Description
Award-winning historian Zachary Karabell tells the epic story of the greatest engineering feat of the nineteenth century--the building of the Suez Canal-- and shows how it changed the world.
Key features:
- The dream was a waterway that would unite the East and the West.
- The ambitious, energetic French diplomat and entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps was the mastermind behind the project.
- Explores fifteen years of financial challenges, technical obstacles, and political intrigues.
- Details the reliance on forced labor and the constant threats to completion.
- Covers the inauguration in 1869 and its global impact.
- A transporting narrative and a meditation on the origins of the modern Middle East.