The Canal That Cut the Trip to India in Half

The first attempt to dig a Mediterranean-Red Sea canal was a pharaonic project under Senusret III around 1850 BCE, connecting the Nile to the Red Sea via the Wadi Tumilat. That canal silted up, was redug by Darius the Persian around 500 BCE, and was redug again by the Romans, the Byzantines, and the early Arabs. By the 8th century it was abandoned for the last time.

The modern canal was the project of French diplomat-turned-promoter Ferdinand de Lesseps. Construction began in 1859 with a workforce that grew to over 1.5 million laborers, many conscripted under brutal corvée labor and tens of thousands of whom died on the project. The canal opened on November 17, 1869. It was 164 kilometers long, had no locks because the Mediterranean and Red Seas sit at almost identical elevations, and immediately changed the geography of trade.

A London-to-Bombay voyage that had previously rounded the Cape of Good Hope, covering roughly 11,000 nautical miles, now ran 5,000. Coal-burning steamships that could not have made the longer route economically suddenly could. The British Empire's grip on India tightened in the same decade, and the strategic importance of Egypt rose enough that Britain occupied the country in 1882, partly to protect the canal.

The canal has been the trigger for two wars (1956's Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War in 1967) and one famous global supply-chain freeze (the container ship Ever Given, wedged across the channel for six days in March 2021). Today roughly 12 percent of world trade passes through it. The drying-up of the Roman version had tied Europe to a longer route for a millennium. The reopening reorganized the planet.