-
Photography, Archaeology, and Imperialism in theNineteenth
Century, Part One
Nineteenth Century Imperialism in the Middle East
Part One: James McDonald and the Ordnance Survey
"It is in fact with the Bible in his hand that a traveller ought
to visit the Holy Land."
Viscount Franois-Ren de Chateaubriand. Itinraire de Paris
Jrusalem (1811)
??Here's a question for you: what is the connection between a
college graduation, the Suez Canaland the terrorist group ISIS,
also known as ISIL? The answer lies in the political condition of
theOttoman Empire in the Levant in relation to the European powers,
which were circling like vulturesof a still stirring corpse as
early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the
entirenineteenth century, it was easier to pick off chunks of the
recumbent empire than it was to instigatea direct war and the
European powers allowed their ally during the Crimean War to
continue as anineffective shadow of its former self. If nothing
else, the continued existence of the Ottoman Empirewas a check on
the ambitions of another circling vulture, the rising Russian
Empire. The extent ofthe inability of the Ottoman Empire to respond
to the incursions or invasions into its territories by itsfellow
empire makers, France and England, can be measured by the weak
response of Turkey to theFrench usurpation of Egyptian lands and
Egyptian peoples during the building of the Suez Canal.Ever since
Napolon scouted Egypt in 1798 and claimed it as his conquest before
he returned toFrance, the French were aware to the possibility of
cutting a canal across the Isthmus to connect theRed Sea to the
Mediterranean Sea. Teams of Napolonic engineers were sent out the
explore thefeasibility of such a project but incorrectly concluded
that the relative sea levels were tooincompatible for such a
connection. It wasn't until 1847 that more modern and accurate
surveysrevealed that the levels of the Mediterranean and Red Seas
were similar and the dream of a canalwas resurrected.
200_.jpg" width="359" />
In the intervening decades, England had surged ahead of France
and began to build a substantialempire, with India firmly in the
hands of its East India Company, and Great Britain eyed
Frenchactivities in Egypt warily. For England, Egypt was an
important land bridge to India. Indeed, due tothe Anglo-Turkish
Trade Treaty of 1838, the British Empire had strong trade interests
in Egypt,especially in its cotton, accounting for a lion's share of
the imports and exports of its subordinatedpartner. And in fact, by
mid century, the strategic territory was semi-independent from the
OttomanEmpire but under the dubious protection and control of
England and France. England, ever
-
interested in transporting its goods across Egypt, built a
railroad, the Alexandria-Cairo-Suez,completed in 1857. In response
to the English activities in Egypt, the French proposed the
longdreamed of Canal across the Suez. Perhaps wisely, the British
stood back and allowed the French todig the massive trench,
intending to claim its rewards in increased trade while spending no
Englishmoney in the process. During the messy and corrupt business
of building the Canal, the Britishprotested the sheer scale of
theft of lands from a "simple people" and the outright slavery of
theEgyptian workers in the service of the French government of
Napolon III. The Emperor was relatedby marriage to the former
diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-1894),who was in charge
offinancing the project and fashioned a favorable agreement with
the viceroy of Egypt, Said Pasha.Pasha, in return, granted the
necessary lands along the canal route and needed the quarries
formaterials and the human labor, all provided without cost to the
French.
Although the actual construction of the Canal began in 1861, the
time of the industrial revolution,the conditions for workers was
the same as that of ancient Egypt under the Pharaohs-they
workedwith their hands, no machines and no salaries. Machines were
expensive and cheap labor, four-fifthsof which worked for free
under the threat of government violence, greatly increased the
futureprofits for the French, especially if those who toiled used
the same methods employed underPharaoh Senusret III in 1850 BCE.
Igniting a media campaign, the British used the Frenchexploitation
of Egyptian labor as a wedge between the French and the rest of the
civilized Europeanworld. Eventually, public opinion and threats
from the Ottoman Empire, the Porte, forced theEmperor and his
minions to pay the workers a living wage in 1863 and the increased
expense forcedthe French to use and even invent machines to build
the Canal. The Egyptian government went intosuch debt breaking open
the Isthmus that it sold the majority of its shares to England and
France,who now, for all intents and purposes, owned the Suez Canal
when it opened in 1869 in a ceremonyon November 17-surely the
high-water mark of the Second Empire. At the request of the
viceroy, thecomposer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) wrote the opera
Aida in 1871 and its famous triumphal marchused for college
graduations to this day.
