Book excerpt: How the Suez canal was built

A monument to Ferdinand de Lesseps in Port Said, Egypt. Photo: iStock

So many treasures were removed from Egypt during the nineteenth century that when Brian Fagan published his extremely readable history of the period he titled it Rape of the Nile.

But it wasn’t the quest for antiquities that would lead to England’s control over Egypt. It was a canal. There is a curious connection between this canal and Napoleon Bonaparte’s failed expedition to Egypt.

When General Bonaparte set sail for Egypt, one of his missions was to determine if a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea was possible. Most of the trade from Europe to India went around the Cape of Good Hope. A canal would permit ships to sail across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, then through the canal to Suez, into the Red Sea, and onto India. If the French could control such a canal, it would be a great economic advantage for France and a financial defeat for their enemy England.

There had been a canal in pharaonic times, and Bonaparte was determined to find its remains. In late December 1798, he rode out to explore the Isthmus of Suez with his chief engineer and a few of the savants. After several days of searching, Bonaparte found the canal and traced it for fifteen miles. Excited by his discovery, Bonaparte instructed the chief engineer, Jacques-Marie Le Père, to return with a team to survey the entire isthmus to determine if a canal was possible. Le Père and his team made three expeditions to the isthmus, surveying under challenging conditions.

Constantly harassed by Bedouins, they had difficulty obtaining food and supplies and slept out in the cold. They finally completed the survey in 1800 and sent the report to Bonaparte, who was back in Paris by then. Le Père reported that because the Red Sea at high tide was thirty feet higher than the Mediterranean, digging a canal would produce flooding in Egypt. He was wrong. Some of his fellow savants, including Fourier and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, correctly understood that sea level is sea level everywhere, and there was no danger of flooding. Still, the plan for the canal was abandoned and not raised again for fifty years. When in the 1850s Ferdinand de Lesseps revived the idea of a canal, he unknowingly opened the pathway the English would use to control Egypt.

The Canal

De Lesseps was an idealistic engineer with almost superhuman energy and optimism. He envisioned the Suez Canal as a promoter of peace. The canal would benefit world trade by lowering shipping costs for everyone, and because it would benefit all the nations of the world, everyone would come together to both build and maintain it. Unlike Bonaparte, de Lesseps had no intention of maintaining control of the canal; it would be an international venture. Further, it would increase Egypt’s standing in the world. In addition to having the canal on Egyptian soil, Egypt would levy taxes on all the goods transported through the canal and finally achieve economic stability. Everyone would win. In 1856 he presented his detailed proposal to the viceroy of Egypt, Said Pasha, a descendant of Mohamed Ali.

An international canal company would be formed, with shares in the company sold to the nations of the world. Egypt would supply the land and the labor to build the canal and would thus earn its equity in the canal. De Lesseps was well aware that the pashas of Egypt were accustomed to using the corvée, basically calling up the peasants to do forced labor. So his proposal stipulated:

Workers will be paid a third more than they would normally receive in Egypt. In addition to their pay, workers are entitled to food, accommodation, medical and other welfare services.

Said Pasha agreed, and the public offering of the Canal Company’s stock appeared in 1859. It was a great success, with more than half of the shares selling in the first three days of the offer. The big surprise for de Lesseps was that England, which stood to gain the most from using the canal, wasn’t buying. Rather, the British were doing everything possible to sabotage the project. They spread rumors that the company was bankrupt, that conscripted labor was going to be used, et cetera, et cetera. They viewed the canal as the French attempting to gain control of the region. The English could have bought shares and had influence, but they feared that sometime in the future they might be drawn into military action to protect their interests, and they weren’t willing to do that. Fortunately, de Lesseps didn’t need the support of the British, and proceeded full steam ahead.

When work on the canal was in its early stages, Said Pasha died and was replaced by Ismail Pasha, who convinced the Ottoman sultan to grant him the title of khedive, which to him sounded more independent than being a viceroy. It wasn’t, but now Egypt was ruled by a khedive.

The political situation was now more complex than when de Lesseps had begun building the canal. Egypt was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman sultan had power over the viceroy/khedive of Egypt. The Sublime Porte (the central Ottoman government, located in Constantinople) was nearly bankrupt, so England had power over the sultan. Soon politics would threaten the canal’s completion. But for the moment, Khedive Ismail was on board with the canal project, and he bought Said’s shares in the canal, so the digging should have proceeded as before. Up to this point, all the laborers had been paid by the khedive. But he was running out of money just as the project needed more workers, and the corvée would have to be used. But the British, still thinking they could sabotage the project, used their influence over the Sultan to have him declare that the corvee was illegal in Egypt. So now Ismail could not provide the labor he was contracted to supply. With the shortage of manual laborers, de Lesseps used huge steam-powered dredgers to continue digging the canal.

Because Ismail’s equity in the Canal Company was based on supplying labor and land, he had to pay to the company an amount equivalent to what he would have spent on labor, but he didn’t have it. He was broke. Ismail had always been extravagant, building palaces for friends and relatives throughout Egypt. In preparation for the opening ceremonies for the canal, he invited six thousand foreign royals and dignitaries to the festivities, paying for their accommodations. He built a palace for Empress Eugenie of France so that she would be comfortable during her visit (it is now a hotel). He also built a road from her palace to the Giza pyramids so that the empress could visit the pyramids in in the comfort of her carriage. So when it was time for Khedive Ismail to pay his share of building the canal, he couldn’t. His solution was to sell his shares in the canal to England. By now it was clear that England could not stop construction of the canal, so the British became a partner rather than be shut out. Because Egypt had sold its shares in the Suez Canal, the government no longer had any control over the canal, which was being now being administered by foreigners.

Rising nationalism in Egypt was causing riots, and there were calls for foreigners to be expelled. Ismail sailed off to exile, leaving the new khedive, Tewfik, to solve the unsolvable. The nationalists, led by the military commander Ahmed Orabi, successfully rebelled against Tewfik, took control of Alexandria, and began fortifying the city, intending to take control of both the government and the canal. The foreigners in Alexandria were now in danger, so the British, saying they were coming to rescue British citizens, and also to support Tewfik, sent more than a dozen of their ironclad fighting ships into Alexandria’s harbor and started shelling Orabi’s position. The bombardment of Alexandria lasted for ten hours, and in the end, much of the city was reduced to rubble (Figure 18.1).13 The British landed marines, and Egypt became an unofficial British protectorate; it would remain one for more than half a century. Such was the political situation Carter and Carnarvon encountered forty years later.

When Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, the country was administered by the British. De Lesseps, of course, could never have foreseen such consequences of his canal and was only very indirectly responsible for England’s control over Egypt. He was, however, directly responsible for France’s control of the Antiquities Service.

Excerpted with permission from Tutankhamun and the Tomb that Changed the World by Bob Brier. Copyright @2022 by Oxford University Press.

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