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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

IN-BETWEEN EMPIRES:

STEAMING THE TRANS-SUEZ HIGHWAYS OF FRENCH IMPERIALISM (1830-1930)

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO

THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

BY

CHARLES BÉGUÉ FAWELL

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

AUGUST 2021

ii

Table of Contents

List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... iii

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. iv

Abstract ...................................................................................................................... vi

Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1

Part One. Entering an Age of Steam .................................................................................... 46

Chapter 1. Entering an Age of Steam.................................................................................... 46

Chapter 2. Gateway to the Orient: Marseille and the Messageries .......................................... 83

Part Two. Space, Place, and the Steamship ......................................................................... 122

Chapter 3. A Place in the Imperial Nation-State .................................................................. 122

Chapter 4. A City on the Sea: Society, Urbanity, and the Trans-Suez Ocean Liner ............... 154

Chapter 5. A Hundred Highways: Routes, Space, and Civilization ...................................... 213

Part Three. The Corridors of Power ................................................................................... 244

Chapter 6. E................................. 244

Chapter 7. Working the Line: Militancy and Anti-labor Repression in Transit ..................... 287

Chapter 8. Rulers of the Route: State, Company, and the Troubled Marriage that Made

Empire Move333

Chapter 9. Interoceanic Commuters: Mobile Sociality and Imperial Elites ........................... 377

Conclusion................................................................................................................ 426

Bibliography................................................................................................................ 435

iii

List of Figures

Figure 1. Trans-Suez routes of the Messageries. ....................................................................... 8

-(1903) ................................................................... 9

Figure 3. Marseille's barren quarantine station (1901) ............................................................. 76

(1901). ......................................................................... 76

Figure 5. "Settling in. First contact with the Lazaret" (1901) ................................................... 77

.................................................... 93 ......................................................... 93 -1925). ........................................ 94 ...................... 95 ...................................... 97 .................................... 97 ........ 132

Figure 13. Barometer replacing Napoleon III under Third Republic....................................... 133

Figure 14. Cross--91).................... 175

Figure 15. Cross-section image of steamship without inhabitants. (1889-91).......................... 175

Figure 16. Cross- (c. 1914). .................... 176

Figure 17. Cross-section image of a Parisian apartment building (1883) ................................ 177

Figure 18. Cross-section image of a department store (1889)................................................. 178

Figure 19. Statue depicting Ho Chi Minh 1911 departure from Dragon Wharf (Nha Rong).. 232 Figure 20. s.. .......................................... 233 -Ho in 1894. ........................ 402 iv

