How a 19th-century infrastructure project reshuffled the winners and losers of global trade and what it tells us about our own age of disruption

In November 1869, the world witnessed the inauguration of one of humanity's most ambitious engineering feats. The Suez Canal, cutting through 120 miles of Egyptian desert, promised to revolutionize global commerce by eliminating the treacherous voyage around Africa. Ships traveling from London to Bombay would save nearly 4,400 miles - roughly 40 percent of their previous journey.

But as a fascinating new draft research paper by Albert Schram demonstrates, the canal did far more than simply shorten distances. It fundamentally reordered the commercial geography of an entire region, creating unexpected winners, surprising losers, and patterns that would persist for generations. The parallels to our own era of technological disruption and geopolitical upheaval are striking.

The Context: A World in Chaos

We often imagine the opening of the Suez Canal as a moment of Victorian triumph—top hats, champagne, and the serene confidence of an empire at its peak. The reality was messier. The two decades surrounding the canal's opening were marked by devastating wars, political upheaval, and economic shocks that reshaped entire continents.

The American Civil War had just ended, leaving global commodity markets in disarray. The "cotton famine" caused by the Union naval blockade had devastated textile mills in Lancashire and Alsace while simultaneously transforming Egypt into a major cotton producer.² Italian unification had forged a new nation from a patchwork of kingdoms and Austrian territories.³ The Franco-Prussian War brought France to its knees and birthed the German Empire.⁴ And the Ottoman Empire—the "sick man of Europe"—faced existential struggles that would culminate in the catastrophic Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.⁵

Sound familiar? We too live in an age where technological transformation coincides with war, pandemic aftershocks, supply chain disruptions, and the apparent unraveling of post-Cold War certainties. The parallel isn't exact, but the lesson is clear: major infrastructure projects don't occur in a vacuum. Their effects interact with political and economic forces in ways that can amplify some outcomes and suppress others.

The Winners: Preparation Meets Opportunity

Schram's research reveals a striking pattern in how the Suez Canal's benefits were distributed across Mediterranean ports. His methodology is straightforward: using shipping statistics measured in Net Registered Tonnage drawn from official port authority records and contemporary shipping registers,⁶ he compares port traffic growth in the decade before the canal opened (1859-1868) with the decade after (1869-1878). The results are illuminating, though any such analysis requires careful attention to causality.

Could the observed growth be coincidental, or explained by factors other than the canal? Reverse causation seems implausible—rising Mediterranean traffic did not cause the Suez Canal to open, since the canal was a deliberate French-Egyptian engineering project decades in the making.⁷ The more serious alternative explanation is industrialization, which drove dramatic increases in trade volumes throughout the nineteenth century.⁸ However, the timing weakens this objection considerably. Before the 1880s, industrialization had barely begun in most Mediterranean regions. Pockets of industrial activity existed around Marseille, in Catalonia, and in Northern Italy, but Central and Southern Italy, the Ottoman territories, North Africa, and the Adriatic remained overwhelmingly pre-industrial economies.⁹

What makes the Suez Canal explanation compelling is the simultaneity and consistency of the effect. Nearly all major Mediterranean ports experienced compound annual growth rates exceeding 3.5 percent in the decade after 1869—a synchronized acceleration that no localized factor could plausibly explain.¹⁰ The Canal connected regional economics through a small inland sea with the powerful forces of globalization. Only one port deviated from this pattern. When traffic surges simultaneously across an entire sea basin immediately following a specific infrastructural change, and when alternative explanations fail to account for the timing and geographic scope, the canal emerges as the most parsimonious explanation.

Trieste, the Habsburg Empire's principal Mediterranean outlet, saw its growth rate increase by an astonishing 376 percent. This wasn't luck. The Austrian government had spent the 1850s and 1860s investing heavily in modern port facilities, warehouses, and—crucially—railway connections to Vienna and Central Europe.¹¹ The Südbahn railway, completed in 1857, meant that goods arriving from Asia via Suez could be unloaded in Trieste and transported to Central European markets faster than ever before. The Austrian Lloyd steamship company, headquartered in Trieste, operated one of the Mediterranean's most extensive shipping networks.¹²

When opportunity knocked, Trieste was ready to answer.

