Document Type:
Article
Author/editor:
Paola Schellenbaum
 
Standard: Schellenbaum, Paola [Paola Schellenbaum]
Title:
The Suez Canal in Conversations Through Time: Evangelical and Waldensian Transnational Mobility in the Mediterranean

Standard:

Collective work:
Italy and the Suez Canal, from the Mid-nineteenth Century to the Cold War : a Mediterranean history
Date of Publication:
2022
Pages:
pp. 279-296
Subjects:
Perkins Marsh, George (1801-1882)
Suez Canal
Waldenses - Egipt

Summary/Notes:

This chapter deals with migrants and missionaries to Southern Mediterranean when they designed a new political and religious geography, sewing together Italy and the Levant after the opening of the Suez Canal. In 1861, the year of Italy’s unification, George P. Marsh arrived in Turin as the first American minister accompanied by his wife. From Caroline Marsh’s diary we draw various comments on the construction of the Suez Canal that was relevant not only in geopolitical terms but also for ecological and developmental reasons, including migration issues. Current debate on transnationalism draws from ethnographic conversations with Egyptian migrants in Port Said, Suez and Ismailia in the 1990s that were subsequently developed in a historical ethnographic research on Waldensians and Evangelicals in the Mediterranean, with migrant biographies of the past and their social networks, at the juncture between the local, the national and the global. A variety of sources were studied in an archival ethnography. Malta had emerged as a centre for evangelization since the 1810s but operations consolidated in Egypt, and in 1912, the British and Foreign Bible Society opened a depot in Port Said where there were also Waldensians and Evangelicals, scattered in the Suez Canal zone. The notion of borderland in women’s travels and missionary encounters questions a nation-state-centred approach. This transnational perspective was of inspiration for an ecumenical project named ‘humanitarian corridors’ that since 2015 has linked the two shores of the Euro-Mediterranean region.