Person1805 – 1894
Ferdinand de Lesseps
French diplomat and entrepreneur who won the concession for the Suez Canal from Egypt and opened it in 1869
Where they went
1 related event
- 1
The Suez Canal linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea opened, greatly shortening the sea route from Europe to Asia.
Themes this person appears in
- Around the World in Eighty Days1869 – 1890
When the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroad made it possible to circle the globe in months — Phileas Fogg’s eighty days in Jules Verne’s novel, and the reporter Nellie Bly who took up the challenge and went round in seventy-two
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas1702 – 1958
Jules Verne’s novel of Captain Nemo’s submarine Nautilus circling the world beneath the sea — the treasure ships of Vigo Bay, La Pérouse’s wrecks, the giant squid and the Atlantic cable behind it, and the people who really reached the South Pole and passed under the North Pole after the novel went there first
- Imperialism and the Partition of the World1839 – 1914
From the Tanzimat to Sarajevo — seventy-five years in which the powers carved up West Asia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and the peoples there answered with reform and resistance