Acknowledgements

This dissertation is the product of many minds. I am grateful for the exceptional mentorship and guidance of Leora Auslander who encouraged me to pursue this project years ago and has been improving it ever since with her patience, wisdom, and enthusiasm. I also thank Tara Zahra, Emily Osborn, and Jan Goldstein, who inspired me in their classrooms and challenged me to follow the dissertation as far as it would go. Along with James Hevia, their unstinting support, expert reading, and keen insights made this project possible. I owe a debt of gratitude to mentors and colleagues in France, too. Jean-François Klein has never ceased to provide safe haven, good company, and unparalleled advice about navigating French archives. Claire Zalc led me to lively venues for developing the research behind this dissertation and has been an inspiration since long ago at Sciences Po. This dissertation also bears the influence of Stéphane Gerson and Herrick Chapman, with whom I was lucky enough to begin learning the craft of research during a formative year at New York University. I am thankful to members of the Transnational Modern Europe, Modern France and Francophone World, and Historical Capitalisms workshops, who kindly read early drafts and offered invaluable commentary. Robert Morrissey, William Sewell Jr., Faith Hillis, Eleonory Gilburd, Michael Geyer, Colin Jones, and many others from these workshops showed me the path forward and encouraged me to carry on. Colleagues beyond Chicago, like Charles Keith, Eric Jennings, and Alessandro Saluppo, have enriched this dissertation immensely. I am also thankful to mentors in the classroom, like Ken Pomeranz, Alice Goff, and Joshua Craze, who broadened my horizons in the critical transition from research to writing. Finally, this project relied on funding from the Lurcy Trust, the French Embassy in the United States, and the Society of for French Historical Studies, as well as centers across the University v of Chicago: the France Chicago Center, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, the Center for International Social Sciences Research, and the Social Sciences Division. Good friends have guided me through the long journey of a doctorate. To Manuel Rodriguez, Elsa Poissonnet, Grace Athena Flott, Stefano Mazzilli-Daechsel, and Luigi Cascone, thank you for the memories, and especially that of Jasmine Jahanshahi, who might have become a historian. To Giancarlo Tursi, Benjamin Shurtleff, Siv Lie, Andrew Galati, Amy Vertal, Adriano Valeri, and Pedro Pizano, thank you for always finding me between cities and archives. To Niand Charlotte Robertson, thank you for making a world on Harper Avenue. To Eliza Starbuck Little and Carmen Merport Quiñones, thank you for going to the Rainbo Club that night. To Usama Rafi, Oliver Cussen, Patrick Lewis, Sanaz Sohrabi, Roy Kimmey, Damien Bright, Marco Aurelio Torres, David Gutherz, Ingrid Becker, and Lucas Pinheiro, thank you for filling Hyde Park with laughter, even during a pandemic. To Mercedes González de la Rocha, Agustín Escobar Latapí, Diego Escobar González, and Denise Flores Somarriba, thank you for giving me a second home. Above all, I am grateful to my family. To my mother, Yvette Bégué, thank you for showing me the hidden value of infrastructure, in more ways than one. To my father, John Wesley Fawell, thank you for teaching me to write about what you love. To my brother, Theodore Wesley Fawell, thank you for sharing with me your boundless imagination. And to my wife, Inés Escobar González, thank you for journeying with me from Tlajomulco to Quincy, from Marseille to Hanoi, and from Cornell to Chapinaya. Your passion

and intellect transformed this dissertation into a labor of love. Con locura y con razón, you make

life beautiful. This is for you. vi

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes mobility and power in an age of expansionary imperialism and accelerated globalization. Based on archives in France, the U.K., and Vietnam, In-between Empires reconstructs the social histories of steamship voyages along the Trans-Suez maritime highways connecting France to its Indo-Pacific empire between the 1830s and the 1930s. In so doing, the dissertation reinterprets the rise of steam-powered imperialism. In much historiography, steamships and maritime highways represent unproblematic pathways through which imperial sovereignty flowed as smoothly as information through an underwater cable. Reifying a meta- narrative in which space and time were swiftly and uniformly annihilated in the latter-19th century, such an interpretation can imply that European states, once equipped with coal-burning steamships, moved people and cargo across the thousands of kilometers separating empire and metropole reflexively and without resistance. This dissertation, by contrast, demonstrates that steamship highways across Suez were contested borderlands where empire was made and unmade. Juxtaposing the everyday life of crowded steamships against the politics of a vast route, I argue that French imperial sovereignty took shape in the struggle to control mobile subjects and govern a trans-imperial highway. From the demands of a multi-racial maritime workforce to the networking of an interoceanic commuter class, a host of actors jockeyed for influence over the highways of imperialism. At the apex of European imperialism and a global age of steam, routine transit was fraught with conflict and filled with encounters, many of which called into question the

stability of colonial racial hierarchies and the ideology of civilization itself. In-between empires,

moreover, the dilemmas of daily life establishing legal jurisdiction, for instance, or following rules for disease control produced dramatic experiments in inter-imperial governance while enlivening the tensions between nation, empire, and capital. 1

Introduction

Over the course of two months in 1906, the steamship Tonkin traveled from Marseille, France to Yokohama, Japan and back again: voyage number 11 in the administrative schedule of the Messageries Maritimes shipping company. As the captain of the Tonkin, A. Charbonnel, related in his report, the voyage had seen troubles, but only its fair share.

