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A Shared Sea: The Axes of French and British Imperialism in the Mediterranean, 1798–1914

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British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies ((CIPCSS))

Abstract

The major axes of France’s and Britain’s empires crossed in the Mediterranean—the French on a north-south axis from Marseille to Algeria and the British on an east-west axis from Gibraltar to Egypt and India. Both powers sought to expand their influence in the Mediterranean and make it a strategic asset in their respective empires. After France’s conquest of Algiers in 1830, French administrators and Saint-Simonian economists referred to the Mediterranean as a “French lake” that would challenge British naval supremacy and link France’s imperial present with Roman antiquity. Despite the Mediterranean being a site of Anglo-French rivalry, both imperial powers shared the sea through collaborative, interconnected, and transnational elements that included steamship networks, coaling stations, and diplomatic agreements. By the turn of the twentieth century, the two sides became mutually dependent and mutually threatening in this shared maritime space, neither willing to risk losing vital sea lanes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Valeska Huber, “Connecting Colonial Seas: The ‘International Colonisation’ of Port Said and the Suez Canal during and after the First World War,” European Review of History-Revue d’histoire européenne 19, no. 1 (February 2012), 141.

  2. 2.

    Examples include Clarence B. Davis et al., Railway Imperialism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Freda Harcourt, Flagships of Imperialism: The P&O Company and the Politics of Empire from its Origins to 1867 (Manchester: Manchester University Press); Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

  3. 3.

    David Todd, “A French Imperial Meridian, 1815–1870,” Past & Present 210, no.1 (February 2011): 156; David Todd, “Transnational Projects of Empire in France, c. 1815–c. 1870,” Modern Intellectual History 12, no. 2 (2015).

  4. 4.

    James R. Fichter, “British Infrastructure and French Empire: Anglo-French Steam Interdependency in Asian Waters, c. 1852–1870,” Britain & the World 5, no. 2 (September 2012).

  5. 5.

    Lofti Ben Rejeb, “‘The General Belief of the World’: Barbary as Genre and Discourse in Mediterranean History,” European Review of History-Revue d’histoire européenne 19, no. 1 (February 2012), 15–19, 22, 26.

  6. 6.

    Rejeb, “‘The General Belief of the World,’” 15; Paul Masson, Histoire des établissements et du commerce français dans l’Afrique barbaresque, 1560–1793: Algérie, Tunisie, Tripolitaine, Maroc (Paris: Hachette & Cie, 1903) viii.

  7. 7.

    Lofti Ben Rejeb, “‘The General Belief of the World,’” 19, 25–26.

  8. 8.

    Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 164.

  9. 9.

    Ian Coller, “Barbary and Revolution: France and North Africa, 1789–1798,” in French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories eds. Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 56; Daniel Panzac, The Barbary Corsairs: The End of a Legend, 1800–1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2005). See also Julie Kalman, “La Maison de Bacri et Busnach et l’impérialisme anglo-français en Méditerranée.” Histoire Économie et Société (forthcoming).

  10. 10.

    Jean-Pierre Dubreuil, “Les transformations de la Marine française en Méditerranée (1830–1860)” (PhD diss., University of Nice, 1975), 61.

  11. 11.

    Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (hereafter ANOM) F80 1577, Communications Maritimes: Correspondance par bateaux à vapeur, “Note sur la correspondance par bateaux à vapeur entre la France et l’Afrique (remise à la commission du Budget, le 26 février 1833),” 1. Translation by author.

  12. 12.

    Alex Colombel, Du parti qu’on pourrait tirer d’une expédition d’Alger, ou de la possibilité de fonder, dans le bassin de la Méditerranée, un nouveau système colonial et maritime à l’épreuve de la puissance anglaise (Paris: Delaunay, 1830), 43, 85, 97.

  13. 13.

    Dubreuil, “Les transformations de la Marine française,” 333, 344–345, 350. The coastal lines remained under naval control until 1866.

  14. 14.

    Hélène Blais and Florence Deprest, “The Mediterranean, a Territory between France and Colonial Algeria: Imperial Constructions,” European Review of History 19, no. 1 (Feb. 2012), 34.

  15. 15.

    Patrick Louvier, La puissance navale et militaire britannique en Méditerranée (1840–1871) (Vincennes: Service historique de la Défense, 2006), 14–22.

  16. 16.

    Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 132–133; Robert J. Blyth, “Aden, British India and the Development of Steam Power in the Red Sea, 1825–1839,” in Maritime Empires: British Imperial Maritime Trade in the Nineteenth Century, eds. David Killingray, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2004), 68–69.

  17. 17.

    Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 135–136; Blyth, “Aden,” 73; Howard Robinson, Carrying British Mails Overseas (New York: New York University Press, 1964), 162.

  18. 18.

