the History of Suez Canal: Ditch That Moved World

A trench one hundred miles long, dug largely by hand through open desert by peasants who received no wages and often no genuine choice in the matter, would go on to reshape the entire pattern of global trade, provoke a war deliberately manufactured by three governments acting in secret collusion, and remain, more than a century and a half after its completion, one of the most strategically contested strips of territory on Earth.This is the story of Ferdinand de Lesseps, a disgraced diplomat who succeeded not through engineering genius but through a childhood friendship that happened to mature at exactly the right moment. Of hundreds of thousands of Egyptian peasants, conscripted from their own villages and marched into open desert, who died in numbers historians still debate but that no credible estimate places below twenty thousand. Of a canal that ran through Egyptian soil, was defended by Egyptian labour, and for eighty-seven years paid its profits to shareholders in London and Paris who never dug a single foot of it.It traces the canal's role in two world wars, a revolution led by a peasant's son who would go on to challenge two declining empires, and a secret treaty three governments spent decades denying ever existed - a conspiracy so carefully concealed that one Prime Minister personally shredded his own government's copy. It ends with the pound sterling in freefall, an American President refusing to be used as what he called "a cat's paw," and a verdict historians still repeat today: that this crisis marked the end of Britain's era as one of the world's major powers.Part of The History of... series.