Description

Award winning historian Zachary Karabell tells the legendary tale of the best engineering feat of the nineteenth-century--the building of the Suez Canal-- and demonstrates how it transformed the world.The desire was a river that will unite the East and the West, and the formidable, lively French diplomat and businessman Ferdinand de Lesseps was the mastermind behind the task. Lesseps found the project through fifteen years of complex hurdles, economic problems, and political intrigues. He persuaded regular French people to get their cash, and he gained the support of Napoleon III and of Egyptis king Muhammad Stated. However the success was not even close to ideal: the building depended greatly on forced labour and diplomatic and specialized hurdles continuously endangered conclusion.