 281 Germany 269, 320 goggles 284–8 Haganah, the 259, 261, 266, 268, 273, 274, 279, 376n, 381 Hatikva 215, 376n HISH 232, 271, 272, 274 Ibdis 234 Ibrahim 254–7 infantry, the 245 Iraqal-Madi 361, 365 Iraq Suweidan 251–2 Iraq-Sharkiah 321 Irgun, the 259–75, 376n, 378n Israel, company commander 320–1 Israel, State of founding 213–14, 278 Jaffa 256, 354 Jamus 238, 248, 250, 252, 253–7, 275, 284–5, 286–8, 293, 295–7, 299–303, 304–5, 309, 322–4, 329, 330, 337–41, 345–6, 349–54, 356, 360, 362 Jerusalem see Deir Yassim Jeshajahu 296 Jewish Brigade 343, 375n Joker 230, 231, 242–3, 244, 288, 305, 336–7, 340–1, 343, 345 Joram, Irgun group leader 262, 263, 264, 265, 269 Joshua 338 Joske, platoon leader 263, 265, 267 Karni, doctor 277–8 Kassit 316, 377n 322, 329, 373n Kebab 238, 239, 240, 273, 280, 285–6, 288, 303, 305–8, 322–8, 329–30, 331–2 keffiyeh 244, 247, 281, 306, 330, 375n Keren Kayemet LeIsrael (Jewish National Fund) 229, 230, 375n Kfar Saba 298 Kfar Vitkin 275, 376n Kibbutz Yavne 300 Latrun 236, 315 wounded Arab at 239–42 Lehi, the 271, 376n Levkovitz, Janek 350, 353–4 Luger 264–5, 325 Majdal 319, 341, 376n Masbaha 375n Masmiyya 240, 241 Mauser 264–5, 324–5 Moroccan recruits 349, 354–9 Mufti 375n Mukhtar 375n Mukhtar of Sukreir 244–5 Mundek 339–40, 342, 345 Musa, squad leader 235, 244, 296 Nachshe 229, 273, 275, 279, 285, 287 305, 307, 322–6, 328, 330, 336 Napoleon 281 National Military Organization see Irgun, the Negev, the 214, 341 Nehemia 286, 287–8, 294, 310, 325, 350, 353 Ness Ziona 310, 377n Nino 333 Palestine Mandate for British rule in 281, 376n Palmach, the 271, 274, 287 Pesach 246, 375n Pinchas 333 Position 125: 323, 333, 357 Primus 278 prisoners 239, 248–9, 303, 323, 331, 352 Rachel 226–7, 234–5, 258, 276–8, 290–1, 333, 335–6 radio, the 250–2, 253–7 Rashke, company commander 232–3 Rehovot 246, 249, 293, 322, 327, 362, 377n religion 302–3 Rishon LeZion 310, 350, 353, 377n Rivka 261–3 Romania 341, 343 Romano House Foxes 316–18 Sancho 229–33, 239, 242, 244–5, 246–7, 278, 279–80, 285, 287–8, 305, 307–8, 322, 325, 326–7, 329, 362–8 Schoschanah 231 Shifra 313–14 Shosho 225–6 Shulah 359–61 sleep 293 smells 319–20, 321 spirits 297 Srulik, Hanagah member 266, 268 Stern, Avraham 269, 271, 376n Stern Gang see Lehi, the Sukreir 244, 246, 247, 249 Suleiman 250–1 Syria 251 Tarzan 246, 248, 249, 275, 285, 286, 287, 305, 307–8, 322–4, 325, 331 Tel Aviv 310–18, 349–51, 362 Tucki 253, 255, 256 Ulcus 225–6 United Nations 302 Observers 283 Partition Resolution 271 Uzi 225–6, 242 Vickers 339 Wadi Nisnas 283 Wadi Sarar 241, 375n West Bank 377n, 382, 383, 384 White Paper, the 263, 268, 376n Yair see Stern, Avraham Yarkoni, Yaffa 377n Yarmouk, battle of 282, 377n Yishuv 259 Yom Kippur 338, 339, 378n Yucki 314–16, 318, 321 Zionist Youth 266–7 Zuzik 229, 230–3, 242, 243, 244, 246, 278, 279, 286, 288, 295, 303, 305, 306, 307, 324, 325–6, 328, 329–30, 331–2 About the Author Uri Avnery, Israeli journalist, writer, politician, and peace activist, was born Helmut Ostermann in Beckum, Germany, in 1923, emigrating with his parents to Palestine on Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

The gross tonnage of the Mauretania (1907) was forty-six times that of the Sirius (1838) but the horsepower of its engines was 219 times greater, so it was more than three times faster and crossed the Atlantic with a far larger cargo in nine and half days instead of sixteen.47 Ocean freight costs fell by more than a third from 1870 to 1910. It cost 8 shillings to send a ton of cotton goods by rail from Manchester to Liverpool, just 30 miles away, but only 30 shillings to ship the same goods a further 7,250 miles to Bombay. The cost of shipping cloth amounted to less than 1 per cent of the cost of the goods. The opening of the Suez Canal (1869) and the Panama Canal (1914) shrank the world still further, the former reducing the distance of the London–Bombay route by more than two-fifths, the latter cutting the cost of shipping from the East to the West Coast of the United States by a third.48 By the late 1860s, thanks to the introduction of gutta-percha coating, undersea cables could be laid and telegrams sent from London to Bombay or to Halifax.49 News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour.

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(tailors of Savile Row) 220–21, 220n population figures/density 4, 5, 10, 17, 20–21, 25, 26, 45, 105–6, 200, 200n, 218, 308 depopulation 12, 23, 25, 44 life expectancy 5, 10, 24, 147–8, 205, 208; in Africa 168, 171, 190–91 Muslims 290 young people 244 pornography 273, 274 Portugal 4, 9, 14, 202n China and 35 exploration, voyages of 33–5, 39, 53, 130 India and 34, 35, 39 Portuguese empire 97, 144, 176 Pottier, Eugène: ‘The Internationale’ 208 Priestley, Joseph 201 printing 27, 60 impact/spread of 60–63, 67, 77, 263 Islamic attitude to 68, 86 Pritchard, Jack 136 property rights 13, 97, 99, 111, 125, 152, 288 in British North American colonies 106–7, 106n, 109–12, 115–16, 117, 124–5, 138; headright system 111 John Locke on 111, 112 slaves as property 132, 135–6 in Spanish South American colonies 102, 113–14, 119, 124, 128 Protestantism 106, 107, 114, 259, 264 British North American colonies as Protestant 106, 114 in China 277–80, 282–8; radical sects 285–6 evangelical, in US 273–4 missionaries 263–4; in China 277–80, 282–3 Max Weber on 259, 260–64, 276, 283 see also Christianity Protestant work ethic see work ethic Prussia 144, 159, 214 Berlin 75–6, 86 the Enlightenment 76–9, 81 under Frederick the Great 71, 73–85 Islamic envoys in 86 political system 73, 80 Potsdam 81–8; Sanssouci palace 73–4, 79 religious toleration 76, 78 Silesia, invasion of 74–5 Prussian Academy of Science and Belle-Lettres 79, 80, 81 Prussian army 74–5, 81–2, 91 public health 147, 148, 177, 205 in French West Africa 171–2 see also health issues Puerto Rico 144 Punch 169 Quebec Act (1774) 116 Quesnay, François, on China 46 Quigley, Carroll 3, 297–8 his ‘Rhodes–Milner group’ theory 298n Tragedy and Hope … 298n racial issues in French West Africa 174–5 in German colonies 176, 177–8 interbreeding (miscegenation) 133–6; in French colonies (métissage) 164 in South America 119, 120, 125–6, 133, 135 in US 129, 133, 134–6, 137–9; Civil Rights movement 245; segregation 137–8, 177 racial theory see eugenics railways 170, 171, 204, 215, 218, 224 Reagan, Ronald 252 Reche, Otto 189 Redhouse, James 89 Reformation 9, 38, 60–62, 67, 259 see also Luther, Martin religious issues 3, 8, 17, 266–7 atheism 8, 289 Christianity see Christianity Freud on 270–71, 273 Islam see Islam science/technology and 67–8 Adam Smith on 276 religious toleration 76, 78, 114 religious tracts/publications 61–3 see also individual authors religious wars/conflict 9, 12, 38–9 French revolution as 151, 152, 153, 154 Islamic 71 Resmi Efendî, Ahmed 86–7 revolution 162–3, 164, 227–8, 244, 246, 251–2 by students/young people 245–9 see also individual revolutions Rhodes, Cecil 298n Ricardo, David, his comparative advantage doctrine 202, 202n Ricci, Matteo, SJ, in China 41 Richard II, King of England 23–4 Richard, Timothy 282 Richard of Wallingford 41 Richardson, Lewis Fry 301–2, 301n Rivera, Diego: The Arsenal (painting) 162n Roberts, Richard 200 Robespierre, Maximilien 156 Robins, Benjamin 83–4 New Principles of Gunnery 83 on rifled gun barrels 84 rock and roll/ popular music 230, 243–4, 246, 249–50, 273, 274 Rohrbach, Paul von 181 German Colonial Economics 176 Roman Catholicism see Catholicism Roman Empire 16–17, 296 Gibbon on 257–9, 291–2 Romania 251 Roosevelt, President Franklin Delano xxiv, 230 Rosa, Salvator: L’umana fragilatà (painting) 26 Rosenberg, Alfred 193 Ross, Ronald 169–70 Rothschild, Nathan 161 Roume, Ernest, Governor of French West Africa 170–71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 155, 156 Social Contract 78, 151–2 Royal Observatory, Greenwich 70 Royal Society of London 69–70, 80, 83, 84 Copley Medal 84 Ruiz-Linares, Andrés 133 Russia/Soviet Union 7, 83, 156, 303 economic growth 231–2 expansion of 144 exploration of 36 France and 160 Germany and 192, 194, 231–2: in Second World War 233–4 under Gorbachev 250 Japan and 226 legal system 244 Napoleon Bonaparte and 160 nationalism in 182, 227–8 US and 236; Cold War 236–9, 250 as a Western civilization 15 Russian army 234 Russian Revolution (1917–18) 182, 227–8 Russo-Japanese War (1904) 226 Safavid empire 9 St Alban’s Abbey 27, 41 Saint-Domingue (island) 160 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de: The Little Prince 90 Sandys, George 283 sanitation 23, 147, 179 see also health issues Schacht, Hjalmar 231 Schaudinn, Fritz 175–6 Schiller, Friedrich 77, 79 Schubert, Franz xxiii Schubert, Helmut 194 Schularick, Moritz xvii Schumpeter, Joseph 205 science/technology 7, 10–11, 12, 14, 50–95, 257, 287 advances in/spread of 41–2, 47, 57, 60–71, 216–18, 317–18; chronology of 65–6; as Eurocentric 67 astronomy 64, 65, 66; Islamic 68–9 ballistics 83–5 Chinese 11, 27–8 definition 13 in East Asia 4, 11 gravity, law of 70 Industrial Revolution see Industrial Revolution Islamic see Islamic science/technology in Israel 93–4 military 37, 41, 57, 65n, 233, 235–6 nuclear 94–5 optics 51–2, 64, 70 religious issues in 67–8 royal patronage of 70; by Frederick the Great 71, 79–80, 84 scientific institutions 69–70, 79, 89 scientific method 60, 64–5, 67, 70 collaborative 70 Scotland 263 England and 24, 105, 107, 213 Industrial Revolution 199 see also Britain Scott, Sarah 289 Second World War (1939–45) 192, 233–6 casualty figures 193; civilian 233, 234 causes of 233 Germany in 189–90, 191–5, 231–4; see also Hitler, Adolf Italy in 233–4 Japan in 233–5 Seven Years’ War (1756–63) 115, 116, 116n sexual revolution 246 Shakespeare, William 23, 62n, 324n Shark Island concentration camp, German South-West Africa 179–80 Sharp, Granville 133 Shaw, George Bernard, on Western medicine 148 Shays, Daniel 117 Sherrington, Charles 300 shipbuilding industry 22, 28–9, 37, 48 Sibutus, George 62 siege warfare 52, 54–7 Siegert, Johann Gottlieb Benjamin 121n Sierra Leone 168 silver, from South America 101–2 Singapore 240, 306–7 Singer sewing machines 216–18, 220 Sivasi Efendi 71 slave revolts 131–2, 136, 160 slavery/slave trade 97, 120, 125, 129–36 abolition of 129, 131, 132–3; in British colonies 177; in French colonies 163, 177 in Africa 176, 177 slaves as property 132, 135–6 in Spanish South American colonies 129, 130–32, 133, 135, 136 in US 129, 130, 132–3, 134–6 Smith, Adam 7, 78, 301 on China 19, 20, 46, 78 on religion 276 Theory of Moral Sentiments xxiv–xxv The Wealth of Nations 297 Smith, Abraham (English migrant to South Carolina) 103, 106, 111–12 Sobieski, Jan III, King of Poland 55–6 socialism 208–9 Sorokin, Pitrim 297 Soviet Union see Russia/Soviet Union Spain exploration, voyages of 35–6 France and 119 Spanish Civil War (1936–9) 231, 233 Spanish empire 144 in America see America, South, Spanish colonies in Spengler, Oswald: The Decline of the West 297 spice trade 33, 34, 36 Spinoza, Benedict (Baruch) xxiii, 65 Spurgeon, Charles Haddon 282 Stead, William T. 298n steam engines 70, 200, 204, 218 Stendhal (Henri Marie Beyle): The Red and the Black 162 Stevens, John Lloyd 298–9 Stevenson, Robert Louis xxvi Stott, George 282, 284 Strauss, Levi 241 Suez Canal 219 suffrage, male 210 in French colonies 163 sugar/sugar production 10, 45, 129, 131–2, 160 Suleiman the Magnificent 52–3, 52n, 56–7, 72 Sun Yat-sen 283 Switzerland 41, 159 syphilis 176 Taiping Rebellion, China 211, 279–90, 285 Takiyüddīn al-Rāsid (Taqi al-Din) 68–9 Taleb, Nassim 301 Tamani, Hüseyin Rifki 69 Tang Yi 286 Tanweer, Shehzad 291 tariffs see trade tariffs Tawney, R.

