Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions, Jessica M Lepler, 2025, University of North Carolina Press
If ever we wanted to demonstrate the power of an idea to shape the physical world, we need look no further than Nicaragua’s dream of building an interoceanic canal.
For while it has never come to pass, despite scores of plans and proposals since the Age of Revolution, this idea has undoubtedly distorted the history of Central America as much as any revolution.
And as with the latest effort to fulfil a vision harking back to the late colonial era, the dream can reveal many things that go far beyond the challenges of the terrain that must be traversed—from the sheer limitations of capitalism to the most fanciful shapes taken by imperial designs.
In short, canals tell us not just about how freight can be carried from the Atlantic to Asia’s coveted markets across the Pacific faster and far safer than sailing around Cape Horn, but also about the geopolitical phantoms that haunt us all behind the façade of global trade.
As a measure of how such projects, given their vast scale, have never been entirely national and always envisaged in league with great powers, the most recent Nicaraguan proposal was a perfect reflection of the shifting silt of international rivalry.
That is because, for the first time, the external power that stepped forward to underwrite a project that like its predecessors would ultimately founder was neither European nor American, but Asian, chosen precisely because of its counter-hegemonic potential.
In 2013, a Chinese company called HKND signed a deal with the government in Managua to build a $50bn, 172-mile canal bisecting Lake Nicaragua, but despite some symbolic “ground-breaking” early into the initiative, no work was ever completed.
It was a classic example of opaque dealings between a local regime that promises the earth yet never delivers and frontier capitalism built on feet of (soggy) clay—in this case Chinese, but in previous attempts British or American.
Opponents pointed to the serious environmental risks, the potential displacement of thousands of mainly indigenous families, and the proposal’s financial unviability. Growing public anger over the plan fed into escalating dissatisfaction with the government of Daniel Ortega that culminated in mass protests in 2018 and subsequent repression. The writing was on the wall and in that year HKND, itself financially besieged, closed its Hong Kong office.
There is evidence to suggest that, of course, Beijing was the mover and shaker behind this project all along, seeing it more broadly in terms of its massive infrastructure investments in Latin America to speed trade, diplomatic strategy towards Taiwan, and rivalry with the US.
The canal project was almost certainly an early incentive for a later decision by Managua to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, while consolidating its position as Beijing’s closest ally in Central America.
Nonetheless, there remains an enduring logic to the creation of freight corridors across the isthmus of this kind, one that is strengthened both by problems facing the Panama Canal caused by drought and undercapacity, but also by the latest incarnations of aggressive US imperialism under Donald Trump in which this existing waterway was the first target.
Moreover, the Trump administration’s full-frontal assault on Chinese influence in Latin America, illustrated by threats to retake the Panama Canal which it falsely claimed to have been under Beijing’s control, only serve to fuel the latter’s concerns about access to the existing Panamanian waterway.
In short, China and other powers need a second canal more than ever. This explains why, although Nicaragua has all but shelved its latest attempt to build an interoceanic link, the idea will not go away, and its officials have indicated a determination to press on: in 2023 they held talks with Belarus about the canal’s construction.
These factors also explain why other countries in the region are pressing ahead with their own efforts to create land bridges linking the Atlantic and Pacific which, if on a smaller scale to an interoceanic canal, allude to growing resistance to Washington’s monopoly over transit.
Mexico, for example, is developing its Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT), comprising railways, highways and pipelines, a vision given a significant boost under the previous president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Colombia has been the focus of an even more contemporary vision for a freight link in the form of a highly automated underground maglev railway to transfer shipping containers between oceans that does the job of a traditional waterway.
It will take decades for such dreams to become reality—yet slowly but surely, they are doing so: in March this year Mexico’s CIIT made its first major delivery after transporting 900 Hyundai vehicles bound for the US from Salina Cruz in Oaxaca to Coatzacoalcos in Veracruz—beating the Panama Canal on both time and cost.
And as Jessica Lepler shows in her eloquent history of Nicaragua’s canal proposals during the 1820s, such dreams expose the conceits of those who first imagine them even if they never come to pass.
Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions is an expansive history of the dreams that have driven international efforts to find a faster route from west to east that began at least as early as the travels of Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas between 1799 and 1804.
In 1823 Don Manuel Antonio de la Cerda, who governed the Nicaraguan lakeside city of Granada after the end of Spanish rule, created the first precise route for the construction of a canal in the form of a map drawn to persuade his political superiors.
This began a quest fuelled by the fevers of gain and status that on repeated occasions ignored the geographical realities on the ground, land-use, the ebb and flow of political tides locally and in Washington and London, geopolitics and hard financial logic.
De la Cerda’s dream was shipwrecked by the abdication of Mexico’s first emperor, the secession of the Central American republics to form a new country, and foreign spies who copied his map and sent it to the four winds.
While similar projects have been reimagined ever since, Lepler demonstrates how the 1820s quest for a Central American canal was something special as, in the absence of anything like reliable data or accurate maps, “the would-be canal constructors of this era blindly and optimistically envisioned the creation of a world-changing waterway”.
It was a leap of the kind of faith that builds nations, and its consequences were real.
She writes: “The idea that an interoceanic waterway could and should be constructed shaped international diplomacy, launched scientific investigations, and contributed to speculative enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The main problem these dreams would face would be their timing: rapidly shifting political and financial contexts as capital turned from shipping to coal and cotton, nation-states flowed into existence on the back of personal patronage, sovereignties washed against each other like tides, and empires began to crave land not water.
As Lepler notes,while the canal of the 1820s remained unbuilt the desire to construct it had a real historical presence, connecting the era’s most important landmarks—from the drafting of the Monroe Doctrine to the bursting of London’s Spanish American financial bubble in 1825, to the rise and fall of both the First Mexican Empire and the Central American Republic.
As she says: “If we escape the false binary of success and failure, and instead take our cue from Columbus’s unfulfilled quest, we need not squint to see the historical power of unrealised dreams.”
This is an epic story of mostly imperial speculation whose characters range from the colonial adventurers on the ground to apologists such as philosopher Jeremy Bentham, for whom carving up Central America was an intellectual exercise.
In the background lingered speculative investors and their friends in parliaments eager to profit, often corruptly, from nascent states—from the British Barclay, Herring, Richardson & Company as just one of many would-be and often illusory canal companies to the American Central American and United States Atlantic and Pacific Junction Canal Company.
Capitalism would eventually prove to be too fickle and fractious to win the race to complete a project of this kind, at least in the turbulent 19th century, and would be outpaced by imperial ambition.
Nicaragua’s hopes were wrecked in 1903 when Theodore Roosevelt despatched the US military to support a separatist coup in Panama—and thereby secure sovereignty over what would become the canal zone.
Lepler writes: “Centring this cast of canal dreamers, new plot lines run through familiar historical events uncovering corrupt bargains at nearly every turn … Foiled by their own follies as well as giant forces (sometimes in microscopic form), these people with so much power proved incapable of accomplishing their revolutionary plan to change the world.”
But as she notes with both insight and foresight, even without constructing a canal the mission to do so itself proved consequential and the dreams lingered, as the recent Chinese adventure illustrates.
The author writes: “Two centuries later, ghosts of the 1820s quest for a Central American canal haunt us still. Building a waterway between the oceans through Lake Nicaragua has proven too revolutionary for any age.”
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Categories: Central America, China, Guatemala, International, Nicaragua, North America, Panama, United States