Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956 is presented as a decisive reversal in the history of Western power in the Orient. The canal had embodied an imperial ambition to overcome distance and bind East and West into a single world under Western influence; when Gamal Abdel Nasser took control of it, that supposedly settled relationship was shown to be politically reversible. In the book’s account, the event brings the material history of the canal into focus as part of a larger argument about Orientalism, imperial power, and the agency of the people whose histories imperial knowledge tried to subordinate.

Background: The Canal as an Imperial Project

The canal’s significance in the book exceeds its practical function as a passage between seas. It represents the culmination of a long process in which the Orient was first rendered knowable, then invaded and possessed, and finally reconstructed through the work of scholars, soldiers, and judges. Their accounts excavated earlier languages, histories, races, and cultures, presenting a classical Orient as the authentic measure by which to judge the modern one. The canal, in this account, was the physical counterpart to that intellectual project: it made the region more accessible to Western power while helping to recast it as part of a shared, administrable world.

The rhetoric surrounding the canal gives this ambition a universal, even providential, cast. A vision of divine breath passing between Occident and Orient imagines the route as a means of bringing people together. Yet the book sets that language of universal connection against the historical consequence it emphasizes: the West had come to the Orient intending to remain. The contrast exposes how a promise of connection could accompany an unequal extension of power rather than mutual understanding.

Nationalization and Reversal

In July 1956, Nasser announced Egypt’s taking over of the canal by invoking the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps. That act supplies the account’s sharp reversal: a route associated with Western arrival and lasting presence becomes the object of Egyptian political control. The episode is not elaborated as a military narrative; its significance here lies in the change of agency and in the contrast between the canal’s imperial history and Egypt’s capacity to alter its terms.

The nationalization also complicates the idea that the canal had permanently erased the Orient’s distinction from the West. Its opening had seemed to dissolve the old distance, turning a land barrier into a maritime artery and recasting resistant difference as partnership. But that partnership was never simply an equal settlement. Nasser’s action demonstrates that the political meaning of the route remained contested, and that the region’s societies were not merely passive terrain in a history directed from Europe.

Orientalism, Power, and Historical Agency

The episode belongs to the book’s argument that the Orient is not a fixed essence waiting to be described. It has been made and remade through power working by way of knowledge, with historical complexity and the diversity of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures repeatedly pushed aside. The canal’s story gives that claim a material dimension: imperial projects can reshape geography and political relationships, but their results are neither natural nor beyond revision.

The book likewise distinguishes understanding other peoples through careful study from knowledge deployed in campaigns of self-affirmation, belligerence, and domination. Against portrayals of Arab and Muslim societies as inherently backward or incapable of political self-definition, it insists on their capacity to struggle for their own visions of what they are and wish to become. Egypt’s taking over of the canal is a concrete instance of that wider insistence. Its narrative function is therefore double: it marks the reach of the imperial project while making visible the possibility of contesting and changing the order that project sought to establish.