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In Bleak House (1852–3) Charles Dickens portrayed the Court of Chancery as a grotesquely inefficient hindrance to the resolution of property disputes, while in Little Dorrit (1855–7) the target of his satire was the ‘Circumlocution Office’, a government department dedicated to obstructing economic progress. Joint-stock companies remained illegal until the 1720 Bubble Act was repealed in 1824, while debtors’ prisons like the Marshalsea – so vividly depicted in Little Dorrit – continued to operate until the passage of the 1869 Bankruptcy Act. It is also worth remembering that much of the legislation passed by Victorian parliaments in connection with the textile industry was designed to limit the economic freedom of factory-owners, notably with respect to child labour. Britain differed significantly from other North-west European countries in two ways that make the Industrial Revolution intelligible.

Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide by Joshua S. Goldstein

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, blood diamond, business cycle, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Doomsday Clock, failed state, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of writing, invisible hand, land reform, long peace, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, selection bias, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Tobin tax, unemployed young men, Winter of Discontent, work culture , Y2K

The Suez War, 1956 At first, Hammarskjöld kept Bunche off the Middle East, but in 1956, during another Arab-Israeli war, the secretary-general put Bunche back on the job. Israel had invaded Egypt, after guerrilla attacks on Israel from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip. Two days later came a British-French invasion force to take control of the Suez Canal, which Egyptian president Nasser had recently nationalized. The crisis did not fit a typical Cold War pattern, since it split Britain and France from the United States. Israel had not yet developed close ties with the United States. Hammarskjöld “played a central role in getting the crisis under control.

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Hammarskjöld considered the alternative of charging “a country, or a group of countries, with the responsibility to provide independently for an international Force serving for the purposes determined by the United Nations.” But Hammarskjöld preferred that a force be responsible directly to the UN, with its commander “fully independent of the policies of one nation. . . .” The soldiers sent to the Suez Canal had ten days’ supply of food with them. How would the UN feed them after that, with no logistics machinery of its own? The solution was to buy food sitting on board seventeen ships that Egypt had disabled in the Canal at the start of the war to impede British mobility. “Identity cards in four languages had to be formulated. . . .

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The never-ending stream of tankers from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and other neighbors constitutes the vital artery of the world’s major economies, from Europe to America to China, and in return flow vast sums of money concentrated in a few hands in a conflictprone region. We will not follow the tankers to the rich countries, however, but peel off south of the Gulf and turn right for the Horn of Africa. This path takes us, along with the tens of thousands of ships using the Suez Canal each year, into the area haunted by Somali pirates. From small boats they board large ships, overpower the crew, and sail to the northern Somali shore where they hold the ships and crew for million-dollar ransom payments (which usually do arrive). This is not a civil war or even a political action; it is strictly business, capitalizing on Somalia’s weak government.

The Great Railroad Revolution by Christian Wolmar

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, accounting loophole / creative accounting, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, California high-speed rail, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cross-subsidies, Ford Model T, high-speed rail, intermodal, James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban sprawl, vertical integration

More practical and thorough than Plumbe, Whitney conceived of his plan for a transcontinental on a lengthy sea voyage in 1843, as he returned to the United States from China, where he had made his fortune. It was the apparently interminable nature of his journey across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans—for this was the era before the construction of the Suez Canal—that attracted Whitney to the idea of a transcontinental. He believed the railroad would become the corridor of exchange between Europe and Asia, placing America at the center of the world’s trade routes. Whitney was also an idealist who, like many early railroad promoters, saw the project as an opportunity for human improvement.

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There was, too, the excess of competitive zeal that saw, at one point, the ridiculous phenomenon of the two railroad companies grading parallel lines in order to maximize the land grants paid by the government. Nevertheless, the celebration to mark the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point, Utah Territory, in 1869 must be seen as one of the turning points of US history. In Chapters 6 and 7, the amazing exponential growth of the railroads during the rest of the nineteenth century is explored against the backdrop of their growing unpopularity. No community of any size in the United States could afford to be out of range of a locomotive’s whistle, and, by the end of the century, with a network encompassing more than two hundred thousand miles, very few were.

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A three-hundred-foot table positively “groaned with barbecued oxen, pork and beans in 50 gallon containers, bread baked in loaves ten feet long and two feet thick,” and there was even an enormous clam chowder.10 As railroad opening celebrations go, it was probably the grandest of them all before the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads in 1869. Indeed, the building of the Erie was, in a way, the start of the process that less than two decades later would see the completion of the first transcontinental. It marked a recognition that the railroad had come of age, demonstrating that it was able to cover huge distances through difficult terrain.

Ten Myths About Israel by Ilan Pappe

British Empire, disinformation, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, Suez canal 1869, WikiLeaks

The war began early in the morning of June 5 with an Israeli attack on the Egyptian air force, which nearly destroyed it. This was followed the same day with similar assaults on the air forces of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Israeli forces also invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula and in the next few days reached the Suez Canal, occupying the whole of the peninsula. The attack on the Jordanian air force triggered the Jordanian capture of a small UN zone between the two parts of Jerusalem. Within three days, after fierce fighting, the Israeli army had captured East Jerusalem (on June 7), and two days later they drove the Jordanian army out of the West Bank.

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In Germany, they publicly rejected the idea of a Jewish nation and proclaimed themselves “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” One of the German Reformists’ early acts was to remove from their prayer rituals any references to a return to “Eretz Israel” or the rebuilding of a state there. Similarly, already in 1869, American Reformists stated in one of their first conventions that the messianic aim of Israel [i.e. the Jewish people] is not the restoration of a Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a second separation from the nations of earth, but the union of the children of God in the confession of the unity of God, so as to realize the unity of all rational creatures, and their call to moral sanctification.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Although there is no clear turning point in the introduction of these innovations, one landmark date was in fact 1848, when the Peninsular and Oriental bought the first iron steamers for their Indian Ocean routes. In the 1830s an exchange of letters between Britain and India could take two years; by 1870, with the opening of the Suez Canal, a letter could reach Bombay in only one month. Dalhousie thus set in place the legal underpinnings of a unified state, with defined boundaries, and individual subjects on whom that state would impinge. He had substantially advanced, moreover, the technological infrastructure that would transform the everyday experience of both state and subjects in myriad ways.

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It was, of course, impossible to tie a tight cordon around European society, and servants, traders, and others both entered and lived in the areas intended for Europeans, and many sites – from government offices to educational institutions and asylums, commercial places, and the frequent Masonic temple – were places of defined and limited interaction between races. Beames was posted in 1869 to a small coastal town in Orissa. His description of ‘our small society’ suggests the make-up of the Revolt, the modern state, and colonized subjects, 1848–1885 111 European population after the revolt. He was the magistrate and collector (the chief official of the district). In addition, the English population included ‘a Joint Magistrate, a doctor, a Superintendent of police, an Engineer, a Harbour-master, and an Inspector of Telegraphs . . . also two police Assistants and a Deputy Magistrate’.

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In that imagined world, ‘Women’s intellects, untrammeled, devised such improvements as solar heat and air-machines; the population fully satisfied, there was no question of war; and men were kept in the zenana.’ The new norms of female behaviour helped draw new lines of social identity. One was that between the more and the less privileged. The opening lines of the popular Urdu novel Mir‘atu’l-’Arus (The Bride’s Mirror) of 1869 by Deputy Nazir Ahmad (1833–1912) set the tone, as a senior woman impatiently calls the recalcitrant daughter, Akbari, to come in from the street. The girl’s association with servants and the low-born is seen as a synecdoche for her general resistance to model behaviour. Akbari, like a similar daughter in a family influenced by the Brahmos or the Arya Samaj, was meant to behave differently from the lower classes.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

The attacking bombers suffered prohibitive losses as a result, forcing the United States to halt the attacks until long-range fighter escorts became available in early 1944.34 During the first days of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) attempted to provide much-needed support to the beleaguered Israeli ground forces along the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. But withering fire from Egyptian and Syrian surface-to-air missiles and air-defense guns forced the IAF to curtail that mission.35 Once an air force controls the skies, it can pursue three power-projection missions in support of army units fighting on the ground. In a close air support role, an air force flies above the battlefield and provides direct tactical support to friendly ground forces operating below.

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The first case was a dispute in 1898 between the United Kingdom and France over control of Fashoda, a strategically important fort at the headwaters of Africa’s Nile River.36 The United Kingdom warned France not to attempt to conquer any part of the Nile because it would threaten British control of Egypt and the Suez Canal. When the United Kingdom learned that France had sent an expeditionary force to Fashoda, it told France to remove it or face war. France backed down, because it knew the United Kingdom would win the ensuing war, and because France did not want to pick a fight with the United Kingdom when it was more worried about the emerging German threat on its eastern border.

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Another case that closely resembles a bait-and-bleed strategy involves Israel.39 In 1954, Pinhas Lavon, Israel’s defense minister, directed saboteurs to blow up important American and British targets in the Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Cairo. The aim was to fuel tensions between the United Kingdom and Egypt, which it was hoped would convince the United Kingdom to abandon its plan to withdraw its troops from bases near the Suez Canal. The strike force was caught and the operation turned into a fiasco. The fundamental problem with a bait-and-bleed strategy, as the Lavon affair demonstrates, is that it is difficult to trick rival states into starting a war that they would otherwise not fight. There are hardly any good ways of causing trouble between other states without getting exposed, or at least raising suspicions in the target states.

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, disinformation, double helix, facts on the ground, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, one-state solution, postnationalism / post nation state, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

State policies of any kind, even as brutal as shooting on sight, are not mentioned in Israel apart from the aforementioned work by Benny Morris.33 The idea that Palestinian resistance on Israel’s borders was pure terrorism was used by the Israeli government in 1956 to justify the collusion with Britain and France on the confrontation over the Suez Canal. Updated historiography, especially that provided by Avi Shlaim, has revealed that the principal objective of this operation was a wish to topple Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was a thorn in the side of Britain (because of his nationalisation of the Suez Canal), of France (because of his support of the FLN), and of Israel (because of his attempts to radicalise Arab states that were somewhat favourable to Israel, including Lebanon and the Hashemite regimes of Jordan and Iraq).34 The occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in June 1967 by Israel and the defeat of the pan-Arab military forces sharpened the focus of the Palestinian national movement.

