Most people know something about the Suez Crisis. By that they mean, of course, the crisis of 1956, when the Egyptians nationalised the canal. But if there had not been another Suez Crisis, in 1882, then the fiasco of 1956 would not have happened. The crisis of 1882 had a very different outcome, and it was really decided by a single battle, whose centenary falls this month, and although it has never passed into popular folklore like Rorke's Drift or Omdurman, it is difficult to think of any battle fought by the British in the last quarter of the nineteenth century which was more important in the long term.
The crisis of 1882 also led to an Egyptian seizure of the Canal, which was then only thirteen years old, and officially the property of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez. As the name suggests, most of the original 400,000 shares were taken up in France. Of the rest, over a quarter were bought by the ruler of Egypt, the Khedive Ismail, and the remainder in Austria and Russia. One country which did everything in its power to thwart the Canal was Britain, who saw in it nothing but a threat to her Eastern Empire and her mastery of the seas. However, once it had been completed (four years late), no one used it more than the British. In its first ten years, 80 ....
