Suez Canal

The Suez Canal is a sea-level waterway across the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt, joining the Mediterranean at Port Said to the Red Sea at Suez and separating the Sinai Peninsula from the African mainland. Built by a French-led company between 1859 and 1869, it cut thousands of kilometres from voyages between Europe and Asia and quickly became one of the world's most important trade routes and strategic choke points. Today it runs for about 193 kilometres and carries around 8 per cent of the world's seaborne trade.

Long before the modern canal, Egyptian rulers dug channels from the Nile to the Red Sea through the Wadi Tumilat. Greek writers credited a legendary king Sesostris with the first attempt, and the pharaoh Necho II began a canal around 600 BCE that he never finished; Herodotus heard that 120,000 men died on it, a figure modern scholars regard as exaggerated. Darius the Great of Persia completed it and set up granite stelae celebrating the work. The Ptolemies reopened it in 270 or 269 BCE, and the Roman emperor Trajan dug it out again. After the Arab conquest of 641 the commander Amr ibn al-As restored a route to the Red Sea, but it was reportedly shut in 767 on the orders of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur. Venetian merchants, ruined by the Portuguese sea route round Africa, dreamt of a new canal, and an Ottoman grand vizier planned one in the sixteenth century, but neither was built. During Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, French surveyors traced the old channels but wrongly concluded that the Red Sea stood several metres above the Mediterranean.

Later surveys, notably Paul-Adrien Bourdaloue's in the 1840s, showed there was no real difference in level. The French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained concessions in 1854 and 1856 from Said Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, and in December 1858 founded the Suez Canal Company, which was to run the canal for 99 years. Britain, fearing a threat to its route to India, opposed the project throughout. Digging began at the site of Port Said on 25 April 1859. Until 1864 much of the labour was forced corvée work, and deaths from cholera and other diseases were common; estimates of the toll vary enormously, from the 120,000 cited by Nasser in 1956 to far lower figures implied by the company's own medical reports. The canal opened on 17 November 1869 with a procession of ships led by the French imperial yacht, carrying Empress Eugénie.

The canal transformed world trade and helped speed the European colonisation of Africa. In 1875 the indebted Khedive Ismail sold Egypt's 44 per cent share to the British government for £4 million, and in 1882 Britain invaded and occupied Egypt, which remained nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. The Convention of Constantinople of 1888 declared the canal open to ships of every flag in war and peace. In the First World War British forces beat off an Ottoman attack on the canal in 1915, and in the Second it was a vital Allied supply route.

On 26 July 1956 President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the canal to pay for the Aswan Dam after Britain and the United States withdrew their funding. Israel, Britain and France then invaded Egypt in a pre-arranged plan, setting off the Suez Crisis. Under American and United Nations pressure the invaders withdrew, and the canal, blocked by ships sunk on Nasser's orders, reopened in April 1957 under the Egyptian Suez Canal Authority.

When the Six-Day War broke out in June 1967 Egypt closed the canal, and Israeli troops occupied its whole east bank. It stayed shut for eight years, trapping fifteen cargo ships, the so-called Yellow Fleet. When the Yom Kippur War broke out in October 1973, the Egyptian army crossed the canal into Sinai, and Israeli forces later crossed in the other direction. After mine-clearing by American and British teams, President Anwar Sadat reopened the canal on 5 June 1975.

In 2015 Egypt opened a 35-kilometre parallel channel, allowing two-way traffic through the central section. On 23 March 2021 the giant container ship Ever Given ran aground in a single-lane stretch and blocked the canal for six days, leaving a backlog of hundreds of ships and prompting new widening work. The canal is owned and run by the state of Egypt through the Suez Canal Authority.