En route, five of the Tonkin

t that settled on their makeshift infirmary.1 The accident, Charbonnel conjectured, was probably related to

variations in the coal that the Tonkin picked up along its layovers. For as they struggled to identify

the ideal balance between British and Japanese supplies, the Tonkin themselves tasked not only with feeding the engines, but also with dumping thousands of kilos of soot, bucket by bucket, into the sea 80,640 kilos every 24 hours, to be exact. In any event, the ship was near one of its layovers at the time of the burning accident, so Charbonnel left the men in a hospital, replaced them, and carried on. Then, flu ripped through his workers, typhoid made an appearance, and, along with a few European crewmembers, an Indochinese soldier onboard showed symptoms of tuberculosis adenitis. Charbonnel could not identify the source of the contagion, and while he worried that the undetected.2 Health issues aside, Charbonnel found his crew tolerable enough. The officers were

1 Rapports de voyage, 1997 002 4337, Association

French Lines, Le Havre, France. [

2 Ibid. [.]

2 ewards had a better 3 The passengers, on the other hand, caused the captain no end of headaches. On the return -minute spots and special accommodations to some Very Important Passengers. To make room for them, several husbands and wives had to be separated, leading to interminable complaints. Other passengers griped that strange odors were for them to distinguish the horizon. As usual, some European, 3rd-class passengers protested their 4 Government officials, within and without the ship, provided little relief for a weary captain.

When the Tonkin

ordered Charbonnel to stop at a nearby island prison and pick up an important file for him. The detour, Charbonnel grumbled, took hours, and extended his path by 9 miles. Moreover, in a state- claims nerve to complain that Chinese migrant workers lodged on the deck were smoking opium and rendering the ship uninhabitable with their odors.5 The accusation was demonstrably false,

3 Ibid. [bon et discipliné] [ommes sur lesquels on peut compter] [ne présente pas de grandes garanties

et fait son service sans zèle] [...]

4 Ibid. [

couleur.] [].

5 The ledger (Cahier des reclamations in French) was a fixture of passenger liners.

3

6 Another voyage; another litany of complaints; another

report; Charbonnel was used to the routine, and upon returning to Marseille, he submitted his paperwork. of approval from the directors of the Messageries Maritimes. The report had been read, reviewed, and even underlined here and there. A half dozen signatures and initials on the cover page supplied further proof that various strata of management had processed the report and were ready to move on to another. And why should they not? Their captain and his 220 workers had brought the while delivering 1,500 passengers to their destinations, and hauling tons of silk and silk-derived products, tin, hides, pepper, tea, coffee, gum, letters, and packages across the seas. From the

7 The directors were

satisfied. Having harvested the relevant data for their investors in the public and their regulators in the state, they put away the report and closed the file. This dissertation reopens the files of voyages like the Tonkinng, it retraces the reached a warp-speed pace, and European imperialism claimed global hegemony. In the mid-19th century, the oceangoing steamship transformed from dream to reality. By

6 Ibid. [ersonne ne se tient

à cause de la chaleur.]

7 Roughly 1.5 million euros in 2020, this figure almost certainly includes not only revenue from tickets, but also

onboard spending. According to the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) online

calculator. See: https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/2417794 (last accessed 4/12/2021). 4 8 In the early-1860s, shortly after the engineer Isambard Brunel designed the most colossal steamship nding, to what new laws, new manners, new politics, vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only 9 Floating City encouraged readers to come aboard the steamship of modernity and find out for themselves where it was heading.10 Soon enough, liberals, conservatives, and socialists alike began to accept the annihilation of space and time as a fact of life. By the 1870s and 80s, steamships had overcome longstanding engineering obstacles and were beginning to be built in steel. As interoceanic cables laced the globe and the Suez Canal began to flow, steamships finally surpassed sailing ships in terms of global tonnage. Regularly scheduled lines reached into the far corners of the earth and the re. Meanwhile, European powers began claiming larger and larger swathes of the world with unprecedented frenzy, in a process that reached its apex just after the First World War.