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., The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 1999 (2006), pp. 287–304. 24 See the lecture by Aharon Shay and David Tal on the new history given in a Van-Leer Conference, ‘The New History in Israel’, March 1996. 25 Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, The Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. iii–vi. 26 Ibid. 27 Pappe, Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1948–51. 28 Ibid. 29 Pappe, Britain and the Arab–Israeli Conflict, pp. 26–7. 30 Ilan Pappe, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1992. 31 Ibid. 32 Pappe, The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict, pp. 16–46. 33 And remade in 1988, see Walid Khalidi, ‘Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 18:69 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4–20. 34 Ilan Pappe, ‘Were They Expelled?: The History, Historiography and Relevance of the Refugee Problem’, in Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cortan, ed., The Palestinian Exodus, 1948–1988, London: Ithaca Press, 1999, pp. 37–62. 35 Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, London: Oneworld, 2006, pp. 1–10. 36 Shlaim, The Iron Wall. 37 Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, New York: Owl Books, 1998. 38 Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. 39 Meron Benvenisti, Sons of Cypresses: Memories, Reflections and Regrets From a Political Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 40 See Ilan Pappe, Out of the Frame. 6 The Emergence of Post-Zionist Academia, 1990–2000 1 A short reference to the conference can be found in Pinchas Ginosar and Avi Bareli, eds, Zionism: A Contemporary Controversy, Sdeh Boker, Israel: The Ben Gurion Heritage Centre, 1996, p. 8 (Hebrew). 2 Again it would be good to refer here to Honig-Parnass, False Prophets, and Ephraim Nimni, ed., The Challenge of Post-Zionism: Alternatives to Fundamentalist Politics in Israel, London: Zed Books, 2003. 3 Lawrence Stone, The Past and Present Revisited, London: Longman, 1989, p. 8. 4 Hanan Hever, ‘The Post-Zionist Situation’, in Gil Eyal, ed., Four Lectures on Critical Theory, Jerusalem: Van Leer, 2012, pp. 73–94 (Hebrew). 5 Edward Said, ‘New History, Old Ideas’, Al-Ahram Weekly, (21–7 May 1998). 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Perry Anderson, ‘Scurrying Towards Bethlehem’, New Left Review, 10, (July/August 2001), p. 11. 9 Oren Yiftachel, ‘Ethnocracy and Geography: Territory and Politics in Israel/Palestine’, Middle East Report, geog.bgu.ac.il/members/yiftachel/paper3.html 10 Sarah Ozacky-Lazar, ‘The Military Rule as a Mechanism of Control of the Arab Citizens’, Hamizrah Hahadash, 42, (2002), pp. 57–69 (Hebrew). 11 Dan Rabinowitz, ‘Natives with Jackets and Degrees: Othering, Objectification and the Role of the Palestinians in the Co-existence Field in Israel’, Social Anthropology, 9: 1, (2000), p. 76. 12 Hillel Cohen, The Present Absentees: The Palestinian Refugees in Israel Since 1948, Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute, 2000 (Hebrew); Yoav Peled and Nadim Rouhana, ‘Transitional Justice and the Right of Return of the Palestinian Refugees’, Theoretical Inquires in Law, 5:2, (2004), pp. 317–32. 13 Sharon Groves, ‘Interview with Marcia Freedman’, Feminist Studies, (22 September 2002). 14 Yuval Yonay, ‘A Queer Look at the Palestinian–Jewish Conflict’, Theory and Criticism, 19, (Autumn 2001), pp. 269–75 (Hebrew). 15 Eyal Gross, ‘Theo Meintz is Gone’, from his blog Eyalgross.com/blog, (14 June 2013) (Hebrew). 16 Michael Shalev, Labour and the Political Economy in Israel, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; and Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel, London: Pluto, 2002. 17 Baruch Kimmerling, ‘State Building, State Autonomy and the Identity of the Society – the Case of Israel’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 6:4, (December 1993), pp. 369–429. 18 Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995. 19 Nachman Ben-Yehuda, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 1995. 20 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, New York: Verso, 2009; Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism. 21 Amnon Raz-Karkozkin, ‘Exile Within Sovereignty: Towards a Critique of the “Negation of Exile” in Israeli Culture’, parts 1–2, Theory and Criticism, 4/5, (1993/94), pp. 23–56 and pp. 113–32 respectively (Hebrew).

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

The aptly named George Train really did travel around the world in eighty days in 1870, and although the fictional Fogg fell back on elephants, sledges, and sailboats when technology let him down,* neither he nor Train could have managed their tours without brand-new triumphs of engineering—the Suez Canal (opened in 1869), the San Francisco–New York railroad (completed the same year), and the Bombay–Calcutta train line† (finished in 1870). The world, as Fogg observed before he set off, was not as big as it used to be. Rising social development and expanding cores had always gone together as colonists carried new lifestyles outward and people on the peripheries copied, resisted, or ran away from them.

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Living standards rose: by 400 BCE the average Greek consumed perhaps 25–50 percent more than his or her predecessor had done three centuries earlier. Houses were bigger, diets more varied, and people lived longer. Darius tapped into this Mediterranean economy by hiring Phoenicians to man Persia’s first fleet, cutting a Suez canal linking the Mediterranean and Red seas, and grabbing control of Greek cities. According to Herodotus, he sent spies to scope out Italy and even considered attacking Carthage. By the time Darius died in 486 BCE, Western social development was a good 10 percent higher than the twenty-four points it had reached around 1200 BCE.

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Lü, 204–207 Springs and Autumns of the State of Lu, 244n Sri Lanka, 16, 273, 408 Stalin, Joseph, 530–31, 534, 542, 579 Stanford University, 23, 110, 141, 597 Stargate (television series), 186 “Star Wars” anti-ballistic-missile shield, 591 state failure, 28, 217, 224, 298, 451, 453–54, 459, 598, 604, 611 Steffens, Lincoln, 531 Steinbeck, John, 535–36 Stephenson, George, 509 Stern Review, 600, 601, 609 Stigler, Stephen, 568 Stoics, 308n Stoke-on-Trent (England), 498, 500 Stone Age, 381, 457, 610 Stonehenge, 182, 189 Stratagems of the Warring States, 263, 266 Stroganov family, 460 Sturges, John, 440n Sudan, 200, 247 Suez Canal, 507 Sufis, 367 Sui dynasty, 333, 336–37, 354, 543 Suleiman, Sultan, 444, 446, 449, 457 Sullivan, Arthur, 522–23 Sumatra, 360 Sumerians, 186, 188–89, 193, 194, 196 Sun Microsystems, 612 Sunnis, 358, 364n, 367, 371 Susa (Mesopotamia), 179–80, 203 Suzhou (China), 501n Sweden, 200 Sykes, Bryan, 110–12 Syracuse, 242 Syria, 90, 346, 352, 366, 392, 605 ancient, 184, 189, 196, 198–200, 216, 218, 220, 246, 248, 296, 308, 311, 323 archaeological sites in, 90–91, 94, 96, 97, 101, 104, 122, 123 plague in, 398 Tacitus, 307 Taiwan, 127, 212, 543, 548, 588 Taiyuan (China), 342 Taizong, Emperor, 457 Taizu, Emperor, 373, 374 Tajikistan, 606n Tale of Genji, The, 360 Taliban, 571 Tamerlane, 401, 407, 574–75 Tan, Amy, 51 Tang, Duke of, 355 Tang dynasty, 333, 355–356, 360, 373, 420, 457, 587 Tanguts, 374, 376 Tang Xianzu, 436 Taosi (China), 203–208, 223, 562 Tarim Basin, mummies of, 125, 126 Tatars, 391 Teach, Edward (“Blackbeard”), 485 technology, 20, 315, 497, 510, 540, 547, 615 information, see information technology maritime, 416, 499, 576 prehistoric, 47–50, 80 social development and, 139, 148, 226, 499–501, 509 weapons, 402–403, 548, 591–92, 606, 615–16, 618 Tell Brak (Syria), 181, 184 Tell Leilan (Syria), 192, 193, 206 Temps modernes, Les (journal), 106 Temujin, 388 Tenochtitlán, 417, 421, 426, 429, 431–33, 460 Terracotta Army, 282, 285 Teshik-Tash (Uzbekistan), 59 Thailand, 120, 127, 534 Thebes (Egypt), 193, 194, 215, 219 Theodora, Empress, 344, 345, 363n Theodosius, Emperor, 315, 326 Three Dynasties Chronology Project, 201, 214 Thucydides, 268, 296 Tiananmen Square massacre, 549, 586 Tibet, 458 Tierra del Fuego, 139 Tiglath-Pileser III, King, 245–49, 269, 303, 316, 335, 567 Tilley, Christopher, 141 Tinghai (China), 145, 148 Tokyo, 501n, 503, 523, 524 population of, 149, 152, 482n Tolkien, J.R.R., 53 Tolstoy, Leo, 113, 284 Tomyris, Queen of Massagetae, 278 Tongling (China), 210 Treasure Fleets, 408, 416, 426, 429 Treasury Bonds, U.S., 585 Treatise on Agriculture (Wang Zhen), 379, 420n Tripitaka (“Three Baskets” of Buddhist canon), 256 Trobriand Islands, 133, 137 Troy, 199, 241 True Levellers, 452 Tunisia, 315, 364 Turkana Boy, 45, 52, 57 Turkey, 81, 97, 197n, 431, 443–46, 452, 453, 459–61, 528, 605n archaeological sites in, 96, 100, 102–103, 105, 123–25 modernization of, 571 Turkic peoples, 348, 349, 354–56, 358, 361, 364, 366–67, 372, 567; Ottoman, see Ottomans Turkmenistan, 125, 189 2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke), 63, 149, 182, 183 Ugarit (Syria), 216, 217, 220, 225 Ukraine, 196, 295, 458 Uluburun (Anatolia), 200 ’Umar, 351 Undefeated Sun, 323 United Arab Emirates, 605n United Monarchy, 234 United Nations, 150, 610 Food and Agriculture Organization, 601 Human Development Index, 145–47, 149–50 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 599 United States, 31, 35, 158, 488, 531, 601n, 604, 605, 612, 634 carbon emissions of, 18, 538, 609 China and, 518, 546–47, 585–88, 606 diseases in, 603 economy of, 12, 34, 225, 529–31, 535, 540–41, 542, 553, 578, 582, 588, 597, 598, 615 emigration to, 509, 603 impact of climate change in, 600 industrialization in, 510, 521 Japan and, 10, 534 military spending in, 548, 631 neo-evolutionary theory in, 138–39 nuclear weapons and, 605–606, 608, 616 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on, 551 Soviet Union and, 526, 527, 533–35, 540–42, 550, 580, 616 technology in, 542, 594, 597, 615 in Vietnam War, 535 in World War I, 529 in World War II, 52, 532, 533, 579 Universal History (Polybius), 263–64 Ur (Mesopotamia), 193–94 Royal Cemetery of, 188–89 Urartu, 248 Urban II, Pope, 372 Uruk (Mesopotamia), 181–88, 190, 192, 194, 203, 206, 207, 210, 223, 229, 562, 610 Uzbekistan, 59, 366, 606n Vagnari (Italy), 273 Valencia, 438 Valens, Emperor, 312, 313 Valerian, Emperor, 310, 328 Vandals, 313, 315, 316, 345 Vedas, 137 Venice, 371, 373, 384, 392, 402, 404, 420n, 427, 429, 431–32, 459 Venter, Craig, 595, 596 Verne, Jules, 507, 511 Vespasian, Emperor, 286 Viagra, 594 Victoria, Queen of England, 6, 7, 10–11, 14, 148 Vienna, Congress of, 489 Vietnam, 11, 127, 407, 408, 587 Vietnam War, 106, 140, 141, 502n, 535 Vikings, 363, 364, 371, 421, 427 Vinland, 371 Virgil, 286 Voltaire, 13, 280, 472–74, 481 von Däniken, Erich, 182–83, 186, 189, 194, 215, 253, 399, 410, 614n Voyage on the Red Sea, The, 273, 275 Wagner, Lindsay, 594 Wales, 472n Wal-Mart, 553 Wang Anshi, 376, 421 Wang Feng, 18 Wang Mang, Emperor, 299 Wang Qirong, 210–11 Wang Yangming, 426, 453, 473n Wang Zhen, 379–80, 420n Wanli, Emperor, 442–43 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 113 Wardi, al-, 398 War of the East, 524, 532 Warring States period, 244n, 264 War of the West, 486–89, 524, 526, 532, 534, 550 Waterloo, battle of, 486 Watt, James, 494–97, 500, 502, 504, 567, 568, 573 Wayne, John, 18 Wealth and Poverty of Nations, The (Landes), 17 weapons, 151, 180, 185, 197, 217, 295, 389 in China, 305, 374, 380 nuclear, see nuclear weapons high-tech, 548, 591–92, 615–16, 618 iron and bronze, 128–29, 181, 191, 200, 208, 233–34, 276 of mass destruction, 605 prehistoric, 57, 80 siege, 277 in World War I, 526; see also guns Weber, Max, 136–37 Wedgwood, Josiah, 498 Wei (China), 265, 266, 335n Weiss, Harvey, 192 Wellington, Duke of, 486 Wendi, Emperor, 337, 345, 346, 354 West Germany, 533, 535 Wheeler, Brigadier Mortimer, 274–75 White, Leslie, 148 Whitney, Eli, 496 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 524, 525 Wilkinson, John (“Iron-Mad”), 495 William I (“the Conqueror”), King, 194 William of Orange, 20 Wire, The (television show), 442 Woods, Tiger, 594 Wordsworth, William, 491–92 World Bank, 547, 603 World Health Organization, 603–604 World Trade Organization, 610 World War I, 65, 133, 526–29, 531, 533, 605 World War II, 17, 52, 254, 273–75, 526, 531–34, 565, 578, 579, 608 Wozniak, Steve, 542 Wright brothers, 510 Wu (China), 245, 524 Wu, King, 229–31 Wudi, Emperor (Han dynasty), 285, 294, 457 Wudi, Emperor (Liang dynasty), 329 Wuding, King, 212–15, 220, 221 Wu Zetian, 340–42, 344, 345, 355, 363n Wuzong, Emperor, 375 Xia dynasty, 205–209, 214, 235, 245 Xian, Marquis, 251 Xianbei, 335–36 Xiandi, Emperor, 302–304 Xianfeng, Emperor, 10 Xiangyang (China), 392 Xiaowen, Emperor, 336, 338, 362 Xiongnu, 293–95, 298, 299, 301, 303–305, 310, 314, 349, 354 Xishan (China), 124 Xishuipo (China), 126 Xuan, King, 242 Xuan, Marquis, 251 Xuanzong, Emperor, 355–57, 359 Xuchang (China), 79 Xu Fu, 421n Xunzi, 259 Yahgan people, 139 Yale University, 30, 192 Yan (China), 265n Yang, Prince, 221 Yang Guifei, 355–56, 424 Yangzhou (China), 442 Yanshi (China), 209 Yan Wenming, 120, 121 Yellow Turbans, 302 Yemen, 349 Yesugei, 388 Yih, King, 233 Yom Kippur/Ramadan conflict, 90 Yongle, Emperor, 406, 407, 413, 414, 416, 426, 429 You, King, 242–43, 355 Younger Dryas, 92–94, 96, 100, 114, 119, 122, 175, 577–78 Yu, King, 204–208, 214 Yuan dynasty, 587 Yuan Shikai, 528 Yue (China), 524 Yu Hong, 342 Yukichi, Fukuzawa, 15 Zemeckis, Robert, 572 Zeno, Emperor, 316–17 Zenobia, Queen, 311 Zhang Zhuzheng, 442–43 Zhao, King, 232 Zhao (China), 265, 266, 279 Zhaodun, 252–53 Zheng, King, 266–67 Zheng (China), 244 Zhengde, Emperor, 441 Zheng He, 16, 17, 407, 408, 413, 417, 420n, 426, 429, 433, 589 Zhengtong, Emperor, 413, 416, 417 Zhengzhou (China), 209–10, 212 Zhou, Duke of, 230, 257 Zhou, Madame, 424, 426 Zhou dynasty, 214, 221–22, 229–37, 242–45, 250–51, 253, 257, 278, 285, 355, 359n, 369 Zhoukoudian (China), 51–55, 57, 60, 72, 78, 154, 210n, 211 Zhou Man, 408, 410, 413 Zhuangzi, 257–59 Zhu Xi, 422–24, 426, 453 Zhu Yuanzhang, 404–405 Zoroaster, 254n Zoroastrianism, 328, 342 Zuozhuan (commentary on historical documents), 252–53 *Some people think Chinese sailors even reached the Americas in the fifteenth century, but, as I will try to show in Chapter 8, these claims are probably fanciful.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

