History Spotlight, 2/17

On this day in 1867, the first ship passes through the modern Suez Canal. There had been a canal there since at least the 2nd millennium, BC, but the rise and fall of civilizations and the vagaries of the desert climate meant that it spent a lot of time being buried by sand.
Of course, it was much easier to do such things in the Classical Age than it was in the late 19th Century. For starters, labor was free and you didn't have to care too much if any of them died, so long as the job got done. It is estimated that 120,000 slave died in the construction of the canal during the years of the Egyptian ascendancy. On top of that, climate change was causing the Red Sea to retreat from its ancient boundaries making it that much more difficult to get the canal to the water's edge.
By the time of Cleopatra's regin the canal was mostly out of service. Workarounds and modifications continued until the 8th Century AD when it was put out of commisssion for the forseeable future.
During Napoleon's adventures in Egypt in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, the remains of the ancient canal were discovered by archaeologists. This led to a swarm of archaeoligists descending on the area and planted a germ of an idea in Napoleon's mind. "If those grubby Egyptians could do it," he reasoned, "why not the greatest empire the world has ever seen?" That would be the French, at least in Napoleon's mind. Unfortunately for Napoleon, time and the Duke of Wellington were working against him and he found himself an exile before he could do much more than a preliminary survey.
The idea stuck around however. The 18th Century was the dawn of the age of massive engineering projects that would culminate with the construction of the World Trade Center in the 1970's. There wasn't anything mankind couldn't do if he (and in the 18th Century, it was he) threw enough money and forced labor at a project. The famed French engineer and diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps offered a sweetheart deal to the viceroy of Egypt, Said Pasha, for a 99-year lease on the property through which the canal was to run and a nice cut of the profits. Pasha, no dummy, figured that if these crazy Europeans wanted to go digging in the desert and give him a lot of money, who was he to disagree with them?
The Suez Canal Company was formed in December, 1858 and would ultimately take 11 years and use over 30,000 forced laborers. You may be asking, "What's the difference between forced labor and slavery?" It's easy: slavery was illegal in France and forced labor wasn't. The British saw the canal as a major threat to their dominance of the seas and pointed out the hypocrisy of the forced labor system. It didn't do them very much good as they had used almost the exact same system of slavery-in-name-only in Egypt. The canal opened officially for shipping on November 11, 1869. After Egypt was forced by crushing debt to sell their share of the canal to Britain, the British found themselves suddenly less pouty over it.