The French press reacted as if France had suffered another military defeat. The French government worried that Britain would become more involved in Egypt and start to undermine the French position in North and sub-Saharan Africa. Lesseps, whose last-minute effort to outbid Disraeli had failed, issued a statement chiding the British for having spent years fighting against the company only to turn around and join it. Trying to sound magnanimous, he expressed the hope that Britain and France would now work together for the benefit of world trade. The Germans enjoyed watching the latest setback to French power. But in England, the news was not greeted with universal acclaim. The Times worried about the long-term consequences of Disraeli’s action. “The possible results of this national investment are so large and indefinite,” the paper prophetically editorialized on November 27, 1875, “that it would be vain to speculate upon them…. It is plain that we acquire an interest in Egypt and its administration which will compel the constant attention of the Queen’s government. We have purchased nearly half the shares of the Suez Canal…. To this country will belong the decision on every question, whether scientific, financial or political… and as we have the power, so we shall have responsibility before the world…. We now have an abiding stake in the security and welfare of Egypt.”
Disraeli’s actions had almost as much effect on subsequent world history as the building of the canal itself. The four-million-pound infusion temporarily allowed Ismail to satisfy his creditors, but within a year, he was faced with the same problem. With no more shares to sell and no way to pay the interest due, he was forced to accept a joint Anglo-English commission to oversee the management of Egypt’s finances. The arrangement, known as the Dual Control, consolidated Egypt’s outstanding debts and provided an excuse for a consortium of international bankers to take charge of the treasury. Ismail’s government was, in effect, placed in receivership, and he lost the ability to determine his state budget. He had dedicated his life to making Egypt independent of the Ottoman Empire. He had done everything he could to revolutionize Egypt in order to place it on a par with European states. And now he found himself condescended to by bankers who treated him as a child who had spent too freely. Unwilling to accept this humiliation, he plotted to remove the Dual Control and regain his authority.
That backfired. Though Ismail had the power to obstruct the efforts of the Dual Control to collect tax revenue, he was losing legitimacy. Ministers turned against him, including Nubar Pasha, who calculated that an Egypt with Ismail was more likely to fall under complete European control than an Egypt without him. In April 1879, after a series of intrigues that failed to dislodge the Europeans, Ismail was deposed by the new Ottoman sultan, who had been pressured by the English and French to remove the troublesome and increasingly impotent khedive. Replaced by his son, Tawfiq, Ismail went into exile and lived the last fifteen years of his life in a secluded villa near Mount Vesuvius in Italy.
Ismail’s ouster did not improve matters. His son was inexperienced and was cast into a situation that few could have managed well. One of the first things the Dual Control mandated was the sale of the khe-dive’s right to 15 percent of the canal’s profits. Bought by a French bank, the price was twenty-two million francs, which was less than one million pounds. In later years, that 15 percent would be worth more than a hundred million francs each year. With that sale, the Egyptian government ceased to have a financial stake in the canal that it had financed.
That was only one of the many indignities. The blatant exercise of European power stoked nascent Egyptian nationalism. Under Said and Ismail, the old Turkish ruling class had gradually been forced to share power with native Egyptians. Much like Napoleon in the 1860s, Ismail had opened up the political system and allowed for an assembly with limited powers. In 1880 and 1881, Arab-speaking ministers and army officers made their own bid for prominence in the Egyptian government, and when they were rebuffed by Tawfiq and his coterie of Turkish and Circassian ministers, they rebelled. Claiming to speak for the fellahin, these officers, led by Colonel Ahmad Urabi, assailed Tawfiq as a puppet of the Dual Control. That led to a diplomatic crisis, followed by an armed rebellion. Tawfiq appealed to France and Britain for help, but only Britain sent troops. In the summer of 1882, after an anti-European riot, a British fleet bombarded Alexandria, landed an army, and routed Urabi’s forces at Tel al-Kabir.
As part of their offensive, British forces seized the canal. Lesseps denounced the seizure as a violation of the canal’s neutrality, but British troops had in fact occupied the entire country. Several years passed before an international convention declared that the Suez Canal should never be closed to ships of any nation by any nation, and in the interim, the British established a protectorate over Egypt. While the khedive ruled in name, along with a prime minister and an assembly, the British government held ultimate authority, and the British consul general, Lord Cromer, was the final arbiter of what the government could and could not do.
In purchasing the canal shares, the British government did, as The Times had warned, develop “an abiding stake in the security and welfare of Egypt.” But the consequences extended beyond Egypt. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Suez Canal had become the fulcrum of the British Empire and an excuse for imperial expansion. As the volume of trade increased, the British government began to treat the canal as the most vital, and most vulnerable, point in the whole empire. Suez was seen as the link between England and its overseas colonies in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. British officials were so concerned about the possibility of Suez’s falling into hostile hands that they justified expansion into Afghanistan, along the coast of East Africa, and into Iran and the Middle East. The logic, however tenuous, was that if adversaries such as Russia, Germany, or France controlled any of these regions, they would be able to threaten the Suez Canal, and if they seized the canal, then the entire British Empire could be severed and dismembered. Operating under that assumption, the British occupied Egypt after the outbreak of World War I and ruled the country directly.
