The Suez Canal opens

On 17 November 1869 the French imperial yacht L'Aigle, with Empress Eugénie and Ferdinand de Lesseps on board, led a procession of ships out of Port Said into a new waterway cut across the Isthmus of Suez. Three days later it reached Suez on the Red Sea. For the first time ships could sail from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean without going round Africa. The canal ran 164 kilometres through the desert and through the lakes of the isthmus, Lake Manzala, Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes. It needed no locks, because the two seas lie at almost the same level, and it was about eight metres deep. Digging it had moved some 74 million cubic metres of sand and mud.

It was a French enterprise built on Egyptian ground, and Egypt was then still part of the Ottoman Empire. De Lesseps, a former French diplomat who had known the viceroy Said Pasha since Said was a boy, obtained a concession from him on 30 November 1854, and a second one in January 1856. It allowed him to form a company that would dig the canal, keep it open to the ships of every nation and run it for 99 years. The Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez was founded in December 1858 with 400,000 shares of 500 francs. Britain, whose prime minister Palmerston feared a French road to India, refused to take part. Some 21,000 French savers, many of them people of modest means, bought more than half the shares, and Said took the rest, 44 per cent, partly with borrowed money. The work took ten years instead of six and cost 433 million francs, twice the estimate.

Work began on 25 April 1859, on the beach where Port Said would rise. In the first years the canal was dug by hand: Egyptian peasants, called up by their government in rotating gangs as forced labour (the corvée), carried the earth away in baskets. Nobody knows how many died. The historian Caroline Piquet speaks of tens of thousands among the hundreds of thousands called up; Nasser, in 1956, spoke of 120,000; no reliable record survives. Britain denounced the forced labour, and Said's successor Ismail challenged the company's terms. Napoleon III's arbitration of 6 July 1864 ended the corvée on the canal, gave most of the company's land back to Egypt and made Egypt pay the company a heavy indemnity. Steam dredgers and excavators, worked mostly by European labourers, did the rest. The company built new towns along the line, Port Said and Ismailia, and in August 1869 the waters of the two seas met in the Bitter Lakes.

Ismail, by then khedive, turned the opening into a festival for the crowned heads of Europe: the Emperor of Austria, the Crown Prince of Prussia and Prince Hendrik of the Netherlands were among his guests. The canal changed the map of trade. Today's sea route from Rotterdam to Singapore is some 3,500 nautical miles shorter through Suez than round the Cape. Together with the steamship, the canal cut the passage from Britain to India from about three months to about three weeks. The Dutch, who had needed some four months to reach the Indies, founded the Stoomvaart Maatschappij Nederland in Amsterdam in 1870 to run steamers to Java. There, the canal and the end of the Cultivation System opened the way to a new export economy of private plantations.

For Egypt the canal was ruinous. Ismail's debts grew from 7 million pounds to almost 100 million, and in November 1875 he sold his 176,602 shares to the British government. Benjamin Disraeli paid for them with £4 million lent by the Rothschild bank, and Britain, which had fought the canal, became its largest single shareholder; in 1882 it occupied Egypt. The Convention of Constantinople of 1888 declared the canal open to the ships of all nations in peace and in war. In 1956, twelve years before the concession was due to end, President Nasser nationalised the company and set off the Suez Crisis. The canal is still one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.