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@marisvandenhof4487
The Rothschilds enabled Britain to redraw the map of the world.
By RON CHERNOW
The purchase of the Suez Canal Company gave bankers more power than they had yet known or would ever know again.
n Dec. 16, 1875, the H.M.S. Malabar set sail from Egypt, bound for Portsmouth, England, with a precious cargo stored in seven zinc boxes: 176,602 shares of stock in the Suez Canal Company, recently sold by the Khedive of Egypt. The buyer was the British Government, bolstered by a timely advance of 4 million from N.M. Rothschild & Sons in London. Spiced with intrigue and flush with flamboyant figures, the affair has all the flair of a thriller. There have been bigger real-estate bonanzas -- notably the $15 million deal that won the Louisiana Purchase from France and the $7 million payment that wrested Alaska from Russia. But none have had quite the elegance, speed and daring of the Suez Canal transaction. It briefly established the House of Rothschild as a sovereign state on a par with -- or perhaps even slightly ahead of -- Her Majesty's Government.
Two decades earlier, the British were strangely myopic about the value of a proposed canal that would unite the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. Benjamin Disraeli, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, dismissed the notion: "The operation of nature would in a short time defeat the ingenuity of man." For the greatest maritime power on earth, this would prove a grave miscalculation, ceding construction of the canal to French capital and engineers, backed by Egyptian forced labor. By the time the canal opened in 1869, it had redrawn the map of the British Empire. The sea journey that had stretched 10,800 nautical miles from London to its imperial jewel, India, was slashed to 6,300 miles.
Ron Chernow is the author of "Titan," a biography of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Luckily for the British, the Khedive provided the British with a chance to remedy their blunder only six years later. A profligate borrower, addicted to luxury and Pharaonic projects, Isma'il Pasha became hopelessly indebted and could stave off his creditors only by selling his controlling stake in the Suez Canal Company. Very likely it was Lionel de Rothschild, head of the British bank, who tipped off Disraeli to the historic opportunity. The Prime Minister had to act with maximum secrecy and dispatch, sending his private secretary to sound out Lord Lionel on the huge advance of £4 million. As legend has it, the reserved and circumspect Rotschild asked, "What is your security?"
"The British Government," the secretary replied.
The tale has been embellished with other, possibly fanciful details -- the most common being that the financier savored muscatel grapes as they talked, spitting out pits between rejoinders -- but the moment needs no apocryphal adornment. With a nod, Lord Lionel had conferred upon the British crown mastery of one of the world's principal crossroads.
In retrospect, the feat represents a high-water mark of banker power. For its services, N.M. Rothschild exacted a steep and controversial fee: a 2 1/2 percent commission on the advance, plus 5 percent annual interest. The Rothschilds defended these terms, noting that they had put a considerable portion of their capital at risk during the perilous interval before Parliament voted for payment. Hobbled by the lumbering pace of politics and fearing a leak of information, Disraeli, like other 19th-century statesmen, employed an elite private bank as a screen behind which to conduct secret statecraft.
The deal held up for a remarkable 81 years, binding together the outposts of the British Empire, until President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, in a blaze of rhetoric, nationalized the Suez Canal Company in July 1956. In a rear-guard defense of colonial privilege, the British, the French and the Israelis pounced on Egypt in a brief but abortive invasion that only underscored the limits of Western influence in the region. The advent of larger vessels has somewhat diminished the canal's importance. Supertankers now economically ship oil by the traditional route around the Cape of Good Hope. Even so, the hundred-mile canal remains the pivot of much Middle East commerce and diplomacy.
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