Former Suez Canal Authority Head asserts that there is no substitute for the Suez Canal in maritime transport, in response to the announcement of the Economic Corridor project by the United States, India, and Saudi Arabia.
Whoever looks at Egypt finds that it constitutes the backbone and heart of the Eastern Mediterranean given its geopolitical points and dimensions. So, it was natural for whoever wanted to control this region to control Egypt.
The Suez crisis should awaken India to a stark geopolitical reality
It took the six-day blockage of the Suez Canal to remind us how dependent India is on free passage through the canal and the Red Sea. While the 400-metre-long container ship, MV Ever Given which ran aground into the east bank of the Suez Canal on 23 March and blocked all movement till it was released on 29 March is now in Egyptian custody, the saga has sent out economic and strategic alarm bells.
This makes India the largest crude importer through the canal. India is also the sixth-largest exporter of oil products through the Suez, after Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya and Algeria.
I am a social and cultural historian of the modern Middle East, with a particular focus on nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Egypt. My research and teaching explore transnational processes and questions of state governance in provincial settings, empire, and the mobility of people, ideas, and goods.
I am currently working on a manuscript titled Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said, 1859-1906: Labor Mobility and the Making of the Suez Canal. In this book, embracing labor migrants who followed domestic as well as international routes, I trace the social and cultural history of the Suez Canal region. I pay particular attention to the different kinds of mobility and circulation that both traversed and wound up in Port Said and the Isthmus of Suez. My future research will take two directions. One is the social history of public health and medicine in the Suez Isthmus region in the turn of the twentieth century. The other is an exploration of migrants correspondence, with par