A canal cut through Egypt's desert erased a 7,000-mile detour

Before 1869, a ship sailing from Europe to India had to round the entire African continent. Ferdinand de Lesseps's Suez Canal, dug largely by forced Egyptian labor over ten years, connected the Mediterranean directly to the Red Sea and cut that voyage by thousands of miles almost overnight.

— Zachary Karabell, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal — Knopf, 2003
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