And, as decolonisation began, he started to view Britain's remaining imperial commitments in very different terms. During the 1950s his views on this, and other related subjects, began to shift quite markedly. Powell was a member of the Suez Group of Tory MPs who opposed the removal of British troops from the Suez Canal. But, after British troops left in June 1956, he broke with this faction and voted against the attempt to retake the canal on the grounds that Britain could no longer plausibly act as a global power. Soon afterwards he started to gravitate towards positions that set him against the leadership of his own party, and indeed the political establishment more generally.

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And in this context we argue that the Anglosphere is a vital, overlooked part of the complex story that has led up to Brexit. Notes 1  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 2  Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1869–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 3  Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of a Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 4  Richard Aldrich and John Kasuku, ‘Escaping from American intelligence: culture, ethnocentrism and the Anglosphere’, International Affairs, 88/5 (2012), pp. 1009–28. 5  Srdjan Vucetic, ‘Bound to follow?

Dirty Secrets How Tax Havens Destroy the Economy by Richard Murphy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, centre right, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, high net worth, income inequality, intangible asset, Leo Hollis, light touch regulation, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Washington Consensus

Because the Norwegian and Spanish banks are ‘not here’ as far as the UK is concerned – because they are located in other countries – that transaction is considered to be ‘elsewhere’ ‘offshore’ from the UK’s point of view. My colleague at City University, Ronen Palan, explains the origin of offshore in his book, The Offshore World.1 He suggests that the idea originated in London following the Suez Canal debacle of 1956, which fundamentally challenged the UK’s self-perception as a world power. At the time, the pound sterling was under pressure in a system of fixed exchange rates. This was partly the result of the Marshall Plan, which had flooded Europe with US-originated currency, creating a so-called eurodollar market.

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There is good reason to argue that the first place to undertake what looks like modern tax haven practice was the US state of Delaware, which in 1898 created a statute deliberately intended to undermine the regulations of its neighbours New Jersey and New York. The trouble is that the Monte Carlo casino in tax-free Monaco, which had abolished all forms of tax by 1869, is the much simpler model of tax haven behaviour that most politicians use as a point of reference.3 The Panama Papers scandal fits the model of Monaco, not Delaware. This is because they are quite explicitly about tax. In some ways this is unfortunate, because it reinforces the political stereotype that the tax haven problem is about straightforward tax abuse undertaken in what appear to be exotic locations.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

BAT had lost plants with the expansion of the Japanese empire and subsequently to the revolutionary government in China and, as a result of nationalizations by governments across the world, in Egypt and Indonesia. BP was nationalized by the Iranian government in 1951 (to outrage from the British Labour government). This was easily the single most important British asset anywhere in the world. The Suez Canal Company, another partly British government enterprise, was nationalized in 1956 by the Egyptian government. GENTLEMANLY FINANCIAL CAPITALISTS? In the 1960s it became a common critique from the left that the British elite persisted with Edwardian aristocratic values. One variant of the thesis was the gentlemanly capitalist thesis – suggesting that a dominant group of elite financiers were mainly interested in reaping easy profits from investments abroad and controlling the British state to help them do so.

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In 1953 the Americans took the lead, with help from the British secret service, in the toppling of the legitimate Iranian government, installing a pro-US government under the shah, who had been forced into exile. Anglo-Iranian, renamed BP, got back only a minority share in its old oilfields and refinery. The nationalization of another asset, the Suez Canal, in which, as in the case of BP, the British government was a shareholder, led to war against Egypt. With the French and Israelis the British government, newly in the hands of Anthony Eden, decided to teach the Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Nasser a lesson. They thought they had the tacit approval of the United States.

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The lack of nationalism was reflected in the fact that US oil companies continued to be important within the United Kingdom. US companies were among those who built the new refineries of the 1940s and 1950s. Four refineries belonging to US firms started operating in Milford Haven between 1960 and 1973. And of course the crude oil itself came from overseas, now largely from the Middle East, at first through the Suez Canal, but increasingly in tankers too big to pass through that waterway. The new oil terminals which fed refineries were now among the greatest importing ports by bulk, to be compared with great coal-exporting ports of the past. The United Kingdom had become a net importer of energy, just like most European nations.

Mr Five Per Cent: The Many Lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the World's Richest Man by Jonathan Conlin

accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, banking crisis, British Empire, carried interest, cotton gin, Ernest Rutherford, estate planning, Fellow of the Royal Society, light touch regulation, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Network effects, Pierre-Simon Laplace, rent-seeking, stakhanovite, Suez canal 1869, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Yet when Socal first urged President Roosevelt to shoulder the burden of subsidising Ibn Saud (which the British government had been carrying up until then), it was said that Saudi Arabia was ‘a little far afield’ for the United States to take an interest.28 In February 1943 Roosevelt changed his mind and declared that the defence of Saudi Arabia was a vital US interest. The United States now paid Ibn Saud his subsidies. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud met at Great Bitter Lake (on the Suez Canal) in February 1945. Thereafter US subsidies took off, starting in 1946 with a $10 million soft loan from the Export-Import Bank and a $4 million airfield at Dhahran. Twenty-three years after the humiliating end of the Admiral Chester concession at the Lausanne Conference, the Americans were in the Middle East to stay.

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He is desirous of knowing which are the points that our company would like to remain on the side of Iraq.5 Why bother with conventions, protocols and treaties when international borders could be fixed your way, for just £2,000 (£100,000)? Others might go to the starting line. Gulbenkian went straight to the finish. PART I A PPRENT ICE, 1869–1914 ‘Even if all Constantinople were to work itself up into a rage against me my reputation would not suffer, for it is not in Turkey that I strive to shine.’ C. S. Gulbenkian — ONE — ISTANBUL, 1869 Calouste Gulbenkian’s life story is many things, but a rags-to-riches story it is not. The eldest of three brothers, Calouste was born in 1869 into a wealthy Ottoman Armenian family in Istanbul, capital city of the vast Ottoman Empire. For little Calouste, travelling between Europe and Asia would have been routine, as the family straddled the Bosphorus.

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His books include The Nation’s Mantelpiece: a History of the National Gallery and Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Making of the Modern City, as well as a biography of Adam Smith. For Richard Roberts (1952–2017) CONTENTS List of Illustrations List of Maps Author’s Note Introduction: Drawing the Line PART I: Apprentice, 1869–1914 1. Istanbul, 1869 2. Marseille, London and Baku, 1883–8 3. Young Man in a Hurry, 1889–96 4. Nothing More Than a Sport, 1897–1901 5. Asiatic and European, 1902–8 6. Young Turks, 1908–14 PART II: Architect, 1914–42 7. Put Out More Flags, 1914–18 8. Talleyrand, 1918–20 9. Open Door, Close Ranks, 1921–3 10.

Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, independent contractor, intermodal, Loma Prieta earthquake, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, transcontinental railway

Of course, unloading ship cargo onto railroad trains and reloading it onto ships at the other terminus was as costly as ferrying rail freight across rivers without bridges. By the late 1870s, a private French company had been formed to explore options, and the prospect of an Isthmian canal, promoted by “Le Grand Français,” Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had been responsible for the Suez Canal, offered some promise amid great engineering controversy. Needless to say, the problem of interoceanic communication and de Lesseps’s scheme attracted the attention of American interests generally and James Eads in particular. In an 1880 address before the House Select Committee on Inter-Oceanic Canals, Eads offered his opinion: The question of the practicability of opening a tide-level waterway through the American isthmus is simply a question of money and of time.

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Indeed, in addition to his German degree of “civil engineer,” Pfeiffer may also have brought with him the experience of the Koblenz Bridge, completed in 1864, for Pfeiffer “based his first series of calculations on the equations developed for Koblenz and modeled his first sketches directly on the German bridge.” In 1869, Eads and Flad jointly were issued a patent for an “improvement in arch bridges” that relieved the thrust of the arch on its piers, “thus permitting a light construction of such piers.” Like Eads’s earlier patents, the drawing was headed “truss bridge.” A few years later, Flad was issued a patent in his own name for an invention that enabled the stay cables essential to the construction process to be maintained at a uniform tension even as temperature changes affected a bridge structure under construction.

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Thus, though the pneumatic-caisson method had been used for almost fifteen years to sink over forty piers in Europe, in America Eads was going to improve upon the concept and extend it to greater depths than ever before. The first caisson was launched from its own construction site, floated into position, and sunk in October 1869. Work inside the chamber was to continue smoothly day and night for five months, through the winter. As the exotic construction progressed, “a visit to one of the air-chambers under the piers was one of the principal attractions that St. Louis had to show to visitors.” One retrospective description captured the experience of descending into the caisson: For a while one felt perfectly comfortable in this underworld—a world such as no mythology and no superstition ever dreamed of.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

By early 1941, Britain’s Asian empire hung by a thread. Axis forces had largely captured the Mediterranean, and Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had knocked the British back on their heels in Egypt. If Britain lost the Middle East, it would lose everything: Iraq’s oil fields, stockpiles of war matériel in Egypt, and the Suez Canal, which connected the British Isles to India, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya, Burma, and Singapore. British officials warned Washington of the complete “disintegration of the British commonwealth.” It was easy enough for the United States to supply tanks and planes. The hard part was getting them to the front lines—Detroit to Cairo was a long haul.

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He bought an estate there, Goldeneye, named after one of the intelligence operations he’d participated in during the war. * * * Jamaica was, for Fleming, one of those “blessed corners of the British empire,” a place where brown-skin natives still served drinks at the club and the fantasies of colonial life could be indulged for just a while longer. In 1956 Britain lost control of the Suez Canal, an incident that foretold the end of the empire. (“In the whole of modern history I can’t think of a comparable shambles,” wrote Fleming.) It was to Jamaica that prime minister Anthony Eden repaired to recuperate from that defeat. He stayed at Goldeneye. Fleming spent every winter in Jamaica from 1946 until his death, in 1964.

