Chapter 4. The growth of transit through the canal (from the 1880s to 1940)
- By Hubert Bonin
Pages 113 to 134
Cite this chapter
- BONIN, Hubert,
- Bonin, Hubert.
- Bonin, H.
Cite this chapter
- Bonin, H.
- Bonin, Hubert.
- BONIN, Hubert,
Notes
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[1]
Calculations based on the Company’s statistics, with reservations regarding their precision, as said by Paul Reymond, Histoire, op. cit., pp 187-188.
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[2]
André Siegfried,Suez, op. cit., table on p. 102.
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[3]
Based on the Company’s statistics.
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[4]
Booklet Le canal de Suez (statistiques), Paris, Suez Company, 1950.
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[5]
Stephen Horwarth, Sea Shell: The Story of Shell’s British Tanker Fleet, 1897-1997, London, 1997, p. 16.
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[6]
James Bamberg, History of the British Petroleum Company. Volume III. British Petroleum and Global Oil, 1950-1975. The Challenge of Nationalism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 290.
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[7]
C. Damougeot-Perron, La Standard Oil Company, 1870-1925, Paris, Jean Budray, 1925.
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[8]
James Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company, volume II: The Anglo-Iranian years, 1828-1954, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
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[9]
See R. W. Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum Company, volume I: The Developing Years, 1901-1932, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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[10]
See Raymond Solly, Tanker: The History and Development of Crude Oil Tankers, London, Chatham, 2007.
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[11]
Imperial shipping committee on British shipping in the Orient, 1939, from: A. Siegfried, Suez…, p. 97.
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[12]
Net taxed tonnage. Fifty-five clients transported more than 100,000 tons via the canal.
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[13]
See David Armine Howarth, Stephen Horwarth & John Haskell Kemble, The Story of P & O: The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986.
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[14]
James Bamberg, History of the British Petroleum Company, volume III, op. cit., p. 291.
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[15]
Chih-Lung Lin, “British shipping in the Orient, 1933-1939: Reasons for its failure to compete”, International Journal of Maritime History, XX, n° 1, June 2008, pp. 153-172.
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[16]
See Gelina Harlaftis, A History of Greek-Owned Shipping. The Making of an International Tramp Fleet, 1830 to the Present, London, Routledge, 1996 (in Greek: Athens, Nefélê, 2001).
Figures allow to determine the part played by the Suez canal within the world economy and to reconstitute its dependancy on its conjunctural rhythms. The transit grew alongside the evolution of the commercial flows between continents and the emergence or reinforcement of countries or colonised territories which got a larger share of the markets for commodities and raw materials – whilst the economy of mineral oil took shape East of Suez and started to foster traffic through the isthmus.
The apparent two-decade-long stagnation in the number of ships (between 3 and 4,000 in 1882 to 1901) is misleading as it hides a doubling of the tonnage due to the increase in the size of the vessels. Then, towards the end of the 1890s, there was an explosion in the traffic itself due to the happy coincidence of a surging economy and the advent of the second industrial revolution: a new stage was reached by the history of the Suez canal.
This period of growth lasted from 1895 to 1930 and almost doubled the number of ships passing through the canal (from 3,400-3,500 in 1895-1900 to 6,000 in 1928-1929): the eight daily customers of 1880-1889 became eleven in 1900-1919 and then fourteen in 1920-1929. The canal’s success was built on the growth achieved in these first three decades of the 20th century. But it was not all smooth sailing: after the initial surge and an annual growth of 8.75 per cent over the first seven years, there were setbacks in 1904-1905 (-2 per cent) and 1907-1908 (-7 per cent)…
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