Opening the Suez Canal, November 1869
Historically, Egypt was not the only Middle Eastern territory of
the Ottoman Empire where Englandand France vied for control. The
two nations also took advantage of the lax control of Turkey
overthe Levant or the modern nations of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon,
Palestine, and Syria, and Iraq. This isthe medieval territory of
the "caliphate" or parts of the old Abbasid Caliphate, from mid
eighthcentury to the mid thirteenth century, predating the Ottoman
Empire. By the mid nineteenthcentury, all of these nations were
within the imperial sphere of England and France, as tolerated
bythe Ottoman Empire. The extent to which this modern imperialism
was self-assured andunchallenged can be quite literally illustrated
by a major photographic activity in the area, the
-
Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Syria, which included
Jerusalem. This massive military andbiblical examination of the
"holy land" was undertaken by the British Empire between 1864
and1869. "Ordnance" means exactly what the word states, weapons,
ammunition, guns, cannon, andother military supplies. The result of
this Survey was hundreds of photographs, most taken by asergeant,
James McDonald, in the service of his country, a military
reconnaissance acting under theguise of biblical antiquarians in
search of archaeological sites.
James McDonald. Members of the Sinai Survey
(The Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Sinai) (1869)
In 1873, the British publication The Athenaeum announced that
the Ordnance Survey of thePeninsula of Sinai made by Capts. C. W.
Wilson and H. S. Palmer, R. E., under the direction of Col.Sir
Henry James, R. E., Director-General of the Ordnance Survey. 5
vols. had completed itspublication, explaining that three of the
five volumes, containing the photographs, had beenpublished two
years earlier.The newspaper noted that the idea of the Survey was
instigated byreligious figures who wanted to explore what was then
called "the Holy Land" to locate the majorsites mentioned in the
Bible. The significance of such a religiously inspired "survey" can
be betterunderstood not only against the backdrop of the Suez Canal
in progress and the recent publicationof Charles Darwin's On the
Origin of Species in 1859, a book that challenged conventional
Christianassumptions of faith with suggestive science. Photographs,
such as those taken by McDonald, ofBiblical sites were thought to
be a form of irrefutable proof of the final truth of the events
related inthe Bible itself. Today, as Suzanne Richard pointed out
in Near Eastern Archaeology: AReader (2003) pointed out, the fields
of Biblical archaeology and Palestinian archaeology, i.e.,religious
studies and historical studies, while overlapping in spheres of
interest, are separate inmethodologies, but in the dawn of
archaeology, there would have been no distinction between theBible
and actual history.
-
James McDonald. Seyal (Shittim) Tree, Mouth of Wady Aleyat (from
the album "Ordinance Survey ofthe Peninsula of Sinai (1869)
The Ordnance Survey sprang out of an innocent desire on the part
of English scholars to find thefact of the Bible. Sponsored by
Queen Victoria, the Palestine Exploration Fund, or the PEF, was
setup in 1865 by British and American scholars who needed accurate
maps and a precise exploration ofthe Holy Land. According to the
2013 book Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. The History of
ItsInterpretation. III/I: From Modernism to Post-Modernism, the
full title of the PEF was "PalestineExploration Fund. A Society for
the Accurate and Systematic Investigation of the Archaeology
theTopography, the Geology and Physical Geography, the Manners and
Customs of Holy Land forBiblical Illustration." The author Steven
W. Holloway also noted that "From the beginning, the PEFoperated in
a place and time when Victorian Protestantism marched openly in
step with Britishimperial pursuits." When the French built the Suez
Canal, the PEF, founded by Arthur PenrhynStanley, Dean of
Westminser and Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at
Oxford, providedexcellent cover for the Ordnance Survey, which
produced "no nonsense military instruments,virtually devoid of
biblical allusion. This pattern of military cartography under
camouflage of biblicalresearch would be repeated several times by
the PEF"..or what could be termed "Governmentalbacking in the
prosecution of Kipling's "Great Game," or the imperial contest
between England andRussia.
