Egypt Built the Suez Canal for Free Then Took It Back

[00:00:00]Did you know that one of the most famous wars in history was actually a debt collection story? Between 1859 and 1869, [music] Egypt's rulers handed over more than 1 and 1/2 million of their own people to dig the Suez Canal by force. No real wages, >> [music] >> no choice. Thousands died in the desert heat cutting through 100 miles of sand [music] so that a waterway could connect two seas and make European shipping companies extraordinarily rich. Britain and France called it progress. [music] The workers who built it with their bare hands called it something else entirely.

[00:00:36]Nearly a century later in 1956, >> [music] >> Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser stood up and nationalized the canal. His argument was simple. Egypt had already paid for [music] it in lives, in labor, in blood baked into the sand. Britain and France sent warships anyway. Think [music] about that for a moment. Two colonial empires went to war to reclaim a waterway that was [music] built by the ancestors of the very people they were now invading. The workers never got paid, but eventually Egypt came [music] to collect.