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Spitz, Bob Springsteen, Bruce Spurlock, Fred Spy Who Loved Me, The (movie) Squanto (Tisquantum) Sri Lanka Stalin, Joseph standardization; of architecture; of aviation; of language (see also English language); military Standard Oil Stanford University Starr, Ringo “Stars and Stripes Forever” “Star-Spangled Banner, The” Star Wars (movie franchise) State Department, U.S. Stephenson, Neal Stevenson, Adlai Stewart, Jon Stiles, Charles Wardell Stimson, Henry stop sign, standardization of, see traffic lights and signs, standardization of Styler, Lt. Gen. W. D. Subaru Sudan Suez Canal Sukarno Sullivan, Louis Sullivan County (Indiana) Sultan, Prince of Saudi Arabia Sulu Archipelago Sumner, Charles Sun Yat-sen Supreme Court, U.S.; Insular Cases decided by Swahili Swan Islands sweatshops Sweden synthetics; medical; for nitrogen fertilizers Syria Taft, Nellie Taft, William Howard Tagalog Taiwan Taliban Tanaka, Tomoyuki Tanzania tape recorders tariffs Tawakonis Taylor, Zachary tear gas technologies; Japanese; military (see also chemical weapons; nuclear weapons); standardization and; see also medical experiments, synthetics Telmex Tennessee Ten Years’ War (Cuba, 1868–78) terrorism Texaco Texas; annexation of Texas to Bataan (movie) Thailand Thanh, Nguyen Tat, see Ho Chi Minh “That’ll Be the Day” (Holly) They Were Expendable (White); movie of Third World; see also specific continents, nations, and regions Thor missiles Thornton, Russell Thule (Greenland) Thunderball (movie) Thurmond, Strom Tillman, Ben (“Pitchfork”) Time magazine Tinian Tinio, Gen.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The premium on speed sparked a twenty-year run of clipper races culminating in the Great Tea Race of 1866, in which a field of forty ships sprinted for sixteen thousand miles and ninety-nine days, ending with a photo finish on the Thames. The races ended a few years later. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the arrival of steamships on the route spelled the end for clippers, as their combined speed once again redrew the maps. Still, when FedEx founder Fred Smith describes his fleet of Boeing 777s as “clipper ships,” he isn’t trying to be poetic. He’s drawing a line between the Qing dynasty and the current one, in which the Delta’s preeminent port is again Canton, and everything made in China is as fresh and fleeting as tea.

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., 105, 119 South Seas Bubble, 210 Southwest Airlines, 118 space: friction posed by, 12, 168; overcome by speed, 11, 25–26, 270 Spain, high-speed rail in, 352 speed: in competition, 180, 369,375; as critical to aerotropoli development, 174, 192, 195–96; of floral auctions, 214; luxury rendered obsolete by, 412; space overcome by, 11, 25–26; of successful supply chains, 61, 76, 174, 183–84, 369 Spirit AeroSystems, 172 “Spruce Goose,” 27 Stansted Airport, 16 Stapleton International Airport, 131–34; death and rebirth of, 147–52; history of, 423–24 start-ups: Chinese manufacturing for, 366–68; as decentralized, 127; Internet and, 42–43 steel industry, 187, 332 Stemmons, John M., 111–12 Stewart, Amy, 217, 221 Stough, Roger, 114 Subic Bay Freeport Zone, 171, 372 suburban age, cities of, 11, 23 Suez Canal, 386 supply chains: in auto industry, 199; Chinese cities specializing along, 365; competition across, 8, 174–75; jobs created by, 87, 338, 339; oil prices and airborne, 331–33; Sea Air Model (SAM) across, 317–25; speed of successful, 174, 183–84 Supreme Court, Thailand, 253–54, 258 Suvarnabhumi International Airport, 19–20, 245–48, 250–53, 254–56, 258, 428;construction problems at, 254–55; failure of, 259–63; governance of, 251; Kasarda’s attempt to salvage, 258; opposition to, 255; political turf wars over, 251–52; renderings of, 250–51; shut down by protesters, 256–57, 428 Swift Freight, 317–25; flowers handled by, 317, 319 Synder, Wes, 77–78 Synthetic Genomics, 349 Synthia, 349 tablets, 371 Taipei, Taiwan, aerotropolis plans in, 388–89 Taiwan: China’s relations with, 388–89; economy of, 389; electronics manufacturing in, 369–71; production freeze in, 257 Tam, Jim, 104–105, 106, 118, 119 Tata, J.R.D., 280 Tata Group, 280 tea trade, 385 technology: in aviation, 341; commodity prices lowered by, 340; connectivity via, 112–13; in floral industry, 210–11; and growth of travel, 341; human drive for, 343, 349; and Kasarda’s Law, 113–19; road warriors and, 102; shipping changed by, 66–68; and urbanization, 11–12 telecommuting, 341 Tellinghuisen, Brian, 131–32, 147 Temasek Holdings, 253 Tempo Group, 205–206 Tennessee, business costs in, 193–94 Terminal, The, 97, 98 Tesco, carbon footprint reduction plans of, 228–30, 232, 241 textiles, 374–75, 391 Thai Airways, 252 Thailand, 245–75; airports in recovery of, 257, 261; economy of, 248–49, 257; floral industry in, 221; tourism in, 256–57, 264–65; see also medical tourism; see also Bangkok Thanarat, Sarit, 245 Third Ring Road, 338–39 Thirteen Factories, 384–85 Thompson, Clive, 371 Thompson, Emma, 15 Thompson, James, 48 Tianjin, China, airport in, 406–408 Tin Goose, 179 Toffler, Alvin, 174, 175 Tokyo, Akihabara district in, 364 tomatoes, carbon footprint of, 231–32 Tomlin, Steve, 30 Topis, David, 107 Toral, Ruben, 265–66, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273–74, 277, 278 Toronto, Canada, airport expansion in, 193 tourism: cheap fares fueling, 334; in developing countries, 338; in developing world, 264–65;as foreign investment, 265; growth in, 428–29; in Japan, 403; jobs created by, 334; in Memphis, 85–86; as part of GDP, 338; in Thailand, 256–57, 264–65 Town and Country Planning Association, 16 Toy Center, 374–75 trains: high-speed rail, 432; as links to airports, 155–56; as part of Detroit aerotropoli plans, 197, 198; stimulus money for, 198, 353 transparks, as early aerotropolis prototype, 169–73 transportation: diffusion of, 414; spending on, 10 Tri-Motors, 179 Tsukiji fish market, 226 Tucker, Preston, 365–66 tulips, 209–10, 212 TWA, 27, 58, 179 Twitter, 113 Tysons Corner, Va., 40, 46 Ultimus, 127 United Airlines, 48, 421; Continental merger with, 193 United Arab Emirates: oil reserves in, 294; see also Abu Dhabi; Dubai United Kingdom: coal use in, 328; home ownership in, 334; Open Skies agreement signed by, 282 United Nations, 19 United Parcel Service (UPS), 64–69; Louisville airport expansion for, 87–90; outsourcing by, 63; relations with Lousiville, 86–87 United States: China as largest trading partner to, 393, 398; floral market in, 221, 223; health care costs in, 267–68; high-speed rail plans in, 351; job loss in, 393; medical community in, 271–72; medical tourists from, 266, 276; medical tourists to, 271; national markets in, 243; number of airports in, 283; Open Skies agreement signed by, 282 United Steelworkers, medical tourism opposed by, 273–74 universal health care coverage, 268 Unnithan, Shaju, 320–21, 322, 323–24 Up in the Air (Kirn), 97–98 UPS Supply Chain Solutions, 69 UPS Worldport, 64, 65–68, 72; Bantu working at, 68; jobs deskilled at, 68; technology at, 66–68 urbanization: in Chicago, 12; of China, 5, 10, 18–19, 360, 364–65, 381, 389, 394–95; as green lifestyle, 356; as inevitable, 176; pace of, 12, 19; spending on, 10; technology and, 11–12 Ussher, Kitty, 14 Venice, as shaped by shipping, 12 Venter, Craig, biofuel development by, 349 Verenigde Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, 211, 212–17, 218–19, 222, 322 Verni, Ron, 127–28 Vietnam, airports in, 263 Virgin Atlantic, 21; environmental efforts of, 345–48, 350 Virgin Green Fund, 345 virtual density, 293–94 Visteon, 199–201 Visteon Village, 199, 200–201, 202 von Klemperer, Jamie, 355, 357 Walmart, sustainability index of, 240–41 Walsh, Willie, 16 Wang Chuanfu, 204 Wanisubut, Suwat, 259–62, 263 Wanxiang Group, 206 Washington, D.C., 355 Washington National Airport, 38–39 Washtenaw County, Mich., 188 water, recycling of, 356 Waterfront City, 293 Wayne County, Mich., 182–83 Wayne State University, 188 Webber, Melvin, 11, 12, 115–16, 124–25 Welch, Jack, 202 Wen Jiabao, 369 Weymouth, Leanne, 124 whaling, 327–28 Whitehaven, Tenn., 83 Whitman, Walt, 23 Whyte, William H., 139 Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (Rubin), 332 Wice, Nathaniel, 367 Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 7 Williams, Adrian, 233 Williams, Fred, 89–90 Willow Run, Mich., 180, 182, 188, 425 Willow Run Airport, 180, 188; auto shipments through, 182 Wilmington, Ohio, 87–88 Wilson, Charles E., 186 Window on the World, 409–10 Wipro, 281, 283 Wongsawat, Somchai, 252, 256 World Bank, 337 World’s Fair (1939), 192 “World’s Unofficial Longest Line” video, 13–14 World Trade Organization, Seattle clashes and, 168 World War II: aviation and aerospace industry in, 27; Ford production during, 179–80, 188 Wright Brothers, 341, 349, 412, 413 Wrigley Field, 411, 413, 414 Xi’an, China, 387, 390 YouTube, 13–14 Zahavi, Yakov, 117 Zappos.com, 66, 69–77, 422; business expansion of, 72;customer service at, 70–71; as decentralized, 74; fulfillment by, 73–74; inventory management at, 73, 74; ordering from, 71–73; shipping strategy of, 70, 72 Zemcik, Marty, 142–44 Zhang Qian, 409 Zhao, Jeff, 205–207 Zheng He, 390 Zhou Tianbao, 205–206 Zhuhai, China, 378, 383 Zimbabwe, economy of, 325 Zoellick, Robert, 400 A Note About the Authors John D.

…

Denver isn’t a mountain town so much as a railroad one, resting at the foot of the Rockies where the pioneers ran out of plains. It was a mining town too, a terminus where gold and silver riches collected before heading east by train. It wasn’t an obvious hub. When the Golden Spike linked the Transcontinental Railroad’s tracks in 1869, they bypassed the city completely. The Union Pacific’s president pronounced Denver “too dead to bury,” but desperate boosters sprinted to build a new line connecting them, ensuring its place as capital of the Rockies. This time around, the taxpayers were more skeptical. They greeted the new airport’s aloofness with exasperation instead of relief.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Paraguay stopped paying in 1872. Spain hung on until June 1873. Bolivia, Guatemala, Liberia and Uruguay suspended interest payments. Egypt nearly stopped doing so in 1873 but managed to roll over its maturing debt at extortionate rates. Eventually, the Khedive found a reprieve by selling a stake in the Suez Canal to the Disraeli government for the payment of £4 million. In February 1876, Bagehot reflected on the foreign lending craze. It was a familiar story. Periods of low domestic interest rates, it seemed, made the specious promise of high yields on foreign debt particularly attractive: the human mind likes 15 per cent; it likes things which promise much, which seem to bring large gains very close, which somehow excite sentiment and interest the imagination.

