This picture shows the last days of the Isma‘iliyya canal (filled in around 1897), the sweet water canal, between the Nile and the Suez Canal. Yet it is not the canal which is the most interesting in this picture but the depot-building or factory on the left side in Bulaq. Industrial buildings in Cairo are understudied phenomena as part of urban development and social history. This depot was the central headquarters of the Cairo Tramways Company (better known as Société des Tramways du Caire). We have already mentioned this company in connection with the first Bulaq bridge and it’s a good occasion again to highlight Cairo as a connected space of capitalism and urban revolt.
Detail of the above picture:
The Société des Tramways du Caire’s mother company was the Belgian Société générale des chemins de fer économiques de Bruxelles (which owned many other tramway companies in Western Europe). The Société des Tramways du Caire was established in 1895 to utilize the tramway construction concession in Cairo, obtained by Baron Ed. Empain in 1894, expiring in 1976. In 1900, already 11,245,960 passengers travelled in its networks and 35,637 meters was the total length of the line and constantly growing. In 1905-1906, 36,531,630 passengers circulated in its lines. No wonder that the income of the Société des Tramways du Caire was also rapidly growing: from 3,370,570 in 1904 to 6,686,042 in 1908 to 7,931,251 francs in 1913. An important strike was organized by the workers and employees of the company in 1908 (Beinin-Lockman, 1987, 57-66); and the tramway workers were also crucial in the 1919 strikes. In this way, paradoxically capitalist investment created conditions for social action in the city against the British occupation.
Detail of General Map of Cairo, 1920
The depot’s chimney indicates large scale industrial activity; possibly iron work for the tramways. The company possessed 185 motorized wagons and 160 simple wagons in 1907. They also possessed a large number of small steam-boats. In 1905, the company ordered a 1,500 KW turbo-dynamo which was said to have enough power for their whole network. They enlarged the central depot in Bulaq in 1899. The workers of the company were not only this depot-factory’s workers but the drivers, conductors, and all necessary staff for the lines. The building itself is among the rare well-photographed industrial buildings in fin-de-siècle Cairo. (See more on factory architecture in Egypt in Bodenstein, 2014.) It remained in use until the 1930s certainly. (A.M.)
Bibliography:
Cairo Observer on the Dying Trams in the 2010s; Nicolas Michel, « La Compagnie du canal de Suez et l’eau du Nil (1854-1896) », in Claudine Piaton éd., L’isthme et l’Égypte au temps de la Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez (1858-1956) (Caire : Ifao, 2016), 273-302 ; On Barak, On Time; Henry de Saint-Omer, Les Entreprises belges en Égypte: Rapport sur la situation économique des sociétés belges et belgo-égyptiennes fonctionnant en Égypte (Brussels: G. Piquart, 1907), 126-134 ; Joseph Ben Prestel, Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 118-120 ; Samir Saul, “Chapitre V. Un contrôle jalousement gardé : entreprises belges et capitaux français”. La France et l’Égypte de 1882 à 1914: Intérêts économiques et implications politiques. (Paris: Institut de la gestion publique et du développement économique, 1997), 129-162 ; Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Ralph Bodenstein, « Sugar and Iron: Khedive Ismail’s sugar factories in Egypt and the role of French engineering companies (1867-1875) », ABE Journal 5 (2014).
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