Alfred Julien Beneyton (d. 1948)
HC.HP.2016.0060
This photo album was compiled by French engineer Alfred Julien Beneyton, who accomplished two survey missions in Yemen, the first between 1909 and 1910 and the second in 1911. Beneyton, a member of the French Geographical Society, was tasked with assessing the prospects for the construction of a narrow-gauge railway, which would run from Al-Hudaydah on the coast to inland Sana’a.
Photographs in the album depict city views, including buildings and mosques, landscapes, encampments. They also include people, such as rulers and members of local tribes, colonists and Turkish gendarmes. Various villages and cities are mentioned, including Aden, Al-Hudaydah, Bajil, Bayt al-Faqih, Suq al-Khamis, Sana’a, Taiz, Manakha, Mokha, Suq al-Falaq and Dhamar.
Due to financial difficulties in the Ottoman Empire, surveying and construction of the line was given to the French, and pre-construction and infrastructure preparations were completed in 1911. The Ottomans ultimately hoped to link the Yemen railway to the existing Hejaz Railway, which ran from Damascus to Medina. However, attacks by Italians in the Tripoli War and resistance from local Bedouins halted the project, and it was never completed.
For more information about the Hejaz Railway and its political and historical importance, check out Murat Özyüksel’s The Hejaz Railway: Modernity, Industrialisation and Ottoman Decline. For a broader look at railways in the Ottoman Empire, see Railway Development in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1914, by Yaqub N. Karkar.
The attempt to build a rail line in Yemen was just one of many instances in which Yemen was caught between imperial and local powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To learn more about this turbulent period, see the ebook Unmaking North and South: Cartographies of the Yemeni Past, by John M. Willis.
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