On November 17, 1869, the esteemed guests of Ismail PashaOttoman viceroy of Egypt, gathered on the Mediterranean coast for a truly global event: the official opening ceremony of the Suez Canal.

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

As European royalty arrived on their yachts, celebratory cannons “thundered in welcome, until the ears were dizzy with the sound and the atmosphere thickened with smoke,” Russell wrote.

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

Much of the fanfare was reserved for Ferdinand de Lessepsthe French developer who obtained the political and financial support that enabled the construction of the canal. But de Lesseps is certainly not the first to imagine a canal connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Sea – and, by extension, Europe and Asia – via the Isthmus of Suez.

How the Suez Canal changed the world – Lucia Carminati

The idea was ancient, probably dating back to the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh. Sénousret IIIwho imagined and commissioned a similar project in the 19th century BCE. The so-called “Channel of the Pharaohs» connected the Red Sea to the Nile, which in turn flowed into the Mediterranean. But its extent is disputed by historians, and the canal was closed in 767 CE in order to cut off trade with the rebel cities of Mecca and Medina on the Arabian Peninsula.

In 1798, during the brief Egyptian conquest of France, the French discovered traces of the ancient canal and sought to reconstruct its route. The strategic and economic advantage of a canal under French imperial control would be immense. But a civil engineer investigation erroneously concluded that the sea level on each side of the isthmus was off by 30 feet, requiring a massive system of locks that engineers were not yet equipped to construct. The project was abandoned.

More than half a century later, the idea comes back into fashion with the Suez Canal Companywhich would oversee the construction of the canal, give 15 percent of the profits to the Egyptian state, and retain control of the canal for 99 years, after which Egypt would assume responsibility.

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

After ten years of digging, the immense Suez Canal is finally open to transit.

A procession of ships began the journey, led by a boat whose passengers included the Empress of France and de Lesseps. According to a British observerthe ships “passed in dignified rank…acclaimed by teeming multitudes thronging the arid shores of the burning desert.”

These masses witnessed the first moments of a narrow but 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.