The “New Imperialism” and the Scramble for Africa 827Most of the lines were never built, and, in any case, they could never have
generated sufficient revenues to justify their enormous cost. France had
little more than a series of forts to show for enormous expense. Yet British
merchants on the coast of West Africa feared that French gains would lead
to the loss of products such as palm oil and potential markets for their own
goods in the African interior. The Franco-British rivalry in Africa heated
up. Further French advances in western Sudan followed.
British and French rivalries in Egypt, a gateway to the markets and prod
ucts of the Middle East, dated to the revolutionary years of the late 1790s.
In 1869, a French engineer and entrepreneur, Ferdinand de Lesseps
(1805-1894), completed a canal through the Isthmus of Suez, which con
nects the Red and Mediterranean Seas. The Suez Canal cut the distance of
the steamship voyage from London to Bombay (now Mumbai) in half by
avoiding the treacherous Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa.
The severe financial difficulties of Ismail Pasha, the ruler (khedive) of Egypt,
which was a part of the Ottoman Empire, brought Britain a stroke of incred
ibly good fortune. In 1875, Britain bailed out the bankrupt Ismail Pasha by
purchasing a considerable portion of shares in the canal. Under British
management, the number of ships passing through the canal rose from
486 in 1870 to 3,000 in 1882.
No power had a greater stake in the canal than Britain. The British gov
ernment traditionally had sought to protect the land and sea routes to India
by supporting the Islamic Middle Eastern states—above all, the Ottoman
British forces at rest around the Great Sphinx of Giza after defeating an