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In the intervening decades, England had surged ahead of France and began to build a substantial
empire, with India firmly in the hands of its East India Company, and Great Britain eyed French
activities in Egypt warily. For England, Egypt was an important land bridge to India. Indeed, due to
the 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 subordinated
partner. And in fact, by mid century, the strategic territory was semi-independent from the Ottoman
Empire 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 long
dreamed of Canal across the Suez. Perhaps wisely, the British stood back and allowed the French to
dig the massive trench, intending to claim its rewards in increased trade while spending no English
money in the process. During the messy and corrupt business of building the Canal, the British
protested the sheer scale of theft of lands from a "simple people" and the outright slavery of the
Egyptian workers in the service of the French government of Napolon III. The Emperor was related
by marriage to the former diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-1894),who was in charge of
financing 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 for
materials 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 worked
with their hands, no machines and no salaries. Machines were expensive and cheap labor, four-fifths
of which worked for free under the threat of government violence, greatly increased the future
profits for the French, especially if those who toiled used the same methods employed under
Pharaoh Senusret III in 1850 BCE. Igniting a media campaign, the British used the French
exploitation of Egyptian labor as a wedge between the French and the rest of the civilized European
world. Eventually, public opinion and threats from the Ottoman Empire, the Porte, forced the
Emperor and his minions to pay the workers a living wage in 1863 and the increased expense forced
the French to use and even invent machines to build the Canal. The Egyptian government went into
such 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 ceremony
on November 17-surely the high-water mark of the Second Empire. At the request of the viceroy, the
composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) wrote the opera Aida in 1871 and its famous triumphal march
used for college graduations to this day.
Ordnance Survey of the Peninsula of Syria, which included Jerusalem. This massive military and
biblical examination of the "holy land" was undertaken by the British Empire between 1864 and
1869. "Ordnance" means exactly what the word states, weapons, ammunition, guns, cannon, and
other military supplies. The result of this Survey was hundreds of photographs, most taken by a
sergeant, James McDonald, in the service of his country, a military reconnaissance acting under the
guise of biblical antiquarians in search of archaeological sites.
James McDonald. Seyal (Shittim) Tree, Mouth of Wady Aleyat (from the album "Ordinance Survey of
the Peninsula of Sinai (1869)
The Ordnance Survey sprang out of an innocent desire on the part of English scholars to find the
fact of the Bible. Sponsored by Queen Victoria, the Palestine Exploration Fund, or the PEF, was set
up in 1865 by British and American scholars who needed accurate maps and a precise exploration of
the Holy Land. According to the 2013 book Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. The History of Its
Interpretation. III/I: From Modernism to Post-Modernism, the full title of the PEF was "Palestine
Exploration Fund. A Society for the Accurate and Systematic Investigation of the Archaeology the
Topography, the Geology and Physical Geography, the Manners and Customs of Holy Land for
Biblical Illustration." The author Steven W. Holloway also noted that "From the beginning, the PEF
operated in a place and time when Victorian Protestantism marched openly in step with British
imperial pursuits." When the French built the Suez Canal, the PEF, founded by Arthur Penrhyn
Stanley, Dean of Westminser and Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, provided
excellent cover for the Ordnance Survey, which produced "no nonsense military instruments,
virtually devoid of biblical allusion. This pattern of military cartography under camouflage of biblical
research would be repeated several times by the PEF"..or what could be termed "Governmental
backing in the prosecution of Kipling's "Great Game," or the imperial contest between England and
Russia.
In her 2003 essay, "Mapping Sacred Geography: Photographic Surveys by the Royal Engineers in the
Holy Land, 1864-68," Kathleen Stewart Howe noted that the official survey photographer Sergeant
James McDonald posed the Officers of the Royal Engineers of the Ordnance Survey with the PEF
scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, who were in the dubious business of "claiming" the Holy Land "as
a uniquely British possession." As the author pointed out, echoing Holloway, "Surveying the East, in
this case, the birthplace of Western Christianity, united military surveyors, philologists and biblical
scholars in a quasi-military campaign articulated in terms of the great intellectual project to know
the Orient. The taking, organizing, collecting and viewing of the photographs was an integral part of
that 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 around
Jerusalem, as if they owned the territory outright, examining buildings and and bridges, with the
intent of modernizing where needed, locating sites where soldiers could drill and even "Recording
the effects of the explosion of gunpowder in different positions." Keep in mind that all this British
activity, from explosions to photography, was undertaken in the heart of the Ottoman Empire with
apparent impunity.
Given that the meaning of McDonald's photographs were purely documentary and intended for the
combined 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 used
the expression before and I refuse to adopt any other," these images by McDonald are devoid of the
poetry expressed by Eadweard Muybridge in Yosemite and lack the flights of imagination played out
by Timothy O'Sullivan in the barren deserts of Western America. McDonald was required to record
the territories of Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula for two purposes, military information and
religious convictions, or as Howe eloquently expressed the role of the photographs as "graphic
articulations of a physical possession, defined and justified by a pervasive geopiety centre on the
lands of he Bible; at the same time, they reinforce that attachment to sacred place with is geopiety."