My stop in Suez was brief, but one thing stood out above all: the sound of crows, an omnipresent cawing that filled the empty, sun-swept streets. I had spent the morning at the Suez Museum and the afternoon driving around the old quarters of the city shooting a roll of film. It was July, and a thick, viscid heat distorted the air. Whenever I stepped out of the car the chorus of crows would resume, punctuating the silence that hung about as though all day were noon. I felt an eerie déjà vu. Years ago I had been to Ismailia, another Canal city just north of Suez, and in my memory it existed not as a place but as a sound—that same sound, the cawing of crows. ​​​

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120,000 Egyptians died building the Suez Canal. Everything about the Canal is political, and entangled in its politics is much of Egypt’s recent history. Even in the marine realm, the Canal resembles a political narrative. Species of fish and crab that had been separated by 25,000 kilometers of ocean suddenly found themselves less than two hundred kilometers apart, and the species of the Red Sea—hardened by the competition of their tropical home waters—began colonizing the sparsely-populated eastern Mediterranean. The term for this is Lessepsian migration, named after French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps who directed the Canal’s construction. It is also called the Erythraean invasion.

 

Such an ‘invasion’ had never been possible before; though canals previously connected the Red and Mediterranean seas, none did so without the Nile as interlocutor. De Lesseps’s own inspiration came from excavated evidence of an ancient canal dating to the rule of Pharaoh Senusret III of the Middle Kingdom. A navigable canal was constructed a millennium later in the reign of Ptolemy II, connecting the Red Sea to the Bitter Lakes north of Suez, and westwards to the Nile town of Zagagig. That canal remained in use for hundreds of years, eventually falling into disrepair under the Byzantines. Though it would be re-dug by Egypt’s first Arab ruler, it would finally be buried in 760 CE by the Abbasid Caliph to starve a growing rebellion in Arabia.  ​​

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What de Lesseps envisioned, some 1100 years later, was a canal that would cut straight across the isthmus of Suez, severing the continents of Africa and Asia with one sharp incision. Completed in 1869, the modern Suez Canal was built with Egyptian and French financing under the rule of the Khedive Ismail Pasha, Egypt’s Ottoman viceroy. Ismail Pasha was a Turkish-speaking, French-educated middle child of Albanian descent. He had inherited from his grandfather not only the seat of Egyptian power, but also unyielding ambition for an industrialized, Europeanized Egypt. It’s an old tale; Ismail Pasha’s rule comprised massive development projects that saw Egypt’s external debt grow by a factor of thirty, leading to concessions and increased control of Egypt by its debtors, Britain and France. He sold Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal to Britain, and among other unpopular concessions, he agreed to a separate court and judicial system for Egypt’s burgeoning European population.

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Ismail Pasha’s aspirations, nevertheless, were grand. Europeanizing Egypt meant not only more railroads and opera (the opera Aida was commissioned by the Khedive and premiered in Cairo), but accruing an empire to rival that of the Great Powers and earn their respect. His grandfather had conquered Sudan and parts of the Levant and Arabia; Ismail Pasha wished to subsume the rest of the Nile basin into Egypt’s realm—starting with Ethiopia. A few years after the Canal’s completion, an Egyptian army sailed the Red Sea south and landed in modern-day Eritrea, where it would suffer an overwhelming defeat by a much larger Ethiopian force. The humiliation of the defeat, coupled with the ongoing humiliation of Egypt’s fire-sale to European powers, was too much for some to bear. 

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​Ahmed Orabi, a colonel in the Egyptian army during the war with Ethiopia, stirred nationalist opposition to Ismail Pasha’s rule. At the heart of the nationalists’ demands was that the Khedive put an end to the institutionalized favoritism of Turco-Circassians and Europeans over Egyptians in the military and state bureaucracy. Ismail Pasha, facing a movement that was garnering strength across Egypt’s social strata, acquiesced. Shortly afterwards, at the insistence of Britain and France, he was deposed by the Ottoman Sultan and replaced by his more servile son, Tawfik.

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The movement nevertheless grew in strength, and by September 1881 the nationalists forced Tawfik Pasha to accept the formation of a new government. Alarmed by their waning power over the country and by nationalist rhetoric that threatened to shrug off the massive Khedival debt owed to them, Britain and France re-affirmed the Khedive’s authority. The Ottoman Sultan was asked by both the Khedive and the nationalists to intervene on their behalf, and in both cases remained indecisive. Finally, in the summer of 1882, British forces bombarded Alexandria and marched on Cairo via the Suez Canal. Orabi, who had been assured Britain would not land troops in the Canal by none other than de Lesseps himself, was outflanked and defeated.

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So began, after decades of increasing economic control, direct British occupation and rule of Egypt. It continued in various forms until 1952 when another disgruntled group of military officers overthrew Egypt’s British-backed monarchy for the last time. 

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