Well before that happened, the final major figure in the canal’s construction also came to a less than happy end. Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son Charles founded a company in 1880 to dig a canal across Panama. Lesseps figured that what had worked for Suez would work for Central America, and the new company mimicked the old. It was called the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique de Panama. After a few false starts, shares were offered to the public, and the company began publishing a regular paper called The Bulletin of the Interoceanic Canal, modeled after The Isthmus of Suez: The Journal of the Union of the Two Seas. “I maintain that Panama will be easier to make, easier to complete, and easier to keep up than Suez,” Lesseps declared, and once again he drew on the expertise of the engineers of the Polytechnic. He assured investors that the work would be completed by 1892.2
By 1889, the company was in shambles. It had spent nearly one billion francs, and had almost nothing to show for it. In truth, Panama was a more complicated and dangerous enterprise. The jungles made the proposed route a zone of disease, rain, and heat. Thousands died. The differential height between the Atlantic and the Pacific meant that not only was more excavation required, but the canal would need locks—a reality that Lesseps only conceded after several years of futile effort. Locks presented technical difficulties that neither Lesseps nor any of the engineers had faced, and cost estimates soared. In 1889, another exposition was held in Paris, and France witnessed two things it had thought impossible: a huge erector set known as the Eiffel Tower, and the downfall of Ferdinand de Lesseps.
The Panama Canal company went bankrupt and was liquidated. Though the individual losses to the half-million shareholders were manageable, the scandal and the disgrace were not. In 1892, Lesseps, his son, and several others, including the recently lauded Gustave Eiffel, were investigated by the Assembly and then charged with fraud and conspiracy. Charles de Lesseps, Eiffel, and the other company directors were arrested and placed in solit
ary confinement. Ferdinand was kept from jail because, at the age of eighty-seven, he was too ill to be moved from his bed at his country estate. The prosecuting attorney charged the elder Lesseps with having deceived France with “beautiful illusions,” and both father and son were sentenced to five years in prison. The court did not enforce the sentence against Ferdinand, and he remained in his bed, only vaguely aware of his utter humiliation. Though the board of the Suez Canal Company issued a statement defending Lesseps and his legacy, he remained mute, and did not leave his room until his death on December 7, 1894.
The Panama Canal was eventually built by an American company at far greater cost. The Suez Canal, meanwhile, assumed ever-greater prominence in world affairs. During World War I, the British stationed more than a hundred thousand troops in the canal zone. To protect the canal, and undermine Turkey, the British sponsored an Arab revolt, and a brilliant, eccentric young officer named T E. Lawrence crossed the canal into the Arabian Peninsula to help the sharif of Mecca. After World War I, the British governed Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, and increased their military presence in the canal zone.
Even when Egypt was declared independent in 1922, with a newly crowned King Fuad I, Britain retained the right to defend the Suez Canal and garrisoned troops in the isthmus for that purpose. A substantial percentage of world trade was passing through the canal, and the company’s profits soared. With the rise of Egyptian nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, the British granted the Egyptians more say over how the canal was managed, and the company agreed to pay an annual rent.
During World War II, the British once again clamped down on dissent and occupied the country. Egypt became a significant theater of the war. First the Italians and then the Germans, commanded by Erwin Rommel, tried to evict Britain from Egypt and capture the strategically important canal. Even if the Germans failed to occupy the isthmus, they could do almost as much damage by gaining air supremacy in Egypt and then using their planes to bring shipping in the eastern Mediterranean to a halt. Without the canal, Britain would be cut off from India and Asia. Until the summer of 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps moved steadily eastward from Libya. Only after the tank battles of El Alamein were the Germans halted, and only then did the threat to the canal recede.
On July 23, 1952, King Farouk, the last descendant of Muhammad Ali to govern Egypt, was overthrown by an officers’ coup. Three days later, he was sent, like his grandfather Ismail, into exile in Italy, and he left on the same yacht, the Mahroussah, which had been moored in Port Said when the Suez Canal was inaugurated and which now carried Farouk to a life of dissolute luxury.
Within a few years, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser emerged as the leader of the officers who had organized the coup. He was the dominant figure in the Arab world for the next fifteen years, espousing his own particular mix of nationalism and socialism. He called for Arab unity, and refused to take sides in the emerging Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Having come to power on a platform of nationalism and independence from the West, he looked at the Suez Canal as an egregious reminder of Egypt’s long decades under British control.
The canal concession was scheduled to expire on November 17, 1968, ninety-nine years after the opening date. But the company still operated as a quasi-autonomous state on Egyptian soil, and still was Egypt’s largest source of foreign revenue. The canal accounted for a sizable share of world oil shipments from the Middle East. By the mid-1950s, 122 million tons of cargo passed through the canal annually, and more than seventy-five million of that was oil. Compared with the days when the company hoped to get five million tons of traffic, the canal had come far.
