Singapore Unlikely Power Chapter 4 Part 1 - The Suez Canal and Global Trade Boom

Chapter IV is where Singapore stops being a scrappy trading outpost and starts becoming a real global port. Three things happened almost at once in the late 1860s and early 1870s: Singapore cut ties with India and reported directly to London, the Suez Canal opened, and the undersea telegraph cable arrived. Perry calls this chapter “Empire at Zenith” and it’s easy to see why. British infrastructure basically supercharged Singapore’s growth.

The Dirty Ditch

That’s what people called the Suez Canal. And before it existed, getting from Europe to Singapore was a serious pain.

The old way was sailing around the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa. Months at sea. The slightly less old way was a bizarre overland shortcut through Egypt. You’d sail to one side, then ride camels and horse-drawn carts across the desert while swallowing flies and getting pelted by sandblown grit, then board another ship on the other side. One Singapore merchant described the meals as “scanty and miserable.” And get this: moving the cargo of a single ship required more than three thousand camels. Not exactly efficient.

The French opened the canal in 1869. Perry describes how the idea had been floating around for centuries, but it was a French philosopher named Claude-Henri Saint-Simon who really pushed the vision. He thought canals could carry humanity into a golden age.

Here’s the thing about the British. They were actually against the canal at first. Their sailing fleet was the biggest in the world, and the Red Sea was terrible for sailing ships. Bad winds, coral reefs, scorching heat. A canal meant switching to steamships, which meant scrapping their entire fleet. Plus they’d have to pay tolls. But as the Edinburgh Review admitted, half the British Empire was on one end of the canal and the other half on the other end. Saving distance was obviously good.

The numbers speak for themselves. Via the canal, a ship could make two or three round trips between Singapore and Europe for every one around the Cape. Perry quotes that this “more than doubled the earning capacity of a Singapore merchant’s capital.”

And when Benjamin Disraeli learned in 1875 that canal shares were available, he borrowed four million pounds from Baron Rothschild (Parliament wasn’t in session, so he just went ahead). That gave Britain over 40 percent ownership. Some MPs thought it was vulgar for the government to be in business. But Queen Victoria liked Disraeli, the public came around, and Britain now controlled the canal.

Joseph Conrad wrote that the canal “had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade.” It changed what it meant to be a sailor. Lapping waves and creaking timber got replaced by engine roar and coal fumes. Seamanship gave way to engineering.

The Kra Canal That Never Was

Here’s a subplot I didn’t expect. For over a century, people kept proposing a canal across the Kra Peninsula in what is now southern Thailand. If built, it would bypass the Straits of Melaka entirely. That meant bypassing Singapore.

The Portuguese thought about it in the 1500s. A French engineer proposed it to the King of Siam in 1677. The British investigated after the 1857 Indian Mutiny, thinking it could help warships reach India faster.

Perry tells a great story about the 1883 French survey expedition. Commander Loftus, a British hydrographer tagging along, spent most of the trip riding elephants through dense jungle. The team did two and a half miles per hour, pulling leeches off their skin, slapping stinging flies, and listening to tigers roar in the dark while trying to sleep on the ground. They ate monkey “cooked French fashion” and pronounced it delicious.

After all that suffering, Loftus concluded there was “as much chance of it ever being accomplished as there is of reaching the moon in four days.” Too much granite, too expensive, and the tolls would never compete with the free passage through the Melaka Straits. A Singapore merchant put it perfectly: “Why, instead of steamers paying to go through the canal, the canal would have to pay steamers for using it.”

The British eventually got a treaty from Siam in 1897 saying nobody could build it without British consent. But Perry notes that the idea keeps coming back. In the 1930s it was the Japanese interested. Today it’s the Chinese.

Wiring the World

The undersea telegraph cable might be even more interesting than the canal, honestly.

Before the cable, communication between Singapore and London took months by sailing ship, weeks by steamer. Ship captains operated with near-total independence because their owners had no way to reach them. When the cable arrived in Singapore in 1871, it changed everything in minutes. Literally minutes.

Perry explains that Britain had a massive advantage in building this global network because of all its “imperial confetti.” Tiny islands and outposts scattered around the globe, previously worthless, now suddenly critical as relay stations for boosting electrical signals. Britain manufactured the cables, laid them with British ships, owned the companies, and found the whole thing profitable.

Here’s a detail I love: the cables used gutta percha as insulation, a rubberlike substance from Southeast Asia, shipped through Singapore. So Singapore was literally supplying the raw material for the technology that was making Singapore more important.

The strategic implications were huge. Undersea cables were nearly impossible to tap or cut. London got commodity prices and trade news before anyone else. Americans wanting news from Asia had to wait for it to travel the long way around through London.

One old Singapore merchant complained: “We lived then above our offices, a small but a very happy community. Now we might almost as well live in London. Our Sundays are not our own. By night and by day we are at work, writing for the mail.” Sound familiar? The 1870s version of being always online.

The Port Scrambles to Keep Up

So here’s what happened. All this new traffic from the Suez Canal and all these steamships needing coal and repairs showed up at Singapore, and the port infrastructure was… not ready.

The P&O shipping company had built the first proper wharf in 1852 at New Harbor. Then the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company developed the waterfront with machine shops, foundries, and boiler shops. But the docks were about a mile from town, and cargo moved between them on bullock carts along a road described as “a vast dust hole with many ruts in it.” Goods literally went missing en route because passersby would help themselves.

Perry presents this wonderful contradiction: Singapore was already a ranking world port, but the pace of an ox still determined how fast cargo got distributed.

The Tanjong Pagar Company absorbed its competitors and controlled nearly all of Singapore’s dock space. The whole economy basically depended on one company. When the colonial government decided it was moving too slowly, they took it over in 1905 and renamed it the Singapore Harbor Board. Even then, congestion and ship delays plagued the port. Thorough mechanization didn’t arrive until after World War II.

But none of that stopped Singapore from growing. By the early twentieth century it had become a globally significant seaport, handling Southeast Asian resources like tin and rubber while distributing European goods across the region.

And that’s the story of Part 1 of Chapter IV. Technology built thousands of miles away in Europe rippled across the globe and landed hardest at Singapore. The canal shortened the distance. The cable shortened the time. And Singapore, sitting right where it all had to pass through, grew with every ship and every signal.

Previous: Chapter III: Queen of the Further East | Next: Chapter IV: Empire at Zenith (Part 2)