…

., 163–4 Röpke, Wilhelm, 97, 100, 299 Rothbard, Murray, 30 Rothermere, Lord, 93 Roubini, Nouriel, 207, 254 Rousseff, Dilma, 258 Rucellai, Giovanni, 21 Rueff, Jacques, 85, 91, 115‡, 251 Ruskin, John, 180–81 Sainsbury’s (British grocery chain), 160 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of, 50–51, 52, 57 Samuelson, Paul, 246–7 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 292 Savills (property consultants), 174 saving: bonus of compound interest, 190; China’s savings glut, 268–9; as deferred gratification, 29, 188–90; and interest, xxiv, 44, 77, 188–93, 194–9, 205–6; interest as ‘wages of abstinence’, xxiv, xxv, 188–91; savings glut hypothesis, 115–16, 117, 126, 128–9, 132, 191, 252; Terborgh on, 125* savings & loan crisis, US, 111, 145 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 99 Sbrancia, Maria Belen, 290 Scandinavian banking crisis (early 1990s), 136 Schacht, Hjalmar, 82, 92, 312 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 299 Scheidel, Walter, 204 Schumpeter, Joseph, 16, 32, 46, 95, 218; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), 126, 140, 296–7; ‘creative destruction’ idea, xx, 140–43, 153, 296–7; on deflation, 100; History of Economic Analysis, xviii; view of intellectuals, 297 Schwartz, Anna, 98, 99, 105, 116 Schwarzman, Steven, 207 Sears (department store), 169–70 secular stagnation, 77, 124–8, 131, 132–9, 151, 205–6 Sée, Henri Eugene, Modern Capitalism (1928), 28* Seneca the Younger, 20–21 Senior, Nassau, 188, 191 Senn, Martin, 193 shadow banks: in Canada, 174–5; in China, 266, 270, 282*, 283–5, 286; collapse in subprime crisis, 221, 283; illiquid products, 226–7; re-emergence after 2008 crisis, 221, 227, 231, 233; structured finance products, 116, 227, 283–5; Trust companies as precursors of, 84*; types of, 221; ‘Ultra-short’ bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 227 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 27 ‘shareholder value’ philosophy, 163–6, 167, 170–71 Shaw, Edward, 286 Shaw, Leslie, 83, 83* Shiba Inu (cryptocurrency), 308 Shin, Hyun Song, 254, 263 Shiyan, Hubei province, 275 Silicon Valley, 148, 151, 173, 176, 204 Silver, Morris, 7, 11 Singer, Paul, 185, 246 Smith, Adam, 14, 174; on monopolies, 162, 298; view of interest, 27, 27*, 31, 183; on wealth, 181; The Wealth of Nations (1776), xxii, 27–8, 27*, 31 Smithers, Andrew, Productivity and the Bonus Culture (2019), 152* Smoot–Hawley Act (1930), 261 socialism, 188, 297, 298 Soddy, Frederick, 181, 242 Solon the ‘Lawgiver’, 9, 18 Solow, Bob, 128 Somary, Felix, 94–5, 308 Sombart, Werner, Modern Capitalism, 22* Soros, George, 148*, 273, 283 South Africa, 258 South America: loans/securities from, 77, 79–80; precious metals from, 49, 168; speculation in bonds from, 64, 65–6, 91; trade during Napoleonic Wars, 70 South Korea, 267 South Sea Bubble (1720), 62, 65*, 68, 69, 307 Soviet Union, 278 Spain, 144–5, 147, 168, 213, 253, 279; mortgage bonds (cédulas), 117 Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), 307 speculative manias, xxiii; Borio on, 135; and cryptocurrencies, 177–9; ‘hyperbolic discounting’ during, 176–7; in period from 1630s to 1840s, 64–6, 67–72, 73, 74, 75–6, 77–8, 79–80; technology companies in post-crisis years, 176–9; before Wall Street Crash (1929), 91 see also Mississippi bubble Spencer, Grant, 177 Sraffa, Piero, 42 St Ambrose, 18 St Augustine, 18–19, 202 St Bonaventure, 19 Stable Money League/Association, 87, 96 Standard Oil, 157 state capitalism, 280, 284, 292–5, 297, 298 Stefanel (Italian clothing company), 147 Stein, Jeremy, 231, 233 Steuart, Sir James, 53, 273 ‘sticky prices’ theory, 87* Strong, Benjamin, 82–3, 86–8, 90*, 92, 93, 98, 112 Stuckey’s Bank, 63, 66–7 subprime mortgage crisis, xxii, 114, 116, 117–18, 131, 211, 292; produces ‘dash for cash’, 227; unwinding of carry trades during, 221, 227 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, 12 Suez Canal, 78 Sumerian civilization, 4, 6, 8, 15 Summers, Larry, 124–5, 127, 129, 185, 230, 230*, 235, 302 Sumner, William Graham, ‘Forgotten Man’, xx, xxii, 198 Susa, Henry of, 25 Svensson, Lars, 247 Sweden, 174, 241, 242, 244, 245, 247, 294 Sweezy, Paul, 156 Swiss National Bank, 172–3, 293–4 Switzerland, 172, 174, 226, 233, 241, 244, 245 Sydney (Australia), 175 Sylla, Richard, 4, 11, 68, 109 Tacitus, 20–21 Tasker, Peter, 271 Tawney, R.H., 201 tax structures, 164; offshore tax havens, 210 Taylor, John, 116–17, 129, 252 Tencent, 283 Tencin, Claudine Alexandrine Guérin, Madame de, 51 Terborgh, George, 125–6, 127 Tesla, 176–7 Theranos, 149 Thiel, Peter, 263 Third Avenue (investment company), 227–8 Thornton, Daniel, 192 Thornton, Henry, 41–2, 66*, 70, 75 Thornton, Henry Sykes, 66* Tiberius, Roman Emperor, 12 time, concept of, xviii; and act of saving, 188–90; canonical ‘hours’, 21; and Lewis Carroll, 309; in era of ultra-low interest rates, 59, 177; Franklin on, xviii, 22, 28; and Hayek, 32; interest as ‘time value of money’, xxiv, xxv–xxvi, 10, 14–15, 16, 20, 22, 26–7, 28–32; Lord King’s ‘paradox of policy’, 194, 230*; the Marshmallow Test, 29, 189; and medieval scholars, 19–20; Renaissance writings on, 21; secularization of, 21–2; speculators’ misunderstanding of, 59; and thought in ancient world, 20–21; time as individual’s possession, 20, 21, 25; ‘time in production’, xxiv, 14–15, 16, 22, 95, 95†, 141; ‘time preference’ theory, xxiv*, 28–32, 42, 95, 188–9; Thomas Wilson’s ideas, 26–7, 28, 30 Time-Warner, 167 Tooke, Thomas, 69 Toporowski, Jan, 167 Torrens, Robert, 66 Toys ‘R’ Us, 169 trade and commerce: in ancient world, 6, 7–8, 12, 14, 15; Atlantic trade, 59; business partnerships (commenda, societas), 26; commercial classes/interests, 35, 36–7, 38–40, 41, 43, 44, 66–7; commercial importance of time, xviii, 15–16, 21, 22; emergence of modern trade cycle, 62–4; expansion of in Middle Ages, 19, 21–3, 25–6; international trade, 6, 15, 23, 24, 59, 252–3, 261–2; and Italian Renaissance, 21; in medieval Italy, 21–3; mercantile/shipping loans, 6, 12, 14, 22–3, 26, 219 TransAmerica Life Insurance, 199* Trichet, Jean-Claude, 239 Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, 73 Truman, Harry, 84 The Truman Show (Peter Weir film, 1998), 185–7 Trump, Donald, 185, 261, 262, 291–2, 299, 304, 310 trusts/monopolies: in early twentieth century Europe, 159; Lenin on, 159–60; merger ‘tsunami’ after 2008 crisis, 160–63, 161*, 168–70, 182–3, 237, 298; ‘platform companies’, 161; Adam Smith on, 162, 298; in US robber baron era, 156, 157–9, 203 tulip mania (1630s), 68 Tunisia, 255 Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques, 15, 28–9, 30, 218 Turkey, xxiii, 252, 258–60, 263 Turkmenistan, 262 Turner, Adair, 292 TXU (energy company), 162 Uber, 149, 150 ‘unicorn’ start-up companies, 148–50, 153, 155, 173, 176–7 Union Pacific Railroad, 157, 158 United States: as bubble economy, 184–7; credit expansion of 1920s, 87–91, 92–4, 96–8, 112, 203; Democrats’ Green New Deal policy, 302; economic expansion (1929–41), 143; economy in Bretton Woods era, 291, 302; financial crisis (1873), 157; foreign securities/loans in 1920s, 91; inflation in 1970s, 108–9; Knickerbocker Panic (1907), 83–4; large-scale immigration into, 78; loan of farm animals in, 4; long-term interest rates (1945–2021), 134; loss of manufacturing jobs to China, 261*, 261; low economic vitality in post-crisis decade, 124, 150–53, 191; monetary policy in 1900s, 83–4, 83*; post-Second World War recovery, 126; public debt today, 291–2, 291*; recessions of early 1980s, 109–10, 151; reversal of global capital flows (late-1920s), 93; robber baron era, 156–9, 203; shift from manufacturing towards services, 167–8, 182; and zombification, 146, 152–3, 155 see also Federal Reserve, US United States Steel Corporation, 157–8 Universities Superannuation Scheme, UK, 196 Useless Ethereum Token, 178 usury: attacked from left and right, 17; attitudes to in ancient world, 17–18, 19, 20–21, 219; in Britain, 24, 26–7, 34, 40, 42, 65‡, 65; Church law forbids, 18–19, 23–4; definitions in Elizabethan era, 26–7; etymology of word, 5; Galiani on, 218–19, 220, 221; and Jews, 18; Marx on, 16, 200–201; medieval Church acknowledges risk, 25–6; Old Testament restrictions on, 17; Proudhon-Bastiat debate on, xvii–xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 9; in Renaissance world, 22–3; scholastic attack on, 18–20, 23–4, 25 Valeant Pharmaceuticals, 161, 168–9 Vancouver, 175 Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), 158, 159, 166 Velde, François, 58*, 59 Venice, 22, 23 Vinci, Leonardo da, Salvator Mundi, 208–9 VIX index, 228–9, 254 La Voix du Peuple, xvii–xix volatility, 153, 228–30, 233, 234, 254, 304, 305 Volcker, Paul, 108–9, 121, 145, 184, 240 Voltaire, 57 Wainwright, Oliver, 209 Waldman, Steve, 206 Waldorf Astoria, New York, 285–6 Wall Street Crash (October 1929): Fed’s response to, 98, 100, 101, 108; Fisher and Keynes fail to foresee, 94–5; Hayek’s interpretation of, 101, 105; low real rates in 1920s USA, 87–91, 89, 92–4, 96–8, 203; low/stable inflation at time of, 134; monetarist view of, 98–9, 101, 105, 108; predictions/warnings of, 93–5, 96, 101, 105, 308; reversal of international capital flows (late-1920s), 93, 93*, 261 WallStreetBets, 307, 309 Walpole, Horace, 62–3 Warburg, Paul, 94 Warsh, Kevin, 228 wealth: ‘Buddenbrooks effect’, 216; conspicuous consumption by mega-rich, 54–5, 208–10, 212; definitions of, 179–82, 216; elite displays as signs of inequality, 209–10, 212; virtual wealth bubbles, 179, 180, 181–2, 185, 193–5, 206, 215, 216–17, 217†, 229–30, 237; wealth illusion, 193–5, 198 Welch, Jack, 170, 171 Wells, H.

…

Davis, Steven J. and Haltiwanger, John, ‘Labor Market Fluidity and Economic Performance’, NBER Working Paper, September 2014. Dawson, Frank, The First Latin American Debt Crisis: The City of London and the 1822–25 Loan Bubble (London, 1990). Defoe, Daniel, Daniel Defoe: His Life, and Recently Discovered Writings: Extending from 1716 to 1729, ed. William Lee (London, 1869). Defoe, Daniel, Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe, vol. VI, ed. William R. Owens (London, 2000). Denby, Charles, ‘The National Debt of China – its Origin and its Security’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 66 (155), July 1916: 55–70. De Roover, Raymond, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

This rotten alliance still exists in the twenty-first century and goes some way to explaining the xenophobia, racism and hostility that is such an obvious part of our British heritage but now awkwardly co-exists with multiculturalism and a diverse society. THE FALL: FROM ONE CANAL TO ANOTHER The Suez Canal was the British Empire canal. Britain’s might was ridiculed by the Suez Crisis of 1956 and its financial sector exposed as similarly incompetent by the release of the Panama Papers sixty years later, showing the extent of the tax avoidance and evasion among Britain’s elite. The Paradise Papers of 2017 showed there would be more and more to come.

…

Elite families like the Morgans, the Rothschilds and the Barclays gained huge influence over the global economy by the early twentieth century. The Rothschilds also had a big hand in making Britain great under the empire, supporting the De Beers Company, which funded Cecil Rhodes, as well as backing the South African Rio Tinto Group and funding the building of the Suez Canal. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, in 1986 the Thatcher government changed the rules governing the London Stock Exchange. In their project, called Big Bang, the Conservatives deregulated London’s financial markets and London became a more dominant global centre for banking and trading in money.

…

The argument was that whatever specific provision was needed could be provided in most mainstream schools, they could be taught separately for some tasks, and that it was better to allow them to socialise and gain educational experiences with their non-SEN peers. It is hard to see why exactly the same argument does not apply to the most able students in each area.17 Hard to see unless you understand that some people still believe today what Galton believed 150 years ago. In his books Hereditary Genius (1869) and Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), Galton advocated selective reproduction and used the term eugenics – derived from the Greek eugenes, ‘a person hereditarily endowed with noble qualities’ – as a science which would preserve what at the time were thought to be the best inborn qualities of the population.

A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

He couldn’t check them into the baggage hold, he explained to an ISI official; the temperature would swing too much and kill them. He needed them in the cabin: “They will be sealed up, and will not smell.” He announced his resignation from University College in November 1956, days after the United Kingdom, France, and Israel attacked Egypt to wrestle away its control of the Suez Canal. He didn’t miss the opportunity to score a political point. “I do not want to be a citizen here any longer because Britain is a criminal state,” he told The Times. Was this because of the Suez affair? the reporter asked. “If you mean the mass murders at Port Said, it is.” Just before he caught his flight, Haldane gave a reporter a second reason: the presence of US soldiers on bases in Britain.

