The Monstrosity of Maritime Capitalism - 3 Quarks Daily 3quarksdaily.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from 3quarksdaily.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás
Beginning in the late 1860s, the decade that it took to construct the Suez Canal, photographs depicting its feats of engineering circulated across the world. Sold to travelers as souvenirs, featured in
Le Monde, and later exhibited at the 1889 Paris world fair, they enshrined on paper the industrial monumentality of the dredgers that excavated earth into sea.
The Ever Given provided a rare glimpse into global markets, whose workings are typically invisible dissolved in the abstract, numerical, quasi-magical relations of capital flows.
As publicized images of the machinic wonders of modernity, they also served as promissory notes, enticing investors to purchase shares in the joint-stock Suez Canal Company. The photographs telegraphed seductive promises of financial gain, pictorializing the genius of European engineering that could dig a manmade channel across the African continent. Running through the pictures, historian Mohamed Gamal-Eldin disc