“Aperire terram gentibus”: industrialism and the idea of creating the Suez canal

The article analyzes the preparation for the construction of the Suez Canal. The purpose of the research is to study this idea as the first in the history of the enterprise, originally planned with foreign capital participation. Ferdinand de Lesseps was the main figure in it. The study of this issue will significantly expand the understanding of the world economic system formation in the XIX century and the inclusion of the Ottoman East into it. The historical background described in the memoirs of contemporaries and above all in Lesseps’s own correspondence makes it possible to understand the attitude to the Suez Canal in the highest political circles of France, Great Britain, and the Ottoman Empire. The study found that the Suez Canal completely changed the balance of power in the region, as well as the geopolitical structure of Egypt and the entire Middle East. The analysis of the sources revealed that the idea of building the canal was implemented within the framework of the philosophical concept of “industrialism”, which emerged from “Saint-Simonianism” in the 1830s. Saint-Simonian ideas in economics, in their liberal version, were accepted by Napoleon III through his close adviser Michel Chevalier, and Lesseps, being one of the representatives of “industrialism”, was the first to put these ideas into practice in such a large-scale format.