…

See also Haldane, Helen Haldane’s marriage to, 229–30 spying, Russia on Britain, 254 Stahl, Franklin, 207 Stalin, Joseph, 11 as British ally, 241 brutality, 187 impact on Lysenko’s research, 271 nonaggression pact with Hitler, 239 Stalinist Communism, 228 Stalin’s Englishmen, 178 statistical tools, 280 statistics, and evolution, 3 sterilization, 193 Haldane on, 138 state-passed compulsory laws, 136–37 Stoddard, Lothrop, The Rising Tide of Color, 133 strontium chloride, 103–4 submarines loss of HMS Thetis, 242–44 ventilation, 50 sucrose, transformation, 108 Suez Canal, 273–74 superiority, 139 superstition, Soviet government and, 9 survival of the fittest, 157–58 Sverdlov (Moscow university), 164 telegraphy, 81 Ternate, 157 Terrington, Vera, 149 Teruel, Spain, 219 tetany, 104 Teutonic superiority, 222 thalassophilia, 134 theology, and science, 35 Thetis, HMS (submarine), loss of, 242–44 Third Reich, eugenics in, 133 Tito, Josip Broz, 211 Tolstoy, Alexei, 175 trade unions, 47 tram strike, 159 transhumanism, 143 transplants, 207 treason, 256 Treasury of Human Inheritance, The, 198 Treaty of Versailles, 209 trench mortars, 86 trench warfare, 100 Trinity College, 105, 154, 167 Trotter, Coutts, 39 Trotter, Louisa Kathleen, 39–40 Tube (London) as air raid shelters, 236 gas testing, 50 Tutt, J.

…

Darwin may not have noted the mentions of Mendel in the books he owned, but Mendel certainly read the German edition of On the Origin of Species in 1863, just as he was finishing his experiments. He marked up parts of it in pencil, and terms from these paragraphs appear in the final two sections of his 1866 paper. In another paper, published in 1869, Mendel mentioned “the spirit of Darwinian doctrine.” But he never realized that his principles could help solve a problem that nagged at Darwin’s theory. As plants and animals reproduce, the offspring vary from their parents. Darwin had proposed that sometimes an accumulation of slight variations makes an organism better suited to its environment than its parents or its peers.

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea by Robert D. Kaplan

Ayatollah Khomeini, citizen journalism, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Live Aid, mass immigration, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, the market place

As a result of these influences, among others, Eritreans grew to be more sophisticated and less xenophobic than were the Amharas and Tigreans of the interior, whose cultures and political traditions were to evolve completely on their own. This is why present-day Ethiopian politics (especially during the 1970s) remains very much an enigma to outsiders. The Turks held sway over the coast for three centuries until they were displaced by the Egyptians, who were aided by the British, in 1875. The Suez Canal had opened six years earlier, in 1869, and with the increased strategic importance of the Red Sea, the British needed the assistance of a proxy in order to exclude the French, who already were ensconced in neighboring Djibouti. But the Egyptians, like the Turks before them, were unsuccessful in penetrating the Eritrean interior due to stiff local resistance.

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

This forced England and her allies to borrow huge sums of money in the London market. Merchant bankers like Rothschild filled this need and grew immensely wealthy in the process. Baring Brothers raised the money for Jefferson to buy Louisiana from Napoleon and helped finance Latin American independence. Later the Rothschilds advanced the money for Britain to buy the Suez Canal. The great London merchant bankers also financed the huge expansion of world trade and the building of railroads and factories around the globe that marked the long peace of 1815 through 1914. The number one destination for all this London money was the United States, not Britain or her empire.

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It turns out that the asset securitization model provided the explosives to blow up the global economy. 3 t FINANCIAL INNOVATION MADE EASY ‘‘The business of banking ought to be simple; if it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.’’ —Walter Bagehot, The Economist, January 9, 1869. In the last chapter, we saw that so-called financial instruments were, at one time, in fact standard ‘‘contracts in a box’’ that were easily saleable because they were easily intelligible. In other words, there was no doubt about how to put a price on them, how they worked, and what risks were involved.

Cabin Fever: The Harrowing Journey of a Cruise Ship at the Dawn of a Pandemic by Michael Smith, Jonathan Franklin

airport security, Boeing 747, call centre, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, global pandemic, lockdown, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Port of Oakland, Snapchat, social distancing, Suez canal 1869

At least twenty thousand workers—nearly all from the West Indies—died during the early years of canal construction. The massive construction project was led by Ferdinand de Lesseps and a bevy of fellow French investors, including many politicians, who would later rue their involvement. Having spearheaded the creation of the Suez Canal in 1869, de Lesseps basked in his success. He coolly estimated that if he could dig through the sands of Egypt in ten years, he’d be able to rip through the rocks of Central America in six. Convinced that yellow fever and malaria were caused by “bad air” and invisible particles, which they called “fomites,” that infected bedding and linens, de Lesseps and his French colleagues could not have devised a more lethal work environment had they tried.

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

The 1956 Suez Crisis, in which Britain failed to topple President Nasser of Egypt and was forced to yield to U.S. economic pressure, laid bare Britain’s military and economic weakness. To the shock of Australians, in 1967 Britain announced its intent to withdraw all of its military forces east of the Suez Canal. That marked the official end to Britain’s long-standing role as Australia’s protector. As for Asian political developments, former colonies and protectorates and mandates in Asia were becoming independent nations, including Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

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After that coup gave them control of Kyoto, the immediate problem facing the Meiji leaders was to establish control over all of Japan. While the shogun himself accepted defeat, many others did not. The result was a civil war between armies supporting and armies opposing the new imperial government. Only when the last opposition forces on Japan’s northern main island of Hokkaido had been defeated in June 1869 did foreign powers recognize the imperial government as the government of Japan. And only then could Meiji leaders proceed with their efforts to reform their country. At the beginning of the Meiji Era, much about Japan was up for grabs. Some leaders wanted an autocratic emperor; others wanted a figurehead emperor with actual power in the hands of a council of “advisors” (that was the solution that eventually prevailed); and still another proposal was for Japan to become a republic without an emperor.

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But opposition to Meiji reforms turned out to be less violent than might have been anticipated. Meiji leaders proved skilled at buying off, co-opting, or reconciling their actual or potential opponents. For instance, Enomoto Takeaki, the admiral of the fleet that held out on Hokkaido against Meiji forces until 1869, ended up being absorbed into Meiji ranks as a cabinet minister and envoy. Let’s now consider what selective changes actually became adopted in Meiji Japan. The changes affected most spheres of Japanese life: the arts, clothing, domestic politics, the economy, education, the emperor’s role, feudalism, foreign policy, government, hairstyles, ideology, law, the military, society, and technology.

Barcelona by Damien Simonis

Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Kickstarter, land reform, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, retail therapy, Suez canal 1869, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Built low so that the cannon in the then Ciutadella fort could fire over it if necessary, it bears images of St Michael (Miquel) and two other saints considered protectors of the Catalan fishing fleet: Sant Elm and Santa Maria de Cervelló. Just behind the church is the bustling marketplace, worth an early morning browse. Ferdinand Lesseps, the French engineer who designed the Suez Canal, did a stint as France’s consul-general in Barcelona and lived in the house to the right of the church. Return to beginning of chapter AROUND THE PORT & ALONG THE BEACH Walking Tour 1 Maremàgnum Reached on foot by the Rambla de Mar footbridge, Maremàgnum (www.maremagnum.es), which encloses the marina, is a bubbling leisure centre, with chirpy waterside restaurants, bars, shops and cinemas.

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Poor nutrition, bad sanitation and disease were the norm in workers’ districts, and riots, predictably, resulted. As a rule they were put down with little ceremony – the 1842 rising was bombarded into submission from the Montjuïc castle. Some relief came in 1854 with the knocking down of the medieval walls but the pressure remained acute. In 1869 a plan to expand the city was begun. Ildefons Cerdà designed L’Eixample (the Enlargement) as a grid, broken up with gardens and parks and grafted onto the old town, beginning at Plaça de Catalunya. The plan was revolutionary. Until then it had been illegal to build in the plains between Barcelona and Gràcia, the area being a military zone.

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Among other things, the winds destroy more than 200 of the city’s 1500 gaslight street lamps. 1808 • In the Battle of Bruc outside Barcelona, Catalan militiamen defeat occupying Napoleonic units in June. Nonetheless, Barcelona, Figueres and the coast remain under French control until Napoleon is ejected from Spain in 1814. 1873 • Antoni Gaudí, 21 years old and in Barcelona since 1869, enrols in architecture school, from which he graduates five years later, having already designed the street lamps in Plaça Reial. 1895 • Málaga-born Pablo Picasso, 13, arrives in Barcelona with his family. His art teacher father gets a job in the Escola de Belles Artes de la Llotja, where Pablo is enrolled as a pupil. 1898 • Spain loses its entire navy and last remaining colonies (the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico) in two hopeless campaigns against the USA, dealing a heavy blow to Barcelona businesses. 1914 • The Mancomunitat de Catalunya, a first timid attempt at self-rule (restricted largely to administrative matters) and headed by Catalan nationalist Enric Prat de la Riba, is created in April.

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

At virtually every turn, something—as little as a road sign bearing the city’s telltale name, or as jarring as the appearance of Antarctica on the departures board at the airport—reminds me that I’m at one of the most picturesque ends of terra cognita. And this, despite the fact that for centuries, until the opening of the Suez Canal, the growing settlement, like a pulley steering lines of commerce and power between Europe and Asia around Africa, was central to the forces of imperialism that did so much to shape the modern world. Cape Town’s fabled blue sky, like the summit of Table Mountain right ahead of us, is hidden this morning by heavy clouds and waves of intensifying showers.

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The mere thought of spring makes them drunk; what had the tavern doors and walls to do with it? I am ashamed of the violence of my own love. In this ruined house how I had hoped to be a builder! Today our verses, Asad, are only an idle pastime. What’s the use of flaunting our talent, then? —Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) (translated by R. Parthasarathy) PITTSFIELD I’m in the backseat, listening, as Mom steers our station wagon through downtown and explains to a visiting relative next to her in the front that while most American towns have a Main Street, the Pittsfield street that serves as such is, in fact, called North Street.

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In 1854—not long before the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the destruction of much of the city, and the rise of the British Raj—he wrote: “Inside the Fort a few princes get together and recite their verses. Once in a while I attend these gatherings. Contemporary society is about to vanish. Who knows when the poets would meet next or meet again at all.” Ghalib died in Delhi in 1869. His tomb stands near the mausoleum of Nizamuddin, the Sufi saint who declared that Delhi was still far; while in Old Delhi, at Ghalib’s former haveli, or townhouse (though that English word hardly does justice to the cultural and architectural legacy of such grand, centuries-old havelis as his), signs describe him as “arguably the best Indian poet”; list his favorite foods, including roasted mutton and sohan halwa, a traditional and still popular Delhi sweet; and note his hobbies, such as kite flying, chess, and Ganjifa, an ancient game that’s often played with round cards.

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, defense in depth, European colonialism, Kwajalein Atoll, land reform, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, nuremberg principles, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869

Six days later the warship arrived at the capital, Colombo. With neither Japanese nor expatriate Koreans living on the isolated island, the imperial party felt free of danger for the first time. After five days in Columbo, the Katori departed on April 1 for the warm waters of the Red Sea, their destination the Suez Canal, the famed “lifeline” of the British Empire. They reached the canal on April 15 and the next day began the hundred-mile journey through the sea-level waterway with barren desert sands stretching away on each side. After docking at Port Said, at the entrance to the canal, on April 17, they traveled to Cairo, the ancient capital of Egypt, then in its last year as a British protectorate.

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For the remainder of his Italian stay Hirohito attended the usual ceremonial functions, visited patriotic war monuments, and observed a sports tournament held under the auspices of the Italian military, then already under the influence of Mussolini’s Fascist movement. On the return voyage to Japan, which began on July 18, Hirohito did little sightseeing as the Katori retraced its course through the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean to Singapore. Only when his ship anchored to take on coal at Cam Ranh Bay in French Indochina did he go ashore to walk in the tropical forests and later to ride in a motorcar along the newly constructed Highway Number 1, which ran parallel to the railroad linking Hanoi and Saigon.

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., 374, 401, 498, 543–44, 611, 626, 640, 651 surrender decision and, 498–500 Statement Concerning the Guidance of Thought, 201 State Restoration Society (Kokuikai), 253 Stimson, Henry L., 134, 242, 601 nonrecognition principle of, 249–50, 256, 428 stock market crash of 1929, 219 Sud Shinji, 432 Suetsugu Nobumasa, 101, 151, 208, 209 Suez Canal, 107, 110 suffrage issue, 41, 94, 184, 206 Sugiura Shigetake, 62–70, 73, 77, 78, 80, 85, 91 background of, 62–63 ethics lessons taught by, 63–64, 66–67, 69–70 imperial engagement controversy and, 96–97, 98, 99 lectures of, 64–67 race theory of, 68–69 Sugiyama Gen, 319, 320, 321, 325, 336, 362, 388, 399, 402, 413, 414, 417, 421, 423–24, 426, 433, 447, 449, 454–56, 459, 461, 464, 466–67, 468, 469, 475, 476, 588, 675 Hirohito’s scolding of, 411–12 prisoners of war and, 448 resignation of, 473 Sumatra, 467 Sumitomo Company, 174, 175 Sumitomo Kichizaemon, 174 Summer Flowers (Natsu no hana) (Hara), 637 Sung, T.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

By the turn of the century the Liberal and Labour parties often accused each other of stealing the other’s programs. Later they would also compete in their lavish praise of the Soviet Union.19 But one issue split them across the bow: the British Empire. The year that Culture and Anarchy appeared, 1869, also witnessed the opening of the Suez Canal and the expansion of British imperial dominion into a new and unprecedented phase. By 1890 it covered nearly one-quarter of the habitable globe. The old liberal attitude toward imperialism had been ambivalent at best: the British Empire, with its exotic trappings of imperial splendor, durbars and jubilees, and “maps painted red,” was largely the creation of Benjamin’s Disraeli’s Conservatives.

