The idea of cutting a canal across Egypt was old — the pharaohs had connected the Nile to the Red Sea, Venetian and Ottoman engineers had drawn plans, the scientists of Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian expedition had revived the proposal. But it became real when the former French consul Ferdinand de Lesseps obtained a concession from the Egyptian Khedive Said Pasha in 1854. The Suez Canal Company was founded in 1858; about half of its capital came from French investors and roughly 44 percent from the Egyptian state. Britain — fearing a project that would shorten its route to India but place Egypt under French influence — actively opposed it.

Excavation began at Port Said on 25 April 1859 and took ten years. Amid heat, thirst, and cholera, tens of thousands of Egyptian fellahin were brought to the work site each year under the corvée system of forced labor; the death toll is disputed, with estimates ranging from the low thousands to tens of thousands. In 1864 Khedive Ismail formally abolished the corvée; Lesseps then imported large steam-powered excavators and dredgers from Europe — the final five years of the project are an early example of industrial engineering substituting machine power for human labor. The 163-kilometer canal, initially 8 meters deep, opened on 17 November 1869 with a lavish ceremony: French Empress Eugénie, Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, Prussian princes, and Ottoman dignitaries attended; Verdi's opera Aida was commissioned for the occasion (it premiered, after delays, in Cairo in 1871).

The economic effect was immediate. A saving of roughly 4,500 nautical miles between London and Bombay — about half the Cape of Good Hope route — transformed the coal economics of steam shipping; Indian tea and cotton, Chinese silk, and East African spices reached Europe far faster. But for Egypt the canal turned into an economic disaster. To service the massive debts of Khedive Ismail's modernization spending, Egypt's half of the canal shares was sold to Britain in 1875 for £4 million (Disraeli secured the funds through a private loan from the Rothschild bank). In 1876 Egypt formally went bankrupt; Anglo-French financial control was imposed; the 1881–82 Urabi nationalist revolt rose against it; in September 1882 Britain bombarded Alexandria and occupied Egypt, which remained nominally Ottoman but was in fact a British protectorate for seventy years.

The canal stayed at the center of geopolitics through the 20th century. In the First World War it was the line British garrisons defended against Ottoman attacks; in the Second, the Battle of El Alamein was fought to protect this artery. When Nasser nationalized the canal in 1956, Britain, France, and Israel struck together — and the Suez Crisis marked both the end of European imperialism and the beginning of the US–Soviet bipolar order. Today roughly 12 percent of world maritime trade and 8 percent of global oil shipments pass through the canal; when the Ever Given blocked it for six days in 2021, the dependence of global supply chains on a single engineering structure became visible to everyone. Suez embodies a paradox of modernity: human hands can redraw the geography of continents, but the question of whom that redrawing serves travels with it.