8 Dispatches for the New York

Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx, ed. James Ledbetter (London: Penguin, 2007), 219-224. The day was,

in fact, still far off.

9 -1860s), in: Thackeray, Roundabout Papers, ed. John Wells

(New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1925), 75.

10 Jules Verne, Une Ville flottante (Paris

Great Eastern, across the Atlantic during the late-1860s. 5 Historians have tended to portray oceangoing steamships in this period as marvels of engineering, showcases of décor, vectors of economic exchange, and tools of imperial power.11 And indeed, steamships were all those things. But while a wide body of scholarship has understood the steamship as an instrument of power that transformed the world, far less work has sought to transformations took place.12 Existing scholarship thus implies that steamships in motion were unpeopled and untroubled passageways through which sovereignty and capital flowed like information through an underwater cable. Under that assumption, one can easily take for granted the satisfaction of company directors as they filed away the Tonkin

11 Ewan Cortlett, (London: Conway Press, 1975); Daniel R.

Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1981); Denis Griffiths, Steam at Sea: Two Centuries of Steam-powered Ships (London: Conway

Press, 1997); Bernard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Anne Massey, Designing Liners: A History of Interior Design

Afloat (New York: Routledge, 2006); Freda Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism: The P&O Company and the

Politics of Empire from its Origins to 1867 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); John Armstrong and

David Williams, The Impact of Technological Change: The Early Steamship in Britain

Maritime Economic History Association, 2011); Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth

Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Steven Gray, Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal,

the Royal Navy and the British Empire, 1870-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Crosbie Smith Coal, Steam, and

Ships. Engineering, Enterprise and Empire on the Nineteenth Century Seas (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2018); Daniel Finamore, Ghislaine Wood, Ocean Liners: Speed and Style (London: V&A Publishing, 2018);

Laurie D. Ferreiro, Bridging the Seas: The Rise of Naval Architecture in the Industrial Age, 1800-2000 (Cambridge:

MIT Press, 2020). Steamships have most often been instrumental secondary characters in histories of globalization

Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Anchor

history of time standardization: The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2015). The disproportionate focus on technology, business, design, and décor is also reflected in the relevant

journals: etc.

12 A few models for peopling the steamship and problematizing its functionalist historiography have emerged since

2010: Frances Steele, Oceania under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870-1914

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru

and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Anne Reinhart, Navigating Semi-

colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860-1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia

Center, 2018); and Kris Alexanderson, Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch

Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Douglas R. Burgess Jr., Engines of Empire: Steamships

and the Victorian Imagination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), while less concerned with socio-political

transformation, problematizes aspects of the functionalism that defines most historiography dealing with steamships.

6 gover indifference to the fractious world of social contact and suffering within his ship. In this dissertation, however, I argue for lingering in-between the lines of the voyage report, exploring the dark corners of the steamship, and reacquainting ourselves with the time and space of monthlong, interoceanic voyages between Europe and its trans-Suez empires. Far from being neat vectors of power, steamships and the routes they traveled were contested places where empire was made and unmade. As mobile borderlands where social worlds collided and cohabited, steamships in transit gave life and form to imperial sovereignty. This process unfolded according to the particular conditions of possibility of a moving environment in which social life, while shaping sovereignty, then, requires determining what kind of place an ocean liner was. For as it moved across and between empires, the trans-Suez steamship took different forms for different

travelers. A paradisiacal city on the sea for some was a floating prison for others. In the interstitial

space of maritime highways, moreover, drawing lines between national, imperial, international, and inter-imperial realms required constant negotiation.

