The route before the canal
Before 1869, ships travelling between Europe and the Indian Ocean or the Far East went around Africa by the Cape route, a voyage of many weeks. Goods and passengers also took a shortcut across Egypt. From the 1830s and 1840s, steamship companies such as the Peninsula and Oriental company (P&O) carried travellers to Alexandria, where they went overland to Suez, and then boarded another ship for India. A railway linking Alexandria and Suez was completed in the 1850s. This “Overland Route” was fast but required unloading and reloading.
Ancient rulers of Egypt had dug canals linking the Nile to the Red Sea, and the idea of a direct sea channel through the isthmus had been proposed several times. The geography helped: the isthmus is low and flat, and there are no great height differences between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, so locks were not needed.
Building the canal
The Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained a concession from the Egyptian ruler in the 1850s, and the Suez Canal Company began work in 1859. Early construction relied heavily on forced labour, a practice that drew criticism and was gradually replaced by machinery, including steam dredgers, as the project advanced. The scale of the work, and the number of deaths among workers, are both debated by historians.
The canal opened on 17 November 1869 with a grand ceremony attended by European royalty. It ran roughly 160 kilometres (about 100 miles) from Port Said on the Mediterranean to Suez on the Red Sea, and was initially fairly shallow and narrow, which limited the size of ship. Dredging and widening continued over the following decades.
Why steamships benefited
The canal helped steamers far more than sailing ships. Light and unreliable winds in the Red Sea made it a difficult passage under sail, so most sailing vessels continued to use the Cape route. A steamer could take the direct way regardless of wind. For a ship sailing from Britain to India, the canal cut the distance by thousands of miles, and for ports farther east the saving was significant too.
Coal was still the limiting factor. Steamers could not carry enough fuel for the whole trip, so a chain of coaling stations grew up along the route, at Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Aden and beyond. Control of these places became a strategic question for the powers involved. The canal thus strengthened the steamship era and tied it to the politics of empire. The shift also contributed to the end of the tea clipper trade, which had depended on sail.
Politics and control
In 1875 the British government bought the Egyptian ruler’s shares in the Suez Canal Company, giving Britain a major financial stake, and Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. An international agreement, the Convention of Constantinople of 1888, declared that the canal should be open in peace and war to ships of all nations, although this principle was not always respected in practice.
Egypt nationalised the canal company in July 1956. The nationalisation led to the Suez Crisis, when Britain, France and Israel took military action, and an international response including the United Nations led to their withdrawal. Egypt kept control.
Closures and the rise of the supertanker
The canal was closed several times. After the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 it was blocked until 1975, with a number of ships trapped in the Great Bitter Lake for years; their crews became known for organising their own sports and a postal service. The closures sent tanker traffic around the Cape and encouraged owners to build very large ships that benefit from long voyages, a development covered in the history of oil tankers. The long-term consequence was that some of the newest and biggest tankers were too deep to use the canal anyway, even after it reopened.
Modern Suez
The canal has been deepened and widened repeatedly. A major expansion, including a new parallel channel, opened in 2015. Today the canal carries a significant share of world container shipping, as well as oil and gas. In March 2021 the grounding of the large container ship Ever Given blocked the canal for about six days, which showed how many supply chains pass through a single narrow waterway.
The wider picture
Suez linked the Mediterranean seafaring world to the Red Sea navigation routes and the Indian Ocean beyond, and made the Europe-Asia route shorter, more regular and more reliable. In the 19th century it helped to concentrate trade in steamships and strengthen the position of a few large shipping companies. Its history is also a reminder that canals are political as well as engineering structures, and that the control of a short channel can matter greatly to the shipping of whole regions.