Red Sea

The Red Sea is presented as a strategic corridor within the imperial geography of the late Ottoman Near East. In Edward Said’s account, British control of the sea formed part of a wider system connecting Egypt and Mesopotamia with the Persian Gulf and Suez Canal; the region’s routes and boundaries were not merely mapped, but made consequential through political power.

Strategic Place in British Imperial Geography

Said locates the Red Sea within Britain’s sphere of influence across the spaces between the Mediterranean and India. Britain was established in Egypt and Mesopotamia and, through a series of treaties with local rulers whom Said describes as powerless, controlled the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Suez Canal, together with much of the intervening land. The sea thus figures not as an isolated body of water but as one part of a connected imperial route and territorial system.

That system depended on arrangements that presented control as a matter of agreements with local authorities, even as the account emphasizes the imbalance of power behind those agreements. The Red Sea’s strategic significance therefore lies both in its location and in its incorporation into a larger structure of British influence.

Anglo-French Rivalry and the Ottoman Near East

The Red Sea also belongs to the wider setting of competition between Britain and France in territory associated with the weakening Ottoman Empire. Britain’s established influence contrasted with France’s more intermittent projects, including railway schemes planned across areas described as more or less British territory. France also claimed a role as protector of Christian minorities. Despite their rivalry, the two powers agreed in principle that Asiatic Turkey should eventually be partitioned.

Before and during the First World War, secret diplomacy pursued the division of the Near East first into spheres of influence and then into mandated or occupied territories. British committees studied possible policy, and the Bunsen Committee was among the bodies from which joint Anglo-French teams emerged. In this account, the Red Sea is part of the geographical field within which routes, territories, and imperial claims were organized, while the negotiations over partition sought to manage competition between the powers.

Geography as an Instrument of Power

Said’s treatment of the Red Sea contributes to his larger argument that geographical space was not a neutral backdrop to imperial history. European powers described, mapped, and negotiated the Orient in ways that could make its territories appear available for external direction. The political arrangements surrounding the Red Sea demonstrate how control over waterways and connected lands could be folded into an expansive imperial geography.

The sea’s significance in the passage is therefore relational: it links British positions in Egypt and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal, and it situates those positions within Anglo-French rivalry and plans for the Ottoman Near East. Its appearance supports Said’s account of how geographical knowledge and imperial power worked together to define and administer the region.