Zachary Karabell's "Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal" inevitably will be compared with David McCullough's immensely popular "The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914."
Both are about the building of the two major public works that shrank the world when travel by sea was the only way to go. Both are about small groups of strong-minded men, rooted in the 19th century belief in progress, who overcame doubters and skeptics to achieve their bold visions. Both are about the forces of nationalism that, for good and bad, drove nations to assert themselves and their superiority. Both are about great engineering feats that were more important to humanity when they were constructed than they are now.
The two books, though, are written from quite different points of view. McCullough's, exhaustive at a length of more than 700 pages, accepts at face value the greatness of the cause of which he writes and its value for humanity. "The creation of a water passage across Panama was one of the supreme human achievements of all time ...," he wrote. "Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization."
Karabell's book, much shorter at about 320 pages, gazes at his canal through the irony-tinted spectacles of history. "Sitting at the point where the canal ends and the Red Sea begins," he writes, "watching dilapidated freighters glide past, it is hard not to focus on decline, but that is too easy. The Suez Canal was the inscription of an idea on the face of the earth. As a vision it was beautiful and inspiring; as a reality, it has sometimes been a blessing and usually not. In its prime, it offered, at best, power and wealth. In its decay it is Ozymandias...." He refers to the poet Shelley's image of a colossal broken statue in the desert sands inscribed "My Name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Karabell's study excellently places the genesis of the Suez Canal in the turbulence of post-revolutionary, 19th century France, in particular in the phenomenon of Saint-Simonism. Philosopher Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon, with his follower Auguste Comte, developed the theory that human progress could be built on the application of observable facts. The resulting "positivism" afforded carte blanche to 19th century entrepreneurship.
