The Inauguration of the Suez Canal, 1869
Dignitaries and crowds gather for the opening ceremonies of the Suez Canal at Port Said on 17 November 1869.
French diplomat and engineer-promoter Ferdinand de Lesseps spent a decade pushing the Suez Canal to completion, a project that relied heavily on forced Egyptian corvée labor in its early years before steam dredgers took over the bulk of the excavation. Cutting a direct sea route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea shaved weeks off the voyage between Europe and Asia, transforming global shipping overnight, but the debts Egypt ran up building it left the country financially crippled and open to foreign control, culminating in the British occupation of 1882. More than a century and a half later the canal remains one of the world's most vital shipping lanes.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
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