The British Empire and the Construction of the Suez Canal

The Suez Canal, opened on 17 November 1869, was the most consequential infrastructure project of the nineteenth century. It cut the sea journey from Britain to India from around four months via the Cape of Good Hope to a few weeks via the canal, and it made the British presence in India, in Australia, and in the Far East both more rapid and more reliable. The canal was built by a French entrepreneur with Egyptian labour and capital, and the British government opposed it. The British opposition, however, lasted only six years: in 1875, Benjamin Disraeli purchased the Egyptian khedive’s 44 percent stake in the canal for £4 million, and the British became the principal shareholders in the most important waterway in the world. The canal’s subsequent history — the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, the defence of the canal in two world wars, the Suez Crisis of 1956 — was shaped by the strategic importance of a piece of water that the British had not wanted to be built.

The Long History of the Idea

The idea of a canal connecting the Mediterranean and Red Sea had a long history, dating back to ancient times. The Pharaoh Necho II is said to have begun such a canal in the seventh century BC, and a working canal, used until the eighth century AD, was maintained by the early Islamic caliphs. Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 included a survey of the isthmus, and Napoleon himself is said to have declared that “the conquest of Egypt would give us the keys of the world” and that the canal would be a key element of French power.

The modern project began with the work of French engineers, particularly the survey carried out by Alois Negrelli and the Saint-Simonian engineer Paulin Talabot. The completion of the project was made possible by a combination of engineering advances — particularly the development of dredging technology that could work in the desert climate — and by the political instability of the Ottoman Empire, which gave the French promoter Ferdinand de Lesseps the opportunity to negotiate directly with the Egyptian khedive.

Ferdinand de Lesseps and the Project

Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805–1894) was the principal driving force of the project. A retired French diplomat who had served as French consul in Egypt, de Lesseps obtained in 1854 a firman from the Egyptian khedive Said Pasha authorising him to construct a canal across the isthmus. In 1858 he founded the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez, with the Egyptian government and the public both holding shares. The project was controversial from the start: the British government, fearing French influence in the region, opposed the canal, and the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was formally a part, was reluctant to authorise a project that would strengthen Egypt at its expense.

De Lesseps pressed on regardless, and in March 1859 construction began at Port Said on the Mediterranean coast. The project required the excavation of nearly 75 million cubic metres of sand and clay, the construction of a fresh-water canal from the Nile to supply the workers, and the building of the cities of Port Said and Ismailia to house the construction staff. The workforce was overwhelmingly Egyptian, with perhaps 25,000 Egyptian fellahin employed at the peak of construction. The work was extraordinarily harsh, and the mortality among the workers was high. As Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister, put it in a letter to Queen Victoria, the canal was being built “at the cost of the blood of the Egyptian fellahin.”

The Construction of the Canal (1859–1869)

The construction of the Suez Canal was a major engineering feat. The project took ten years to complete, and it was financed in part by a forced loan of £3.6 million extracted by the khedive from the Egyptian peasantry. The French and Egyptian engineers used a combination of steam dredgers, manual labour, and an ingenious system of dredged channels filled with water to remove the sand. The work was hard, the conditions were dangerous, and the death toll among the workers is estimated at 25,000 to 30,000, most of them from cholera, typhoid, and other diseases.

The canal was opened on 17 November 1869 in a grand ceremony attended by the Empress Eugénie of France, the Crown Prince of Prussia (later Kaiser Wilhelm I), and the khedive Ismail. The opening procession sailed from Port Said to Ismailia, and the celebrations included fireworks, balls, and operas — Verdi’s Aida, commissioned for the occasion, was not ready in time, and the inaugural performance was of Rigoletto. The canal was an immediate success: in 1870, its first full year of operation, nearly 500 ships passed through it, and by 1880 the figure had risen to over 2,000.

The British and the Suez Canal

The British government was initially hostile to the Suez Canal project, but it came to appreciate its strategic value. The opening of the canal in 1869 was followed by the British purchase of the Egyptian khedive’s shares in 1875, after Ismail, forced to sell his assets to pay the Egyptian debt, offered his 44 percent stake. Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, borrowed the £4 million needed from the Rothschilds and secured the shares for Britain, giving Britain a major position in the canal and a de facto veto over its operations. As Disraeli told Queen Victoria in a dispatch: “You have it, Madam.”

The strategic value of the canal was demonstrated in 1882, when the British used it to deploy troops to suppress the Urabi Revolt and to begin the British occupation of Egypt. The British occupation, which lasted formally until 1922, was justified in part by the need to protect the Suez Canal, and the canal remained a central element of British strategic planning in the region. The canal was a major factor in the British decision to intervene in Egypt, to declare a protectorate over the Persian Gulf, and to confront the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.

The Suez Canal and the British Empire

The Suez Canal became a vital artery of the British Empire, used by Royal Navy ships and by the merchant marine. By the 1890s the canal was carrying over 9 million tons of shipping a year, and the proportion of British shipping was high. The canal was the principal route by which British troops, supplies, and mail reached India, Australia, and New Zealand, and it was essential to the maintenance of the British position in the Indian Ocean.

The Suez Canal Company, a French-Egyptian joint venture, was the operating body of the canal until its nationalisation by Nasser in 1956. The company’s headquarters were in Paris, but the British position on the board of directors, secured by Disraeli’s purchase, gave Britain an effective veto over major decisions. The company’s operations were closely tied to the British imperial system, and the canal itself was a major source of revenue for the Egyptian government until the 1950s.

The Twentieth Century

The strategic importance of the canal was demonstrated by the two World Wars. In the First World War, the British defended the canal against the Ottoman attack in 1915, and the canal was the principal route for British supply lines to India and the East. In the Second World War, the canal was of major strategic importance, although it was vulnerable to Axis air attack. The British maintained control of the canal throughout the Second World War, and it remained a vital supply line.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 marked the end of British control of the canal. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt nationalised the canal in July 1956, and the British, French, and Israeli invasion of November 1956 failed to reverse the decision. The failure of the Suez intervention was a defining moment in the decline of the British Empire, and it marked the effective end of British power in the Middle East. The canal itself remained open and became even more important to world trade, with major expansions in 2015 to accommodate larger ships. The legacy of the canal, and of the British involvement in it, continues to influence international politics in the twenty-first century.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Suez Canal has been shaped, since the 1956 crisis, by the question of how to understand the British position. The official British history, including the relevant volumes of the History of the Second World War and the subsequent Documents on British Foreign Policy series, treated the canal as a vital strategic interest whose loss marked the end of British great power status. The revisionist work of the 1960s and 1970s, including Keith Kyle’s Suez (1991) and the work of W. Scott Lucas, has been more critical of the British intervention, treating it as a misconceived imperial adventure that accelerated the very decline it was meant to reverse. The more recent scholarship, including the work of Wm. Roger Louis in The British Empire in the Middle East (1984) and David French in his work on British strategic policy, has produced a more nuanced picture in which the canal is treated as a strategic interest whose importance was perhaps overstated in the years before 1956. The economic history of the canal, the work of statisticians and economic historians, has shown that the canal’s contribution to the British balance of payments was smaller than the imperial rhetoric of the 1950s suggested.

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