The idea was ancient — pharaohs and Persians had cut canals from the Nile toward the Red Sea — but the direct sea-to-sea passage waited for Ferdinand de Lesseps: a French ex-diplomat of terrifying charm and no engineering training, whose friendship with Egypt’s viceroy Said Pasha yielded, in 1854, a concession to pierce the isthmus. Britain — fearing French leverage over the India route — fought the project diplomatically for years while its shipping stood to gain most: the canal would cut London-Bombay by roughly 7,000 kilometres.
Digging began at the future Port Said in 1859. Its foundation was the corvée: under the concession, Egypt supplied drafted peasant labour, and through the early 1860s tens of thousands of fellahin at a time — perhaps a million rotations in all — dug the desert with hand tools, unpaid or nearly so, short of water in the early stretches, ravaged by heat and by cholera epidemics that swept the works. The dead were not counted honestly; serious estimates run into the thousands and popular Egyptian memory far higher. When the new viceroy Ismail Pasha — under British pressure sincere and self-interested in equal parts — ended the corvée in 1864, an arbitration (chaired, conveniently, by Napoleon III) awarded the company a colossal indemnity, and the last years were dug by machines: the great steam dredgers that moved most of the canal’s spoil and pointed the way for every mega-project after.
The party of the century
The canal opened on 17 November 1869 with imperial theatre: the French Empress Eugénie’s yacht led the first convoy; khedive Ismail — who had near-bankrupted Egypt for the occasion, building palaces and an opera house for the guests — feted crowned heads and six thousand invitees for weeks. (The tale that Verdi’s Aida premiered for the opening is off by two years: Cairo’s new opera house opened with Rigoletto; Aida, commissioned for it, arrived in 1871.)
The reversal
The canal remade world trade — and unmade its Egyptian patron. Ismail’s debts forced the sale of Egypt’s entire shareholding in 1875: Disraeli, borrowing four million pounds from the Rothschilds overnight, bought it for Britain — “You have it, madam,” he reported to Queen Victoria. Foreign debt control followed, then the nationalist revolt it provoked, then the British bombardment and occupation of 1882: the canal built on Egyptian backs became the strategic reason Egypt ceased to govern itself, a “protected” imperial artery for seventy years until Nasser nationalised it in 1956 and the ensuing Suez Crisis marked, for the old empires, closing time.
De Lesseps, “the Great Engineer” who wasn’t one, rode the triumph for two decades — then reapplied the Suez formula, sand for jungle, at Panama, where the differences proved fatal.