ABSTRACT
World history offers an understanding of the maturation of global networks over time that is important to the way literature and the arts are periodised. The understanding of the world appearing in a microcosm or seeking the universal in the particular so characteristic of Rabindranath Tagore's concept of world literature appears in his 1888 poem "Duranta Asha". The idea for the Suez Canal emerges concretely in the nineteenth century at the hands of Saint-Simonian founder, BarthElemy Prosper Enfantin, who arrives to Egypt with eighty French followers. The Suez Canal was designed as a microcosmic network in itself and as one of a series of points which fed into each other in order to unite, as Enfantin might have put it, le globe. The anti-imperialist catchphrase of the Suez Crisis would be borne across the newer routes of Bandung, underscoring the need to increase ties of diplomacy, trade and troops between "third way" countries.
