The Suez Canal and the British Empire
The Suez Canal was, in the short British imperial century between 1869 and 1956, the most strategic single piece of infrastructure in the British Empire. The canal cut the sea route from London to Bombay by some 4,000 nautical miles and converted the steamship voyage to India from a two-month journey around the Cape of Good Hope into a two-week journey through the Mediterranean. The British did not build the canal. They acquired a controlling interest in it in 1875, defended it as a strategic asset from 1882 to 1947, and lost it in 1956 in the political conditions of decolonisation. The story is the story of the British Empire: the conversion of a commercial project into a strategic asset, and the loss of the asset in the conditions of the post-imperial world.
The Construction
The canal was the work of the French diplomat and engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had supervised the construction of the French-built Alexandria waterworks in the 1850s and who in 1854 secured a 99-year concession from Sa’id Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, for the construction of a maritime canal across the Isthmus of Suez. The concession was held by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, incorporated in 1858, with the Khedive holding 44 per cent of the shares and the French public holding most of the remainder. The construction was carried out between 1859 and 1869, with the use of forced Egyptian labour — at its peak, 25,000 Egyptian conscripts — under conditions that produced a death toll of 20,000 to 30,000. The canal opened on 17 November 1869. The Ismailia ceremony, attended by the Empress Eugénie of France and a substantial European diplomatic delegation, was the most expensive opening of a piece of infrastructure in the nineteenth century.
The initial British response was hostile. Palmerston and Russell, the Liberal leaders, had opposed the canal in the 1850s on the grounds that the British did not need it and that the French project would damage the British strategic position in Egypt. Robert Stephenson, the British engineer, had campaigned in the 1850s for a British-built overland route through Palestine and Syria as an alternative. The strategic position changed in the 1870s. The 1870 opening of the Indo-European Telegraph Line, the 1874 opening of the P&O Line’s new steamship services through the Canal, and the 1875 financial crisis of the Khedive Ismail produced the conditions for the British purchase.
The 1875 Purchase
In November 1875, the Khedive Ismail, in severe financial difficulty and unable to service the Egyptian state debt, offered his 44 per cent stake in the Suez Canal Company to the British government. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, moved with speed. He raised the £4 million necessary for the purchase from the Rothschild banking family in two days, in what is the most important financial operation of the nineteenth century. The purchase gave the British government the largest single block of shares in the Canal Company, and the right to appoint a proportionate number of directors. The share was not a majority — the French public held a larger residual interest — but it was enough to give the British a strategic position in the Company’s affairs.
The political economy of the 1875 purchase is the right place to read the shift. Cain and Hopkins, in British Imperialism: 1688–2015 (2016), treat the 1875 purchase as the moment the gentlemanly capitalism of the City of London took over the management of the imperial project in the eastern Mediterranean. The argument is not unchallenged. Andrew Phillips’s work on the 1875 purchase, in his German-Ottoman Relations and the Emergence of a Modern Middle East, 1870–1914 (2013), reads the purchase as a defensive measure against the Russian advance on the Ottoman Empire, the 1876 Bulgarian atrocities, and the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War. The two readings are not mutually exclusive.
The 1882 Occupation
The 1882 occupation of Egypt, in the aftermath of the nationalist revolt of Urabi Pasha, converted the British shareholding into a strategic control. The 1882 bombardment of Alexandria, the 1882 Battle of Tel el-Kebir, the 1882 occupation of Cairo, and the 1883 establishment of the British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt were the institutional moments. The 1882 occupation was, in form, an occupation of the Egyptian state in the name of the Khedive and in support of the Egyptian public debt. In substance, it was the moment the British state assumed strategic control of the Canal and the routes to India.
The strategic logic was the 1885 Stanhope Memorandum, the 1885 Northbrook Memorandum, and the 1887 Hartington Memorandum — the three documents in which the Liberal Unionist, the Liberal, and the Liberal Unionist governments successively articulated the strategic case. The argument was, in substance, that the Canal was the route to India, that the route could not be allowed to fall into the hands of a hostile power, and that the only European state capable of defending the Canal was the British. The 1882 occupation was never, in formal terms, a declaration of war or a treaty of annexation. The 1914 declaration of a British protectorate over Egypt converted the 32-year de facto occupation into a de jure protectorate. The 1922 unilateral declaration of Egyptian independence, the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, and the 1952 Egyptian Revolution of the Free Officers Movement, led by Nasser, were the conditions of the 1956 crisis.
The Two World Wars
The Canal was defended against the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The 1915 defence of the Canal, in the early phase of the First World War, was the work of the Indian Expeditionary Force, drawn from the British Indian Army, and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The Ottoman 1915 attack, planned by the German General von Kressenstein, was repulsed at the Battle of Ismailia, and the Canal remained in British hands for the rest of the war. The 1917 British capture of Jerusalem and the 1918 capture of Damascus extended the strategic depth. The 1919 Versailles settlement, by which the Ottoman Empire was partitioned, formalised the British control of the region.
The 1942 defence of the Canal against Rommel’s Afrika Korps, in the western desert campaign, was the second test. The 1940 Italian invasion of Egypt, the 1940 Italian declaration of war, the 1941 German intervention, the 1941–42 Rommel offensive, and the 1942 El Alamein victory marked the period of greatest risk. The 1943 North Africa campaign, the 1943 invasion of Sicily, and the 1945 German surrender were the conditions of British strategic control. The 1952 Egyptian Revolution, the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian Agreement on the Suez Canal Base, and the 1956 nationalisation of the Canal Company by Nasser, were the political conditions of the 1956 crisis.
The 1956 Crisis
The 1956 nationalisation of the Canal Company, on 26 July 1956, was the moment the British state lost strategic control of the asset. The British, French, and Israeli governments launched a military operation in October 1956 to seize the Canal, in the company of the Israeli Air Force and the British and French Mediterranean Fleets. The 1956 military operation was, in conventional military terms, a success. The political operation was, in the conditions of the post-imperial world, a failure. The US government, the Soviet government, and the United Nations combined to force the British, French, and Israeli governments to withdraw. The 1956 crisis was the moment the British state definitively ceased to be a world power.
The historiography of the 1956 crisis is large. Keith Kyle’s Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (1991) is the indispensable single-volume account. Donald M. McKale’s Nasser and the Suez Crisis (2008) and James Barr’s A Line in the Sand (2021) provide the Egyptian and the British strategic perspectives. The unresolved question is the weight to assign to the British economic interest, the British strategic interest, and the British domestic political interest in the 1956 decision. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the British Empire’s commercial legacy a clean bill of health.
Historiographical Note
The historiography of the Suez Canal has been shaped by three interventions. John H. Drabble’s work on the post-1945 contraction of the British shipping industry and on the 1956 crisis provided the economic history. Keith Kyle’s Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (1991) and Donald M. McKale’s Nasser and the Suez Crisis (2008) provided the political history. James Barr’s A Line in the Sand (2021) and his earlier Lords of the Desert (2018) read the canal as the strategic core of the British informal empire in the inter-war period. The unresolved question is the weight to assign to economic interest, strategic interest, and domestic political interest in explaining the 1956 decision. The present generation of historians has, on the whole, declined to give the British Empire’s commercial legacy a clean bill of health.