Valeska Huber

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

Contents:

Introduction: mobility and its limits

Part I. Imperial Relay Station: Global Space, New Thresholds, 1870s–1890s
1. Rites de passage and perceptions of global space
2. Regimes of passage and troops in the canal zone
3. Companies and workers

Part II. Frontier of the Civilising Mission: Mobility Regulation East of Suez, 1880s–1900s
4. Bedouin and caravans
5. Dhows and slave trading in the Red Sea
6. Mecca pilgrims under imperial surveillance

Part III. Checkpoint: Tracking Microbes and Tracing Travellers, 1890s–1914
7. Contagious mobility and the filtering of disease
8. Rights of passage and the identification of individuals

Conclusion: rites de passage and rights of passage in the Suez Canal region and beyond"

Special Section: Social Planning
Guest Editor: Valeska Huber


Valeska Huber, Introduction: Global Histories of Social Planning

Samuel Coghe, Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–45

Moritz Feichtinger, ‘A Great Reformatory’: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in
Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–63


Muriam Haleh Davis, ‘The Transformation of Man’ in French Algeria: Economic Planning and the Postwar Social Sciences, 1958–62

Valeska Huber, Planning Education and Manpower in the Middle East, 1950s–60s

This article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore. Beyond drawing parallels between the cholera epidemics and the current crisis, the article argues for combining imperial and social histories in order to write richer and more grounded histories of internationalism. It explores this histo-riographical and methodological challenge by analysing the boardrooms of the international sanitary conferences , Middle Eastern quarantine stations catering for Mecca pilgrims, and ocean steamships aiming to move without delay during a worldwide health crisis.

Education is largely absent in recent work on the history of development and modern- ization. Yet it was central to the political project of many leaders of decolonization and figured prominently in five-year plans and other development schemes. The article highlights the central role of education in concepts of development and social planning in the Middle East. This could take the form of central plans but also of statistical and computer-generated projections of future educational and manpower needs. After showing how different concepts of planning education were circulated at the level of international organizations, the article investigates the first Egyptian five-year plan. It looks at the Egyptian Institute of National Planning in Cairo, highlighting that Egyptian planners drew on a variety of different experts and institutions from the US and the Soviet Union to the GDR and India. While the late 1960s ushered in more scepticism toward formal planning and projection, the emphasis on expertise, knowledge and skills as central variables of modern societies has endured.

Introducing the special section on histories of social planning in late colonial and post- colonial societies (1920s–60s), this article argues that we have to take the global origins and reverberations of discourses on planning seriously. It outlines the field of planning and the historiographical debates around it, which mainly centre on European, US and Soviet history. It then checks the viability of the concept for late colonial and post- colonial contexts. In this way, it demonstrates how planning discourses, for instance in recently decolonized states, became global and how they reflected back onto Europe and the USA for example. Beyond summarizing the contributions of the special section, this article raises wider issues concerning the potentials of a dialogue between European, Soviet and US American contemporary history and (post)colonial history. It shows how the paradigm of planning can be applied to settings outside of Europe, the Soviet Union and the USA, and how in turn postcolonial history can contribute to a new understanding of the global history of planning.

This article traces the influence of international networks in three Middle Eastern universities from the 1920s onwards: the American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It shows how American, internationalist, imperial and religious actors competed and how the universities were placed in these often overlapping or interconnected networks. It illustrates the complicated process of institutionalizing the new universities, for instance in financing them or validating degrees. The article also looks at the role the universities played in the attempt to transform local societies, as they devised outreach programmes and language policies that aimed to spread English, to simplify Arabic, or to modernize Hebrew.

The Suez Canal played an essential role in transforming the Mediterranean into a colonial sea by changing its geopolitical features from a lake to a lane connecting faraway possessions of European empires more closely (at least geographically speaking) to the metropoles. At the same time the Suez Canal region itself was colonised in a very specific way, under British occupation on the one hand, yet carrying features of a ‘global locality’ on the other. Besides shedding light on the larger connections of the Suez Canal with the colonial world, this article attempts to understand the colonial situation of Port Said and the Canal, a place built from scratch in an effort to colonise (in the primary sense of the word) a part of the desert. Tracing Port Said and the Suez Canal Zone through different time periods – particularly during the First World War and the inter-war era – this paper tries to pin down the shifting meanings of ‘international’ and ‘colonial’ by highlighting the specificities of this ‘international colonisation’, regulated by agreements and treaties and marked by the influence of competing colonial powers and private companies.

History has for a long time focused on the stable aspects of societies; recently, however, in the context of a rising interest in global interconnections, people on the move have caught the attention of historians. The article follows this interest in stressing the importance of faster mobility for sustaining the expansion of empires or the development of a world economy in the wave of globalisation at the turn of the 20th century. Yet at the same time – and this has mostly been neglected – it is crucial on the one hand to distinguish different kinds of mobility and on the other to analyse how these differentiations were actually established at a time of increasing acceleration. This is pursued by first introducing concepts that have developed such a differentiated approach towards mobility, or rather mobilities. Subsequently these arguments are taken further through an investigation of the political processes that determine the distinction between different mobilities. This structuring of mobilities becomes most evident in spaces where different trajectories overlap and intersect. What emerges is neither all-encompassing acceleration nor the hardening of borders and constraints, but rather the channelling of movements in an attempt to bring them under control.