In 1956, the World Bank in conjunction with the U.S. government of Dwight Eisenhower turned down Nasser’s request for a loan to build a high dam across the Nile at Aswan. Nasser responded with a dramatic speech on July 26, 1956, exactly four years after Farouk had been sent into exile. Though he spoke in front of a large crowd in Alexandria, Nasser’s words were broadcast throughout the Arab world on radio. His long, colloquial speech presented the past century of Egyptian history as a series of struggles against the West that had culminated in the glorious victory of the 1952 coup. Now, Nasser declared, only one thing remained in Egypt’s way. Recently, he reminded his audience, he had participated in negotiations for a loan, and the president of the World Bank, Eugene Black, had been in the room. Nasser continued: “I started to look at Mr. Black, who was sitting in a chair, and I saw him in my imagination as Ferdinand de Lesseps.”3 That seemingly innocuous reference was a signal to Egyptian forces, who streamed into the canal zone and surprised the startled British troops. Nasser concluded his speech with the declaration that, as of that moment, Egypt had nationalized the Suez Canal Company. For the first time, the canal belonged solely to Egypt.
It was a short-lived victory. In October 1956, Britain, France, and Israel responded by attacking Egypt. Large portions of Port Said were destroyed. British forces retook parts of the canal, and in retaliation, an angry crowd of Egyptians blew up the thirty-five-foot-high statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps that stood at the canal’s entrance. The United States refused to countenance what the British, French, and Israelis had done, and the canal was then returned to Egypt. For England especially, it was a signal defeat. The British Empire, it was said, came to an end with the Suez crisis, and Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned in disgrace. The crisis also altered the fortunes of the canal itself. No longer the center of an empire, the Suez Canal was now one point among many in the global Cold War, and hardly the most important. That didn’t matter to the Egyptians, however. For the next ten years, Egypt operated the waterway and negotiated a compensation agreement with the canal-less Suez Canal Company. Though its international profile dwindled, the canal continued to provide Egypt with dearly needed foreign currency.
In 1967, Israel went to war with Egypt again, and this time, all three cities along the isthmus were devastated by Israel’s air force and artillery. Israeli troops and tanks crossed the canal, and only retreated to the eastern shore after the armistice. Nasser ordered dozens of ships to be scuttled to make sure that no one could use the passage, and the canal remained closed until 1975. Soon after, Israel and Egypt signed an accord at Camp David, and Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula and the eastern shore of the canal to Egypt in return for a peace treaty recognizing Israel’s existence.
The canal reopened, and it was deepened and widened to accommodate large oil tankers. But after 1975, history began to reverse itself. Since its inauguration in 1869, the Suez Canal had enjoyed a steady expansion of its business. Now it started to contract. By the 1980s, pipelines had taken away a large portion of the canal’s oil business, and a new generation of tankers were too big for the waterway. World shipping began to bypass the canal, and in order to retain traffic, the Egyptian government was forced to cut rates. This was a losing game.
The total number of ships passing through the Suez Canal peaked in the early 1980s at twenty-two thousand annually, and had fallen below fifteen thousand in 2002. At the turn of the millennium, the canal still generates nearly two billion dollars a year in revenue for Egypt, but that figure has ceased to grow even as the country’s population balloons. The cities along the canal zone have become more populous, along with the rest of Egypt, and the government has put hundreds of thousands of people to work for the Suez Canal Authority. But there is an inverse relationship between the number of people employed and the amount of work to be done. The canal cities have started to resemble mini-Cairos, overpopulated and filled with young men and women who have just enough work, food, and subsidized housing, and little possibility of anything else. There is chronic talk of multibillion-dollar projects to dredge the canal, widen it, and make it more attractive to international shipping. But with seventy million people, many of them disillusioned by a repressive government and decades of an unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict, and a few of them drawn to the eschatological appeal of radical Islam, Egypt has enough trouble maintaining i
ts precarious status quo. The canal still functions. It is still a testament to nineteenth-century will and ingenuity. But its legacy for Egypt is a different, and sadder, story.
EPILOGUE
OZYMANDIAS
IN LATE DECEMBER 1817, two young English poets held a contest. They would each write a sonnet based on a reference made by the ancient historian Diodorus Siculus. The subject was a statue of Ramses II, who was widely thought to be the pharaoh of the book of Exodus who tried to keep Moses from leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Then, under pen names, they would both submit their final poems to The Examiner, a prominent London journal, and see who received the greatest acclaim. One of the two was Horace Smith; the other was Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Neither man had been to Egypt, but they were excited by what they had heard. Pharaonic Egypt fit their sensibilities perfectly, and the image of a colossal statue in the sand was irresistible. According to Diodorus, a thousand-ton statue of Ramses had been erected near the Theban necropolis, on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor. There was an inscription on the statue’s base, which declared that no one would be able to surpass the achievements of Ramses the Great. Yet, centuries later, as Shelley and Smith knew, that statue (or at least what explorers at the time believed was that statue) was in ruins. It lay prostrate in the desert, its face smoothed by centuries of wind and sand, the inscription almost erased by time. Smith wrote a short poem with a long title, called “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.” His friend Shelley offered a pithier title, the Greek word for “Ramses,” or “Ozymandias.”
Parting the Desert Page 34