Suez Canal (1859-1869): Building the Link Between Two Seas

The Suez Canal, built between 1859 and 1869, cut through the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt to join the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Promoted by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps and dug at first largely by Egyptian forced labour, it opened with lavish celebrations on 17 November 1869. By removing the long voyage around Africa, it transformed trade between Europe and Asia and made Egypt a focus of great-power rivalry.

Background: an old dream

The idea of linking the two seas was ancient. Pharaohs and later rulers had dug canals connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, but these silted up and were abandoned. During the French occupation of Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte’s engineers surveyed the isthmus in 1798–1799 and wrongly concluded that the Red Sea was about ten metres higher than the Mediterranean, which seemed to make a direct canal dangerous.

Later surveys showed that the two seas were at roughly the same level. In the 1830s and 1840s French followers of the social thinker Saint-Simon promoted a canal as a project of human progress. Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894), a former French diplomat who had served in Egypt, took up the idea.

Egypt was already a busy crossing point. From the 1830s an “overland route” carried mail and passengers between Alexandria and Suez by river boat and carriage, connecting British steamers in the Mediterranean with those bound for India. A railway from Alexandria via Cairo to Suez, engineered by Robert Stephenson, was completed in 1858. Stephenson, who doubted that a canal could pay, was one of its prominent British critics.

The concession and the company

In 1854 Sa’id Pasha, who had just become viceroy of Egypt, an Ottoman province with wide autonomy, granted de Lesseps, a family friend, a concession to form a company to build the canal. A fuller concession followed in 1856. The terms were generous to the company: it would operate the canal for 99 years after opening and receive land, and Egypt would supply most of the workers.

The Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez was founded in December 1858 with 400,000 shares of 500 francs. Small French investors bought more than half. Many shares went unsold, and Sa’id Pasha took up around 177,000, giving Egypt a large stake and a heavy financial burden.

Britain opposed the project. Lord Palmerston’s government saw it as a French scheme that might threaten British routes to India, and it pressed the Ottoman sultan to withhold formal approval, which came only in 1866.

Building the canal

On 25 April 1859 de Lesseps struck the first blow with a pickaxe on the beach where Port Said would be founded. The route ran about 164 kilometres (102 miles) south through Lake Manzala, Lake Timsah and the Bitter Lakes to Suez. A freshwater canal from the Nile was also dug to supply workers in the desert.

New towns grew up along the route. Port Said, named after Sa’id Pasha, was built on a narrow strip of sand between Lake Manzala and the sea, with breakwaters made from large concrete blocks. Ismailia, named after Isma’il Pasha and founded in 1863 on the shore of Lake Timsah, became the company’s administrative centre. In November 1862 Mediterranean water was let into Lake Timsah, a symbolic halfway point.

From 1861 Egyptian peasants were conscripted under the corvée, a traditional system of forced labour. Tens of thousands at a time were sent to the works in rotation, often digging by hand and carrying earth in baskets. Conditions were harsh, with heat, poor water and disease. How many died is unknown. Egyptian figures as high as 120,000 are sometimes cited, but many historians regard them as exaggerated; there is no reliable count, though deaths certainly ran into thousands.

When Isma’il Pasha succeeded Sa’id in January 1863, he objected to the scale of forced labour and the land given to the company. Britain also criticised the corvée. Emperor Napoleon III arbitrated the dispute in 1864, ruling that Egypt could end the forced labour and recover land, but must pay the company large compensation of about 84 million francs.

Machines, cholera and completion

The loss of conscripted labour pushed the contractors toward machinery. Huge steam-powered dredgers and excavators, many designed for the project by the firm of Borel and Lavalley, removed most of the remaining earth. Paid workers came from Egypt and around the Mediterranean.

A cholera epidemic in 1865 killed many workers and briefly halted progress. Water from the Mediterranean reached the Bitter Lakes in 1869, and the canal was completed later that year. In total the project moved roughly 75 million cubic metres of earth, at a cost about double the original estimate.

The opening of 1869

The opening on 17 November 1869 was one of the great spectacles of the century. Isma’il Pasha, now with the title of khedive, spent lavishly to present Egypt as part of Europe. A procession of ships led by the French imperial yacht L’Aigle, carrying Empress Eugénie, set off from Port Said. Guests included Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia.

The fleet reached Ismailia, a new town in the middle of the canal, where a grand ball was held, and arrived at Suez on 20 November. In Cairo a new opera house opened with Verdi’s Rigoletto.

The canal was not yet perfect. It was narrow and shallow by later standards, with a depth of about 8 metres, and ships ran aground in the early years. Traffic in 1870 was modest, around 500 ships, and the company struggled financially at first. Within a few years, however, shipping volumes and toll income rose steadily, and the canal was widened and deepened many times over the following century.

Memory of the canal’s construction diverged sharply. In Europe it was celebrated as a triumph of French enterprise and of de Lesseps personally; a large statue of him was erected at the entrance to the canal at Port Said in 1899. In Egypt it came to be remembered above all through the labour and lives of the peasants who dug it and the debts that followed. When the canal was nationalised in 1956, the statue of de Lesseps was removed from its pedestal, a gesture that reflected how the canal had become a symbol of Egyptian sovereignty.

Key people

• Ferdinand de Lesseps: French diplomat and promoter who led the company and the project.
• Sa’id Pasha: viceroy of Egypt (1854–1863) who granted the concession.
• Isma’il Pasha: khedive of Egypt (1863–1879) who saw the canal through and staged the opening.
• Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie: French rulers who supported the project; Eugénie led the opening procession.

Consequences

The canal shortened the sea route from Britain to India by roughly 7,000 kilometres and made steamships far more competitive than sailing ships on routes to Asia. Traffic grew quickly, and Britain, despite its earlier opposition, soon supplied most of the ships using it.

For Egypt the cost was severe. Isma’il’s borrowing for the canal and other modernisation projects left the country unable to pay its debts. In 1875 he sold Egypt’s shares to the British government, and European financial control followed. A nationalist revolt led to the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 and British occupation. The Convention of Constantinople (1888) declared the canal open to ships of all nations in war and peace.

The canal remained under the company and British influence until Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised it on 26 July 1956, triggering the Suez Crisis. De Lesseps’s success also inspired the French attempt to build a Panama Canal in 1881, which ended in failure.

The canal was closed several times in the twentieth century, most notably for eight years from June 1967 to June 1975 after the Arab–Israeli Six-Day War, when sunken ships blocked it and ships returned to the Cape route. Its reopening and later expansions confirmed it as one of the busiest waterways on Earth, carrying a significant share of world seaborne trade.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1854, 30 November: Sa’id Pasha grants de Lesseps the first concession.
• 1858, December: The Suez Canal Company is founded.
• 1859, 25 April: Work begins at the site of Port Said.
• 1863, January: Isma’il Pasha becomes ruler of Egypt.
• 1864: Napoleon III’s arbitration ends large-scale forced labour on the canal.
• 1865: A cholera epidemic strikes the workforce.
• 1869, 17 November: The canal opens with an international procession of ships.
• 1875: Egypt sells its canal shares to Britain.
• 1888: The Convention of Constantinople guarantees free passage.

Why it matters

The Suez Canal reshaped world trade and shipping, binding Europe more closely to India and East Asia. It also showed the price of such projects for the country that hosted them, as debt drew Egypt under foreign control and made the canal a symbol of both modern engineering and imperial power.