David Charlwood - Suez Crisis 1956: End of Empire and the Reshaping of the Middle East

The entrance to the canal at Port Said, 1869.

On Christmas Eve 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte stared out across the sea of sand between Cairo and Suez. Frances most famous general carried with him an order to begin an engineering project to open up new trade routes in the East. He was simply instructed to arrange for the cutting of the Isthmus of Suez.

The idea of carving a path through the strip of land that separated the Mediterranean and the Red Sea had been dreamed of as far back as the Pharaohs, but would consume the sleepless nights of emperors and engineers for another seventy years before it was finally completed at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of dollars. The plaudits for the creation of the canal went to another Frenchman: Ferdinand de Lesseps.

De Lesseps was a bushy-moustached and indefatigable career diplomat who only began trying to build a canal after he had officially retired. He had no engineering qualifications. He did, however, have a diplomats ability to win friends and influence people, including Said Pasha, who ruled Egypt as viceroy, nominally under the auspices of the Ottoman sultan. De Lesseps returned to his old diplomatic haunt in 1854 and convinced Said Pasha to back the scheme by appealing to his sense of ego: What a fine claim to glory! For Egypt, what an imperishable source of riches! Somewhat inaccurately he added, The names of those Egyptian sovereigns who built the pyramids are forgotten. The name of the Prince who opens the great maritime canal will be blessed from century to century until the end of time. Said Pasha agreed and granted a concession to the newly created Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez to control the planned waterway for ninety-nine years following construction, after which time ownership would revert to the Egyptian government. With the concession agreed, de Lesseps went off to find financial backers.

Ferdinand de Lesseps.

The concept was a potentially lucrative one. By cutting a canal between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, vessels travelling between Europe and Asia would no longer have to sail around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and whoever was part of the concession would get a cut of the fee every vessel transiting the canal would be required to pay. The problem was not one of potential profit, however, but one of practicalities. Even though de Lesseps had the backing of a team of experienced engineers, it would still be a herculean task. Selling the project was not helped by the fact that Napoleons own engineers, when they had investigated the potential of a canal in the late eighteenth century, had wrongly calculated that the Red Sea was ten metres higher than the Mediterranean and that cutting a path between the two would result in catastrophic flooding across the Nile Delta and the manmade river becoming a raging, unnavigable torrent. Even though de Lessepss engineers were right and Napoleons wrong, it was hard to cast aside the notion that the scheme was liable to failure, but the British objections were primarily over security. Britannia ruled the waves in the nineteenth century and even though relations with France were cordial, the British in particular did not trust the French; as one minister told de Lesseps, in the event of war with France both ends of the canal would be closed to Britain and it would be a suicidal act on the part of England to support the venture.