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The Suez Canal: The Ditch That Moves the World

Published · 34 min

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A trench one hundred and ninety-three kilometres long, with no locks in it, carries around fifteen per cent of global maritime trade and twenty-two per cent of the world's seaborne container trade. This documentary follows the Suez Canal from the pharaonic canals and the forced labour of the corvee, through Britain's purchase of the Khedive's shares and the eight-year closure of 1967 to 1975, to the Ever Given, the Red Sea diversions of 2023, and the recovery now under way.

Every figure carries its source and date, drawn from the Suez Canal Authority's own published characteristics and targets, UNCTAD, the IMF, the US Energy Information Administration, BIMCO, Lloyd's List, LSEG Shipping Research, the Centre for High North Logistics and contemporary reporting.

Where sources disagree — on the 1869 opening date, on the construction death toll, on the Ever Given settlement — the disagreement is stated rather than resolved.

Educational documentary. Not financial or investment advice.

Tags

  • Suez Canal
  • Suez Canal Authority
  • Ever Given
  • Red Sea crisis
  • Bab el-Mandeb
  • Cape of Good Hope
  • global shipping
  • container shipping
  • chokepoint
  • Egypt economy
  • Ferdinand de Lesseps
  • Yellow Fleet
  • Suez Crisis 1956
  • maritime trade
  • supply chain

Chapters

  1. One hundred and ninety-three kilometres of nothing
  2. Why anyone dug here at all
  3. A concession, and a company
  4. Dug by hand
  5. The machines arrive, and Egypt pays for them
  6. The seventeenth of November, eighteen sixty-nine
  7. Britain buys in
  8. The rules written for it
  9. Nationalisation, and forty-seven ships on the bottom
  10. Eight years, and fifteen ships that could not leave
  11. Clearing a canal nobody could enter
  12. What a transit actually involves
  13. The toll
  14. What actually goes through it
  15. The New Suez Canal, and the arithmetic of a promise
  16. Six days in March
  17. The nineteenth of November, twenty twenty-three
  18. The long way round
  19. What it cost Egypt
  20. Coming back, and what the ditch is worth

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Sources and credits

Original narration, artwork, score and editing assembled locally for Forwards or Backwards. No third-party footage, music or imagery.

  • Narration: Kokoro-82M bf_emma, British English.
  • Imagery: generated locally, 20 environments, 589 matched states.
  • Score: original procedural pad, ducked under the narration.

Primary sources

  • Suez Canal Authority, Canal Characteristics and New Suez Canal — 193.3 km length, 24 m depth, 205-225 m width at 11 m, 1,006 m2 maximum wetted cross-section, fleet shares of 61.2% / 92.7% / 100%, the 72 km of 2014-15 works, and the published 2023 targets of $13.226bn and 97 ships a day.
  • UNCTAD, Impact to global trade of disruption of shipping routes (2024) — 22% of seaborne container trade in 2023, the 2023 traffic composition, the -82% container tonnage fall in February 2024, +60% Cape tonnage, and the +29% / +42% / +70% Cape routing comparisons.
  • International Monetary Fund, Red Sea Attacks Disrupt Global Trade (7 March 2024) — ~15% of global maritime trade normally through Suez, -50% canal trade volume in early 2024, Panama at ~5%.
  • U.S. Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints (updated 3 March 2026) — 8.8m b/d oil and products through Suez and SUMED in 2023 falling to 4.8m b/d in 2024; LNG 4.1 Bcf/d in 2023 falling to 0.5 Bcf/d in 2024.
  • Britannica, Suez Canal: The economy — 486 transits in 1870, 18,174 in 2018, 26,434 in 2023 at an average 72 a day; transit times of ~40 hours in the 1870s, 13 by 1939, 11-16 today.
  • Caroline Piquet, via CNRS News, The Turbulent History of the Suez Canal — ~400,000 fellahin mobilised under the corvee 1859-1862; 'tens of thousands' thought to have died; the 120,000 figure asserted by Nasser is unsupported by archives.
  • The Rothschild Archive — the £4,000,000 advanced by Lionel de Rothschild for the Khedive's shares in 1875, repaid within five months.
  • Lloyd's List data written up by Bloomberg, 25 March 2021 — the $9.6bn a day of goods held up by the Ever Given, described by Lloyd's itself as rough calculations.
  • BIMCO, per chief shipping analyst Niels Rasmussen — Suez traffic 60% below 2023 in the first week of 2026; quarterly deadweight tonnage 51-64% below 2023 in every quarter since January 2024; container transits -86% in Q4 2025.
  • LSEG Shipping Research, 25 January 2024 — $932,905 additional cost per Aframax voyage via the Cape, a 110% increase, with voyage time doubling from 16 to 32 days.
  • Suez Canal Authority chairman Osama Rabie — record FY2022/23 revenue of $9.4bn (21 June 2023); $449m and 1,315 ships to 8 February 2026; FY2025/26 revenue of $4.67bn, up 23% (28 June 2026); vessel numbers +40% and dollar revenue +50% in H2 2026 (5 September 2026).
  • Centre for High North Logistics — 103 Northern Sea Route transit voyages in the 2025 season, 30 June to 17 November 2025.

Figures were not re-pulled within 48 hours of export; re-verify before publication if the film is held.

Not regulated financial advice.