Late modern time-space compression - Time-Space Compression: Historical Geographies - page 109

Figure 4.7 Suez Canal's impacts on absolute distances between Europe and Asia.

London and Singapore (Knowles 2006). The Suez Canal both greatly
extended Britain's reach into Asia and restored the Middle East to its historic
role as a crossroads of the Old World. Marseilles, suddenly closer to the
Orient than ever before, mushroomed into France's largest port. With rising
trade levels and lower transportation costs, Europe was able to pay for Asian
imports with goods rather than New World silver, a factor that accelerated
the late nineteenth-century switch to the gold standard. Steamships and the
Suez Canal allowed Asia to

flood European markets with cheap rice, which in
turn brought down the price of wheat, contributing to the generalized global
crisis of agrarian overproduction that bankrupted farmers by the score in
the late nineteenth century. Likewise, the demand for Southeast Asian goods
expanded to include tin, palm oil, copper, lumber, and, after 1903, rubber
(Dixon 1991). As the Asia trade boomed in the wake of this cost-space
convergence, huge numbers of Chinese coolies were imported by the French
and British to work the rubber and cotton plantations and drain the Mekong
and Irrawaddy deltas.
Similarly, the Panama Canal, at

fl

fi first unsuccessfully attempted by the