Dominic Green - Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899

From the pier of Port Said, a forty-foot statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps directs shipping into the Suez Canal.

O N THE MORNING OF November 17, 1869, Africa became an island. A modern waterway severed the sandy isthmus between Africa and Asia, mingling the waters of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. From that day, maps would show that the two continents lay 250 feet apart, and shipping schedules would announce that Britain had moved more than four thousand miles closer to India. With fanfares, fireworks, and a great expenditure of borrowed money and Egyptian lives, the Suez Canal was open.

At Port Said on the Mediterranean, sixty ships from over a dozen nations sheltered in the largest artificial harbor yet built, waiting for the signal to enter the Canal. To the triumphal piping of military bands, the guests of honor took their seats in the viewing stands: the host, Khedive Ismail of Egypt, and his guest of honor, Empress Eugenie of France; the bishop of Jerusalem and the sharif of Mecca; the emperor of Austria-Hungary and the prince of Prussia; the empresss Catholic confessor and the sheikh of al-Azhar, the Islamic worlds premier university; and all flanked by complementary battalions of European consuls and Egyptian ministers.

A sea of smaller fry washed around the feet of the stands. In the scrum on the quayside, the Turkish fez mingled with the spiked Prussian helmet, the frock coat with the jellaba, the veil with the parasol. French financiers elbowed for room with the international crust of the Ottoman EmpireGreek, Armenian, and Jewish businessmen from Alexandria, Turkish cotton magnates, Coptic army officersand the mute extras of Egyptian society, the Arab peasant farmers and African slaves who in the chaos wandered onto center stage.

The French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps waited amid the robes, plumes, and uniforms in his dark business suit. This was the culmination of his fifteen years struggle against sand, politicians, and bankers. No obstacle of diplomacy or geology had been too great for de Lessepss calm mania. He had burrowed around or dynamited through every obstacle. Displacing the opposition of the Turkish sultan and the British prime minister like so much wet sand and bedrock, he raised diplomatic support and funding in France, romancing Emperor Napoleon III with a mirage of empire, and the French public with a share flotation that promised a stake in the global economy to the smallest investor. He had supervised every detail, devising elaborate financing deals that tied both France and the Egyptian government to his Suez Canal Company, designing mechanical diggers when the shovels of his Egyptian laborers proved useless against the water table, even planning the guest lists and firework displays for the opening festivities.

Now he waited fretfully. The bottom of the Canal was only seventy-two feet deep and twenty-six feet wide. Protocol dictated that the first ship to enter should be the Eagle, Empress Eugenies broad and ungainly yacht, sixty feet in the beam and three hundred feet long. In a trial run the previous day, a sprightlier vessel from the Egyptian navy had run aground. To remove it before the guests arrived, de Lesseps had blown it up. An accident now meant economic and diplomatic catastrophe. The eyes of the world were on the Suez Canal.

AT THE JUNCTION of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the Canal was intended as a unifier of civilizations, a conduit for the modern obsessions of trade and transit. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the global economy boomed. In Europe and America, new machines and mass production created an unstoppable, uncontrollable economic revolution that turned rural peasants into urban factory hands. A machine pulse raced across the world, girdling the seas with coal-fired, iron-hulled steamers, crossing continents and borders with smelted rivulets of railway tracks, bounding immensities of land and water with the electric cables of the telegraph. It created a global civilization, based on Western technology and speaking English or French. We are capable of doing anything, Queen Victoria marveled after visiting the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851.