With fresh eyes, the voyage report of the Tonkin

owners and authorities let on and, for that matter, less settled than historiography would suggest. In an age of empires built on explicit racial hierarchies, the Tonkin clearly struggled to separate known for technological mastery over transport, the endless buckets of soot, uninhabitable quarters, and blinding electrical lights paint an odd picture. And in a period of intensified globalization, it stands out that the ship slipped through the Suez Canal with its outbreaks of disease undeclared and undetected. Other questions emerge from this seemingly routine report. By 7 what right could a governor order the ship of a private company with VIPs onboard, no less to carry out an errand at a colonial prison fortress (this would hardly go over well on a jet flight -builder, a globalizer, and an annihilator of space, this ship was a problematic agent. In that regard, the Tonkin was typical. In the chapters that follow, I aim to structure and clarify the discordant details, lingering questions, and fractious picture of everyday life emerging from ships like the Tonkin as they traversed maritime highways across the Suez Canal between the 1870s and the 1930s. Throughout, my principal frame of analysis is France, the Messageries Maritimes shipping company, and a trans-Suez highway that ran across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and around the Horn of Africa, before splitting in three directions: to East Asia, Australia and the South Pacific, or Southern Africa (See maps below). Of course, these routes were, by definition, reversible, and might be better understood as paths connecting the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Sea of Japan, and the Pacific Ocean. Finally, such routes were, in another sense, constellations of port cities where layovers took place. Along the so- Tonkin generally stopped at Naples, Port-Said, Aden or Djibouti, Bombay or Colombo, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, and Yokohama, before doing it all again in reverse.13

13 While it would be impossible to treat all these port cities in depth, this dissertation returns frequently to: Port-Saïd,

the freewheeling Egyptian frontier town at the northern head of the Suez Canal; British-administered Aden and

colonial city in British Ceylon; Singapore, the chokepoint of Asian maritime traffic hovering over the Straits of

8 I propose that it is vital for charting the rise across multiple Ocean Worlds. Trans- Suez highways were global borderlands where imperial projects took shape and met their limits. Theaters of commerce, war, diplomacy, administration, migration, policing, and labor battles, these routes traversed an immense diversity of cultures and climates. To many travelers, they formed nothing less than a world system. Figure 1. Trans-Suez routes of the Messageries. Dates indicate the year when service began on a given line. M.F. Berneron-Couvenhes, Les Messageries Maritimes. compagnie de navigation francaise, 656. 9

Figure 2. Route map of the - in 1903,

From: Encylopédie des Messageries Maritimes, Philippe Ramona Collection, available online at: http://www.messageries-maritimes.org/extreme- orient.htm (last accessed: 5/19/2021).

Along trans-Suez routes, the Messageries

shipping line. Its ships, which were subsidized significantly by the French government, transported civilians and commercial cargo, but also government employees ranging from clerks and teachers to high-ranking administrators and officers, as well as state-ordered equipment and supplies. Ever since its founding in the early-1850s, the company played a vital part in connecting continental France to its growing array of colonies, protectorates, and concessions in Indochina, China, Madagascar, Réunion, Pondicherry, Djibouti, New Caledonia and the South Pacific.14 In times of

war, as thousands of soldiers filled the decks of Messageries liners, the ties that bound the company

to the French state were particularly evident.

14 The Messageries is virtually absent from Anglophone scholarship. The most extensively researched history of the

Messageries is: Marie-Françoise Berneron-Couvenhes, Les Messageries maritimes. compagnie de navigation française, 1851-1894 Bois, Le Grand siècle des Messageries maritimes (Marseill-

Provence, 1992) ; Francis Drémeaux, Les Messageries maritimes à Hong Kong, 1918-1941 (Gope Éditions, 2014).

Other histories of the company have come from outside the academy. See, for instance, the company director, Roger

Sur les routes de la mer avec les Messageries maritimes (Paris: André Bonne, 1968); Philippe Ramona,

(Joué les Tours: Sutton, 2001); and Pierre Patarin, Messageries maritimes: paquebots et voyageurs du passé (Ouest-France, 1997). 10quotesdbs_dbs27.pdfusesText_33

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