    Helen M. Davies, Emile and Isaac Pereire: Bankers, Socialists and Sephardic Jews in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 42–43.

  19. 19.

    Michel Chevalier, Système de la Méditerranée (Paris: Aux bureaux du Globe, 1832), 34–38.

  20. 20.

    Michel Chevalier, Des intérêts matériels en France: Travaux publics, routes, canaux, chemins de fer, 2nd ed. (Paris: Imprimerie de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1838), 266, 289.

  21. 21.

    Valeska Huber, “Connecting Colonial Seas,” 143.

  22. 22.

    Basil Greenhill, “Steam before the Screw,” in The Advent of Steam: The Merchant Steamship before 1900, ed. Robert Gardiner, Conway’s History of the Ship (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1993), 18–19.

  23. 23.

    Freda Harcourt, “British Oceanic Mail Contracts in the Age of Steam, 1838–1914,” in Journal of Transport History 9 (1988): 1–2; Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress, 39; J. Forbes Munro, Maritime Enterprise and Empire: Sir William Mackinnon and His Business Network, 1823–93 (Suffolk, UK: The Boydell Press, 2003) 35–67.

  24. 24.

    Marie-Françoise Berneron-Couvenhes, “La concession des services maritimes postaux au XIXe siècle: Le cas exemplaire des Messageries Maritimes,” Revue économique 58, no. 1 (1 January 2007): 261; Marie-Françoise Berneron-Couvenhes, Les Messageries Maritimes: L’essor d’une grande compagnie de navigation française, 1851–1894 (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 50–51.

  25. 25.

    Berneron-Couvenhes, “La concession des services maritimes postaux,” 268; “Historique des services maritimes subventionnées entre la France, l’Algérie, la Tunisie, la Tripolitaine et le Maroc,” in Revue de la marine marchande et des pêches maritimes 2 (November 1915): 139–142.

  26. 26.

    Davies, Emile and Isaac Pereire, 73; Paul Bois, La Transat et Marseille (Marseille: Imprimerie Espace, 1996), 9; Hippolyte Castille, Les frères Péreire (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 28–33.

  27. 27.

    Berneron-Couvenhes, Les Messageries Maritimes, 405–407.

  28. 28.

    Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 130; Joseph N. F. M. à Campo, “Engines of Empire: The Rôle of Shipping Companies in British and Dutch Empire Building,” in Shipping, Technology and Imperialism, Gordon Jackson and David M. Williams, eds. (Hants, England: Scolar Press, 1996), 63, 94.

  29. 29.

    Michael S. Smith, “Unlikely Success: Chargeurs Réunis and the Marine Transport Business in France, 1872–1914,” Entreprises et Histoire (September 1994): 11.

  30. 30.

    Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress, 42–45.

  31. 31.

    Fichter, “British Infrastructure and French Empire,” 188–191.

  32. 32.

    Joëlle Redouane, “La présence anglaise en Algérie de 1830 à 1930,” Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée, no. 38 (1984): 16.

  33. 33.

    René Lespès, Alger: Etude de Géographie et d’Histoire urbaines (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1930), 688–689.

  34. 34.

    ANOM GGA 1 O 284, Folder Port d’Alger – mouvement des relâcheurs (1901–1904), “Trafic du chabon à Gibraltar et Alger,” 1; Lespès, Alger, 647–650.

  35. 35.

    Redouance, “La présence anglaise,” 26.

  36. 36.

    “Historique Alger (1851–1892),” Worms et Cie, accessed 30 Jan. 2018, http://www.wormsetcie.com/fr/archives/1948/194800de-worms-et-ciehistorique-alger-1851-1892.

  37. 37.

    Berneron-Couvenhes, Les Messageries Maritimes, 83.

  38. 38.

    Louis Laffite, “Simplon et Faucille: Rôle économique d’une nouvelle ligne internationale,” Le génie civil, no. 19 (5 Sept. 1903): 293; Le Matin 16 Feb. 1899, 4.

  39. 39.

    Le Journal, “La Malle des Indes” 12 Jan. 1900, 4.

  40. 40.

    David Todd, “Transnational Projects of Empire in France,” 291–292.

  41. 41.

    Adolphe Duponchel, Le chemin de fer Transsaharien, jonction coloniale entre l’Algérie et le Soudan (Montpellier, France: de Boehm & Fils, 1878), 218.

  42. 42.

    Paul G. Halpern, The Mediterranean Naval Situation, 1908–1914 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971), 141–145; Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 6.

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    1. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

      John Perry

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    1. European Studies, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

      James R. Fichter

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    Perry, J. (2019). A Shared Sea: The Axes of French and British Imperialism in the Mediterranean, 1798–1914. In: Fichter, J.R. (eds) British and French Colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97964-9_6

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