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The Promoting and the Financing of the Suez Canal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Werner Baer
Werner Baer
Affiliation:
Teaching Fellow in Economicsat Harvard University
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Abstract

This timely account of the hunching of the Suez Canal project reveals both sides of the coin of innovation. It is, on the one hand, a study of the character and methods of one of the most famous innovators of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand DeLesseps was not a politician, a financier, an engineer, a promoter (in the common sense of the word), or a businessman. Yet he succeeded brilliantly in a venture requiring consummate mastery of all these professional fields. On the other hand is revealed the waterway itself — vital to one civilization, useless and neglected in another, and then of transcendent importance as world history marched on. Realization of the grand scheme envisaged by the Pharaohs came at last when economic and political factors momentarily aligned in a pattern of opportunity for a unique set of entrepreneurial qualifications.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , December 1956 , pp. 361 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1956

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References

1 Hallberg, Charles W., The Suez Canal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), pp. 25–26.Google Scholar For this historical account I have used books actually dealing with the Suez Canal, but which also give a historical account. The information is often contradictory. I have not gone to more purely historical sources. For the reader interested in more reliable details, I would suggest the consultation of works by Cledat, Bourdon, and Breasted. For sources, consult works of Herodotus, Aristotle, Strabo, and Pliny.

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