Chapter 13. Suez and Panama: two canals, two systems, a common geopolitical issue
- By Hubert Bonin
Pages 293 to 302
Cite this chapter
- BONIN, Hubert,
- Bonin, Hubert.
- Bonin, H.
Cite this chapter
- Bonin, H.
- Bonin, Hubert.
- BONIN, Hubert,
Notes
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[1]
Michel Chevalier, L’Isthme de Panama, examen historique et géographique des différentes directions suivant lesquelles on pourrait le percer et des moyens à y employer, suivi d’un aperçu sur l’isthme de Suez, Paris, Gosselin, 1844.
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[2]
André Siegfried, Suez, Panama et les routes maritimes mondiales, Paris, Armand Colin, 1948.
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[3]
See Miles DuVal, And the Mountains Will Move: The Story of the Building of the Panama Canal, Stanford University Press, 1947. David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1977. Ian Cameron, The Impossible Dream: The Building of the Panama Canal, New York, William Morrow, 1972. Ulrich Keller (ed.), The Building of the Panama Canal: Historic Photographs, 1984.
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[4]
Georges Edgar-Bonnet, Ferdinand de Lesseps. Après Suez, le pionnier de Panama, Paris, Plon, 1959.
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[5]
Jean Bouvier, Les deux scandales de Panama, Paris, Julliard, 1964. Jean-Yves Mollier, Le scandale de Panama, Paris, Fayard, 1991. Hubert Bonin, Histoire de la Société générale. I. 1864-1890. Naissance d’une banque, Geneva, Droz, 2006.
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[6]
See Alfred Richard, The Panama Canal in American National Counsciousness, 1870-1990, New York, Garland, 1990. John Major, Prize Possession: The US and the Panama Canal, 1903-1979, New York and Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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[7]
Ovidio Diaz Espinosi, How Wall Street Created a Nation: JP Morgan, Teddy Roosevelt and the Panama Canal, New York, MJF Books, 2001.
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[8]
André Siegfried, Suez, Panama et les routes maritimes mondiales, Paris, Armand Colin, 1940.
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[9]
William Friar, Portrait of the Panama Canal from Construction to 21st Century, Portland (Oregon), Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1996.
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[10]
See Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal, London, Penguin Press, 2009. Alexander Missal, Seaway to the Future. American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal, Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.
The comparison between both Suez and Panama canals is often spontaneous, and their parallel contribution to worldwide economic growth and to “general progress” is obvious. From the start, Michel Chevalier himself, the Saint-Simonian utopian economist, delivered a little study about a project of establishing a canal through both isthmus of Panama and Suez. Later on, in 1948, the well-known scholar André Siegfried published a book mixing the history and maritime studies about both canals, just before the explosion of the oil traffic. Drawing such a comparison might be still more striking because in both cases the personality and skills of Ferdinand de Lesseps were deeply involved. But the fate of such initiatives met quite different achievements: success on one side and failure on the other. Could we put in touch geopolitical and imperialistic considerations? That is: how to ponder the effects of the opening of both canals on the countries which welcomed them? Then which canal reached the greatest success if we take into account the transit figures?
Huge differences can be reached between the programs of building each canal, but on a first stage both were inspired by French engineering and entrepreneurship, and completed through French initiatives and technology. Basking in the notoriety of his successful Suez canal triumph in 1869, Lesseps’attention quickly focused on an even grander project: building a similar waterway through the Central America isthmus. There was indeed a need for the growing maritime traffic between Europe and western America…
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