In her 2003 essay, "Mapping Sacred Geography: Photographic
Surveys by the Royal Engineers in theHoly Land, 1864-68," Kathleen
Stewart Howe noted that the official survey photographer
SergeantJames McDonald posed the Officers of the Royal Engineers of
the Ordnance Survey with the PEFscholars of Oxford and Cambridge,
who were in the dubious business of "claiming" the Holy Land "asa
uniquely British possession." As the author pointed out, echoing
Holloway, "Surveying the East, inthis case, the birthplace of
Western Christianity, united military surveyors, philologists and
biblicalscholars in a quasi-military campaign articulated in terms
of the great intellectual project to knowthe Orient. The taking,
organizing, collecting and viewing of the photographs was an
integral part ofthat project." Howe recognized the tangled alliance
between photography and "areas of belief,intellectual inquiry and
imperial claim." As early as 1856 the Engineers had prowled
aroundJerusalem, as if they owned the territory outright, examining
buildings and and bridges, with theintent of modernizing where
needed, locating sites where soldiers could drill and even
"Recordingthe effects of the explosion of gunpowder in different
positions." Keep in mind that all this Britishactivity, from
explosions to photography, was undertaken in the heart of the
Ottoman Empire withapparent impunity.
Given that the meaning of McDonald's photographs were purely
documentary and intended for thecombined military and religious
contention that, as the Archbishop of York, William Thomson
-
expressed it in 1875, "Our reason for turning to Palestine is
that Palestine our country. I have usedthe expression before and I
refuse to adopt any other," these images by McDonald are devoid of
thepoetry expressed by Eadweard Muybridge in Yosemite and lack the
flights of imagination played outby Timothy O'Sullivan in the
barren deserts of Western America. McDonald was required to
recordthe territories of Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula for two
purposes, military information andreligious convictions, or as Howe
eloquently expressed the role of the photographs as
"graphicarticulations of a physical possession, defined and
justified by a pervasive geopiety centre on thelands of he Bible;
at the same time, they reinforce that attachment to sacred place
with is geopiety."
James McDonald. Mount Sinai. PEF - Palestine Exploration Fund
(1868-1869)
Little is known of McDonald himself beyond the fact that he was
a Color Sergeant who had beenselected for the task due to his dual
expertise in surveying and photography. The Royal Engineerswere
among the first military units that instituted photography as a
basic skill taught to thespecialists. McDonald, however, was
primarily a surveyor, his main task for the PalestinianExploration
Fund. Like all the engineers, he was part of a support group,
providing expertise to thescholars, but when he wasn't engaged in
the Survey itself, he was expected to take photographs ofimportant
religious sites. In his role as photographer, McDonald worked
directly under the personalsupervision of the Director General of
the Ordnance Survey, Major General Sir Henry James, whohad been
instrumental in raising the public subscriptions or funding which
paid for the Survey andits staff, including the photographer. Sir
Henry even used his own money to purchase the necessaryphotographic
equipment and supplies, and the photographs taken by McDonald
should beconsidered as supplemental to or illustrative of the
(military) maps produced by the Survey party. AsJames explained,
"This map is especially required by Biblical scholars and the
public, to illustrate theBible history, and to enable them, if
possible, to trace the routes which were taken by the Israelitesin
their wanderings in the wilderness of Sinai and to identify the
mountain from which the Law was
-
given." Despite the private/public hybridity of the mission of
the Survey, the images taken byMcDonald are singularly lacking in
any spiritual feeling. It is clear that the Sergeant did not
seekeither light or shadow to imply religious implications or
significance. Instead, the photographs arebest seen as imperial
images, worked up by a military man with a straightforward mind,
recordingthe terrain of a weakened ally, Turkey, which was allowing
Britain to possess and map what wouldbe its future possessions. In
an age of empiricism and positivism, photographs could be "matched"
tobiblical sites and became part of an archaeological collection of
evidence that reinforced stories toldin the Bible. The intellectual
thought process matched the straightforwardness of a McDonaldimage:
if a place mentioned in the Bible can be found, then the existence
of this sacred terrain"proves" that the Bible is not only true but
also "history." Charles Darwin was thus challenged on theempirical
ground of scientific evidence.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit
to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank
you.
[email protected]
http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/photography-archaeology-imperialism-in-the-nineteenth-century/