The Needle’s Eye of World Trade: 150 years of Suez Canal

Abstract

After a very troublesome beginning of the great human project the Suez Canal was opened 150 years before. Ten thousand people gathered on the 16^th and 17^th November 1869 in the Egyptian city Port Said. At the top of the list of guests along with the Egyptian Viceroy Ismail Pascha before all there were representatives of big European governments King Franz Joseph of Austria- Hungary, the French queen Ä’ugenie, Crown prince Freedrich of Prussia. They all came in order to celebrate the opening of the millennium old dream: the completion of Suez Canal, the waterway between the red sea and Mediterranean sea, the artificial man made connection between the two seas.