How the Groundbreaking Suez Canal Forever Transformed the World’s Shipping Routes

On November 17, 1869, the esteemed guests of Ismaʻil Pasha, Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, gathered on the Mediterranean coast for a truly world-shaping event: the official opening ceremony of the Suez Canal.

The event was spectacular, meant to impress attendees with the commercial and cultural possibilities of an engineering project designed, in the words of Scottish journalist Alexander Russel, to “unite the East and West not only in commerce but ideas, and so … greatly bless humanity.”

As European royalty arrived in their yachts, celebratory cannons “thundered forth welcome, till ears were stunned with sound and the atmosphere thickened with smoke,” Russel wrote.

The 120-mile-long canal had taken ten years to dig and was considered what Russel called “the greatest service to the commerce of the world since the discovery of America.”  

Much of the fanfare was reserved for Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French developer who obtained the political and financial support that enabled the canal’s construction. But de Lesseps was certainly not the first to imagine a canal linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas—and, by extension, Europe and Asia—through the Isthmus of Suez.

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The idea was ancient, likely dating to the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Senusret III, who envisioned and commissioned a similar project in the 19th century B.C.E. The so-called “Canal of the Pharaohs” connected the Red Sea to the Nile, which in turn flowed out to the Mediterranean. But its extent is contested by historians, and the canal closed in 767 C.E. in order to cut off trade to the rebellious cities of Mecca and Medina on the Arabian peninsula.

In 1798, during France’s brief Egyptian conquest, the French discovered evidence of the ancient canal and sought to reconstruct its path. The strategic and economic advantage of a canal under French imperial control would be immense. But a civil engineering survey wrongly concluded that the sea levels on either side of the isthmus were offset by 30 feet, necessitating a massive system of locks that engineers were not yet equipped to build. The project was abandoned.

Over half a century later, the idea came back into vogue with the Suez Canal Company, which would oversee construction of the canal, give 15 percent of profit to the Egyptian state and maintain control over the canal for 99 years, after which Egypt would assume responsibility.

To finance the massive and unprecedented engineering project, de Lesseps and the Suez Canal Company courted foreign investors, chiefly from Western Europe. Construction began in 1859, with conscripted Egyptian peasants digging through the earth by hand and pick. Work was hard and slow, beset by poor weather; disease; and a cruel, inefficient labor system.

After ten years of digging, the massive Suez Canal finally opened for transit.

A procession of ships began the journey, led by a boat whose passengers included the empress of France and de Lesseps. According to one British observer, the ships “passed in dignified array … acclaimed by teeming multitudes crowding the arid banks of the burning desert.”

Those masses witnessed the first moments of a narrow yet critical canal that reduced the distance between Europe and Asia by more than 4,000 miles and would become a flashpoint for global conflicts for decades to come.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.