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    • Main contributor: Dr. David Heffernan
    An aerial view of the Suez Canal

    The Suez Canal is an artificial waterway which runs through the western side of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. By extension it connects the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean without the need to sail all the way around Africa. Plans to try and create artificial waterways between the River Nile to the Red Sea, and thus link the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, had been initiated going back to Old Kingdom Egypt in the third millennium BCE. By their nature these canals between the Nile and Red Sea could only accommodate smaller ships. It was not until the nineteenth century, with the advent of modern industrial building methods, that schemes for linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea by cutting a vast canal through the Sinai region were considered in a pragmatic way. The route chosen was the Isthmus of Suez, a 125-kilometer strip of land which connects northern Egypt on the west with the Sinai Peninsula in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the north with the Red Sea in the south. A French diplomat and orientalist, Ferdinand de Lesseps, formed the Compagnie de Suez in 1858 to oversee the project. Eleven years later the canal opened to maritime traffic, reducing the time to travel between Europe to places like India or East Africa enormously, as ships no longer had to sail all the way around Africa. The opening of the Suez Canal accelerated colonial movements like the Scramble for Africa and the Scramble for Oceania, as well as increasing the scale of migration to places like the Horn of Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong in the century after it opened.[1]

    The Suez Canal chronology of eventsThe Suez Canal chronology of events

    Ferdinand de Lesseps

    Even in ancient times, it was possible to travel overland from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea in a matter of days. This basic fact alerted people as early as around 2500 BCE that it would be beneficial for trade and commerce to be able to send boats between the two waterways. At this time it was considered impractical to try and cut through the mountainous terrain of the Suez region or the Sinai Peninsula, but many kings of pharaohs of ancient Egypt did establish canals running from the River Nile east to the Red Sea through the softer, sandy land of the Eastern Desert. The Egyptians, the Greeks, Romans and Arabs all built or rejuvenated existing canals between the River Nile and the Red Sea over a span of thousands of years.[2]

    The European powers began to interfere in Egypt from the late 1790s when Napoleon Bonaparte led an expedition to the country during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.[3] France and Britain continued to take an interest in Egypt’s affairs thereafter at a time when these were the two largest imperial powers in the world with growing colonies in Asia that they needed to be able to travel to quickly. In the mid-1850s a French diplomat, orientalist and engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained concessions from the quasi-independent Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Sa’id Pasha, to begin working on a canal that would run from the Mediterranean Sea south along the western end of the Sinai Peninsula to the Gulf of Suez. The canal was dug out over a ten year period from 1859 to 1869 and ran for 120 miles from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez, while it is just over 300 meters wide and 24 meters deep.[4]

    Extent of migration through the Suez CanalExtent of migration through the Suez Canal

    A map of French Indochina

    The opening of the canal in 1869 transformed global maritime travel. In particular, it reduced the distance which British ships travelling from ports like London and Liverpool to India by anywhere between 5,000 and 7,000 kilometers depending on the precise ship’s path.[5] Similarly, voyages to China, Southeast Asia and Japan became notably faster, further aided by the proliferation of global steamships in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that European imperial activity in the Far East and Oceania accelerated quickly after 1869. France conquered Indochina, the European powers interfered in the affairs of China, Korea and Japan to a growing degree and the Scramble for Oceania began.[6]

    However, the greatest impact of all was in East Africa. It suddenly became far easier for the European powers to send large expeditionary forces to East Africa once the canal opened. While this did take place within the context of the wider Scramble for Africa, it is not a coincidence that the 1880s and 1890s witnessed the conquest of virtually the entirety of eastern Africa from Cairo south to Cape Town by the British, French, Italians and Germans. Previously European contact with this part of the continent had been limited to the Dutch and British colonies at the southern tip of Africa and the Portuguese presence in Mozambique, whereas European interactions with West Africa had been more substantial going back to the sixteenth century owing to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Italy, Britain and France carved up the Horn of Africa between them, the British secured an almost unbroken chain of colonies from Egypt to South Africa, and the Germans acquired a chunk of East Africa around modern-day Tanzania that was twice as large as the German Empire itself in Europe.[7] The Italians began a series of wars to try and conquer Ethiopia, known at the time as Abyssinia, which would continued down to the mid-1930s.[8]

    The British in colonial India

    These conquests led to migration to Africa and other parts of the world. A substantial French colonial community developed in Indochina, particularly in Vietnam, British migration to India expanded and the amount of European merchant communities in the port cities of eastern China and other parts of the Far East expanded. In Africa, a lot of attention is usually paid to the British and Boer communities in South Africa, but there were many colonies that experienced large scale European migration between the 1880s and the 1930s. Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) was one place, and white migration here continued until well into the Bush War in the mid-1970s. Kenya was another, with the Happy Valley Set becoming a well-known community of rich British aristocrats and colonists living in the Wanjohi Valley.[9]

    Demographic impact of the Suez CanalDemographic impact of the Suez Canal

    The island of Saint Helena

    The immediate demographic impact of the opening of the canal was to expand the European population in places like India, Indochina, South Africa and Kenya. The opening of the canal conversely led to population decline in other parts of the world. For instance, the English East India Company and later the British government had developed the isolated South Atlantic island of St Helena as a supply and stoppage point on the route around Africa from Europe to India. Its strategic significance declined considerably once the sea route through the canal opened.[10]

    In the long run, though, a lot of this migration was reversed as de-colonization occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War. British settlers left India and Pakistan after independence in 1947, the French abandoned Indochina after losing the long and bitter First Indochina War (1946–1954). Even as late as the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as the white minority government lost the Rhodesian Bush War in Zimbabwe and Apartheid came to an end in South Africa, a lot of the migration that was inspired by the opening of the canal was being unwound as white people left those nations.[11] Yet substantial traces remain. For instance, because of the comparatively amicable relations which were maintained between Kenya and Britain following independence in 1963, many of the descendants of the Happy Valley Set continued to live there for decades to come and there are still people in Kenya today who can trace their ancestry to people who migrated from Britain to this part of Africa via the Suez Canal at some time between 1869 and 1939.[12]

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the Suez CanalExplore more about the Suez Canal

    References

    1. ↑ Halford L. Hoskins, ‘The Suez Canal’, in Current History, Vol. 33, No. 195 (November, 1957), pp. 257–262.
    2. ↑ https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/timelines/the-building-of-the-suez-canal/
    3. ↑ https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/egyptian-campaign
    4. ↑ Hoskins, ‘The Suez Canal’.
    5. ↑ https://www.britishempire.me.uk/openingofsuezcanal.html
    6. ↑ Walter Nugent, ‘Frontiers and Empires in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 4 (November, 1989), pp. 393–408.  
    7. ↑ https://dcc.newberry.org/?p=14448
    8. ↑ https://www.worldhistory.org/Italo-Ethiopian_Wars/
    9. ↑ https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/set-fire
    10. ↑ https://www.thearticle.com/st-helena-an-island-apart
    11. ↑ A. Mlambo, ‘South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford, 2021).
    12. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/26/kenya.chrismcgreal


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    Dr. David Heffernan. (2025, November 24). *Suez Canal*. MyHeritage Wiki. https://www.myheritage.com/wiki/Suez_Canal