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His young colleague Friedrich Nietzsche, however, would press it to its limit. NIETZSCHE, SCHOPENHAUER, AND WAGNER One of Burckhardt’s favorite images of encroaching modern life was the railway locomotive. The first rail line into Basel opened in 1844, connecting the city to Berlin and the rest of Germany. On April 19, 1869, the train from Berlin brought a new professor of philology to the University of Basel, the twenty-four-year-old prodigy Friedrich Nietzsche. As he disembarked from the train, Nietzsche presented an unprepossessing figure in a drab suit, with thick spectacles and diffident manners. He hardly looked like a man about to set off a revolution that would shake Europe even more profoundly than the events of 1848.

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They must remain so, Schopenhauer stated, if they are to be “true philosophy.” Schopenhauer’s book remained virtually unread for forty years, until Romantic disillusionment after 1848 brought him a new and willing audience. One disciple was Burckhardt. Another was Eduard von Hartmann, who in the Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) turned Schopenhauer’s remorseless human will into the “unconscious,” a concept that Sigmund Freud later adopted and revised. Meanwhile, the young Nietzsche discovered a copy of The World as Will and Idea in a used bookshop in Leipzig in 1865. A shared admiration for Schopenhauer’s philosophy was the starting point of Nietzsche’s friendship with Burckhardt, for whom Schopenhauer would always be simply The Philosopher.32 Richard Wagner was yet another convert.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

In North Korea, the tools of extraction were again inherited from the communist toolkit: the abolition of private property, state-run farms, and industry. In Egypt, the situation was quite similar under the avowedly socialist military regime created by Colonel Nasser after 1952. Nasser sided with the Soviet Union in the cold war, expropriating foreign investments, such as the British-owned Suez Canal, and took into public ownership much of the economy. However, the situation in Egypt in the 1950s and ’60s was very different from that in North Korea in the 1940s. It was much easier for the North Koreans to create a more radically communist-style economy, since they could expropriate former Japanese assets and build on the economic model of the Chinese Revolution.

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On January 27 the former shogun Yoshinobu attacked Satsuma and Chōshū forces, and civil war broke out; it raged until the summer, when finally the Tokugawas were vanquished. Following the Meiji Restoration there was a process of transformative institutional reforms in Japan. In 1869 feudalism was abolished, and the three hundred fiefs were surrendered to the government and turned into prefectures, under the control of an appointed governor. Taxation was centralized, and a modern bureaucratic state replaced the old feudal one. In 1869 the equality of all social classes before the law was introduced, and restrictions on internal migration and trade were abolished. The samurai class was abolished, though not without having to put down some rebellions.

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Like Iturbide and Santa Ana before him, Díaz started life as a military commander. Such a career path into politics was certainly known in the United States. The first president of the United States, George Washington, was also a successful general in the War of Independence. Ulysses S. Grant, one of the victorious Union generals of the Civil War, became president in 1869, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War, was president of the United States between 1953 and 1961. Unlike Iturbide, Santa Ana, and Díaz, however, none of these military men used force to get into power. Nor did they use force to avoid having to relinquish power.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

It was a vessel known as a ‘tea clipper’, built for speed, and at one time it was the fastest ship of its size afloat, famously beating the fastest steamship of its time and doing the Australia-to-United Kingdom run in sixty-seven days. (Yes, I know there’s no tea in Australia but the Suez Canal meant that she only carried tea for a few years and was then set to work bringing wool up from down under.) When she was built, high speed was economically important and there was considerable pressure from the tea companies to get the fastest ships: they weren’t built just for the fun of it, or to show off technology, but because of economic imperative. She was commissioned in 1869. Note the timing: the fastest sailing ship was built well after the first steamships arrived. The first iron-hulled steamship, the Aaron Manby, had crossed the English Channel in 1822.

Drinking in America: Our Secret History by Susan Cheever

British Empire, classic study, George Santayana, Howard Zinn, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, trade route, white picket fence

On others he told his daughter Julie’s husband, David, that he might as well resign.”260 As Nixon’s presidency faltered in 1973, his drinking got worse. Another crisis was more frightening than anything that had gone before. On October 6, 1973, Soviet-backed Arab armies mounted a surprise attack on Israel, crossing the Suez Canal and entering the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights on Yom Kippur—the holiest day in Judaism. The president’s drinking had already been a public relations problem a few months earlier. In August, covering a speech he gave in New Orleans, even the New York Times reporter noticed that there was something wrong with the president.

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In a rare, triumphant moment during his scandal-ridden presidency, President Grant decreed that the two lines of track would meet in Promontory, Utah, and that a “golden spike” would be the last spike driven to unite the two railroads and create a transcontinental track.176 On the afternoon of May 10, 1869, crowds formed to watch the ceremony as railroad baron and former governor of California Leland Stanford prepared to drive in the last spike. Stanford missed, but no one seemed to care. Millions of settlers now poured west. Each small town started with a saloon and ended with a schoolhouse. There were many discoveries along the way.

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Anglo-American Hegemony By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was first among the imperial powers, with Queen Victoria reigning over the British Isles, India, Burma, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malaya, much of Africa (“Cape to Cairo”), New Guinea, and dozens of islands and smaller possessions around the world. Many of these served as fueling stations for the Royal Navy, which had unrivaled dominance over the oceans. The British navy, by far the most powerful in the world, policed the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean that connected Britain and India through the Suez Canal (which opened in 1871). Britain maintained de facto control of Egypt after 1882 in large part to ensure the sea routes to India. Interestingly, China’s GDP remained the largest in the world until 1888, when it was finally overtaken by the United States, but China was impoverished. In 1870, with a population around 358 million, China’s per capita income was just $530 (Maddison data, 1990 international prices); the UK, with 31 million people, had a per capita income of $3,100, roughly six times that of China.12 Britain, of course, also gave rise to the major English-speaking offshoots, most importantly the United States, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

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(The Soviet Union tried to emulate the industrial scale of the United States, but consistently lagged far behind.). In 1820, there were twenty-three states, all but one (Louisiana) east of the Mississippi River. By 1940, there were forty-eight states linked coast to coast by a rail network, which spanned the continent after 1869, and by enormous enterprises that also operated at the continental scale. The continent was fabulously rich in natural resources: vast midwestern plains with fertile soils, minerals, coal and oil, timber, navigable rivers and waterways, and a mostly temperate climate. The European settlers and their descendants were prepared to take any steps to clear the way for settlements, profits, and industry, including mass slavery until the Civil War, the war with Mexico in 1846–48, and the genocidal wars against the Native American populations throughout the nineteenth century.

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

When not delivering scientific lectures, he went hiking in the forests of Nikko and even attended the annual chrysanthemum festival in the gardens of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. ‘One cannot help loving and revering this country,’ Einstein noted in his diary.3 On leaving Japan, Einstein began the return leg of his tour. He stopped off briefly in Malacca and Penang, before crossing the Indian Ocean to reach the Suez Canal. At Port Said, he disembarked once more. From there Einstein boarded a train to Jerusalem. Only a few months earlier, in July 1922, the League of Nations had approved the establishment of the Mandate for Palestine. This new territory would provide a ‘national home for the Jewish people’, a precursor to the modern State of Israel.

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As part of the same reforms, universities were given greater autonomy in the appointment of professors and the allocation of funds. This led to the creation of new museums and laboratories dedicated to science, including the aforementioned Museum of Zoology at Moscow University, established in 1861, as well as the Sevastopol Biological Station, established in 1869.31 As in many other countries, enthusiasm for Darwin’s ideas was closely associated with this wave of modernization. The Russian Herald, a new liberal magazine published in Moscow, described On the Origin of Species as ‘one of the most brilliant books ever to be written in the natural sciences’, whilst the secretary of the Saint Petersburg Society of Naturalists noted that ‘almost all leading contemporary biologists are followers of Darwin’.

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Recent breakthroughs in physics also helped, as scientists realized that an electric current could be used to separate out different chemical elements. But perhaps the most important breakthrough was the invention of the periodic table, in which all the chemical elements were ordered by atomic weight, beginning with the lightest element, hydrogen. First proposed by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, the periodic table predicted the existence of many as-yet-unknown elements, as there were gaps waiting to be filled in, thus kickstarting a race to find them. There was a certain amount of national rivalry here. Scientists often chose to name new elements after the country of their birth. When the Russian chemist Karl Klaus discovered a new element in the middle of the nineteenth century, he called it ‘ruthenium’, from the Latin word for Russia.

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

‘After twenty years of generosity (it was argued) and an outward-looking policy, the United States had to switch to a policy that would give priority to America’s own national interests.’62 Import tariffs and the end of the dollar’s historic gold link, as announced in the President’s broadcast of 15 August 1971, symbolized, in dramatic terms, the retreat of American power. PART IV PAPER: THE END OF GOLD, 1973– 15 The Impact of Oil Shortly before 2 p.m. on 6 October 1973, 222 Egyptian jets took off, with the aim of bombing Israeli command posts on the eastern bank of the Suez Canal and in the Sinai peninsula. The day was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish Year. This assault by the Egyptians began the fourth of the Arab–Israeli wars. One weapon was ‘unique to the Middle East’. It was the oil weapon, ‘wielded in the form of an embargo’, which would induce production cutbacks and restrictions on oil exports.1 The war itself had come as a shock to an unsuspecting world.

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Fisk was ‘coarse, noisy, boastful’, a ‘young butcher in appearance’, being large, florid and gross, but he had considerable personal charm and his ‘redeeming point was his humour, which had a strong flavour of American nationality’. In 1865 he had just turned thirty. Fisk’s business associate, Jay Gould, by contrast, was ‘dark, sallow . . . [and] reticent’.34 It was their attempt to corner the gold market on 24 September 1869 which gave the market the term ‘Black Friday’, an epithet which has been appropriated for other days of the week in subsequent financial history. The key feature of the American currency system between 1865, the end of the Civil War, and 1879 was that there was no convertibility to gold. The country used the paper greenback, since gold had been ‘demonetized’.

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The country used the paper greenback, since gold had been ‘demonetized’. In this environment, gold traded as a commodity, like wheat or copper, and had no special status as legal tender. Gould and Fisk attempted to buy up gold, because many believed that the government would need gold in order to repurchase greenbacks. Gould started buying gold in the late summer of 1869. On Monday 20 September, gold rose in price, and continued to do so on the Tuesday and Wednesday. On Friday the 24th, the government intervened, starting to sell a portion of its gold holdings. The price in a few days had gone from 130 dollars an ounce to 162; it fell back to 135 on that Friday, after the intervention from the government.35 The day was said to have been ‘Black’ from the perspective of speculative buyers of gold.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Railways routinely lengthened the maxima to 102 km (London to Birmingham 162 km, Paris to Brussels 264 km) and before the end of the 19th century many well-off people traveled hundreds of kilometers for vacations in mountain or sea resorts or to spas, and tens of thousands of Russians embarked on repeated (even annual) trips of thousands of kilometers from Saint Petersburg to Paris (about 2,800 km) or from Moscow to the French Riviera, more than 3,000 km. The latter distance is almost exactly equal to that of America’s first transcontinental rail link (3,007 km) completed in 1869. Within decades of its origin during the 1830s, steam-powered shipping began to offer scheduled service among all continents, with the longest distances spanning 104 km: London to Sydney via Suez Canal (completed in November 1869) is 25,000 km, San Francisco to Hong Kong 11,200 km. With typical speed no higher than 30 km/h those two trips would have taken, respectively, more than a month and 15 days to complete.

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Journal of Environmental Management 91:1831–1839. Daugherty, C.R. 1928. The development of horse-power equipment in the United States. In: C.R. Daugherty, A.H. Horton, and R.W. Davenport, Power Capacity and Production in the United States, Washington, DC: USGS, pp. 5–112. Daugherty, C.R. 1933. Horsepower equipment in the United States, 1869–1929. The American Economic Review 23:428–440. Davis, K. 1945. The world demographic transition. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 237:1–11. Davis, K. 1955. The origin and growth of urbanization in the world. American Journal of Sociology 60:429–437. Davis, M. et al. 2018.