Genoa tells a similar story. As the principal port of the newly unified Kingdom of Italy, it benefited from improved railway connections across the Alps—particularly the Mont Cenis tunnel completed in 1871—and aggressive investment in harbor improvements.¹³ Its traffic acceleration rate increased by 180 percent, establishing it as Italy's dominant commercial port for generations to come.

Venice, despite centuries of decline since the Age of Exploration, experienced a 177 percent acceleration. The railway bridge linking the lagoon city to the mainland, completed in 1846, proved essential. Even Naples, Livorno, and Palermo—the other major Italian ports—all showed growth accelerations exceeding 100 percent.¹⁴

The pattern is unmistakable. The ports that benefited most from the Suez Canal shared three characteristics: strategic positioning as transit points between the Mediterranean and major European industrial centers; substantial prior investment in modern infrastructure including railways, steam-powered facilities, and warehouses; and stable political environments that allowed commerce to flourish without interruption.

The Losers: When War Trumps Geography

If the story of the Adriatic ports is one of preparation rewarded, the story of the Ottoman ports is one of geography squandered.

On paper, Ottoman cities like Constantinople, Smyrna (modern Izmir), Beirut, and Salonica should have been among the canal's greatest beneficiaries. They sat astride the new trade routes. They had ancient commercial traditions. They were closer to the canal itself than Trieste or Genoa.

Yet the numbers tell a different story. Constantinople's growth rate increased by only 57 percent—respectable, but far below the Italian and Adriatic leaders. Smyrna managed just 25 percent. Beirut showed a mere 2 percent acceleration, and Salonica only 6 percent.¹⁵

The culprit was war. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 devastated Ottoman commerce at precisely the moment when the Suez Canal's traffic was reaching substantial volumes.¹⁶ Russian armies advanced to the outskirts of Constantinople itself. Shipping routes became dangerous. Insurance rates soared. Merchants redirected their business to safer ports. The war years saw actual declines in traffic at most Ottoman ports, dragging down their decade averages.

Had Schram's analysis stopped in 1876, Ottoman ports would have shown much stronger growth. The timing was catastrophically unfortunate.

Odessa, the Russian Empire's principal Black Sea port, presents the most dramatic case. It's the only port in the analysis to show negative growth acceleration—its traffic actually grew more slowly after the Suez Canal opened than before.¹⁷ This counterintuitive result has nothing to do with the canal itself. The Russo-Turkish War paralyzed Black Sea shipping and devastated the grain trade. Russian warships and Ottoman defenses made the Black Sea dangerous for commercial vessels, while the closure of the Turkish Straits to belligerent shipping disrupted established trade routes.¹⁸

The Middle Ground: Context Matters

Between the spectacular winners and war-ravaged losers, a middle tier of ports experienced solid but unspectacular growth.

Marseille, France's great Mediterranean gateway, saw its growth rate increase by a modest 47 percent. But context is essential here. Marseille was already the Mediterranean's busiest port before the canal opened, adding over 75,000 tons of shipping capacity annually during the 1860s. A large, well-established port growing rapidly cannot easily double or triple its growth rate—it's already operating near its potential. Furthermore, Marseille's growth was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War, which caused significant disruption in 1870-1871.¹⁹

Barcelona showed a robust 130 percent acceleration despite Spain's political instability during the Third Carlist War.²⁰ Alexandria, the Mediterranean terminus of the Suez Canal itself, experienced 140 percent acceleration—perhaps inevitable given its position, but also a testament to the prior Egyptian cotton boom that had already established the city as a major commercial center.²¹

The Data at a Glance

Rank	Port	Pre-Suez Growth (1859-68)	Post-Suez Growth (1869-78)	Change (%)	Data Quality
1	Trieste	24.8	118.2	+376.3%	High
2	Genoa	47.0	131.5	+179.8%	High
3	Venice	15.5	42.9	+176.8%	Moderate
4	Livorno	13.9	33.9	+143.7%	Moderate
5	Piraeus	17.6	42.4	+140.9%	Low
6	Alexandria	56.0	134.5	+140.2%	Moderate
7	Naples	28.0	66.7	+138.2%	High
8	Barcelona	26.2	60.3	+130.1%	High
9	Palermo	12.7	25.9	+103.6%	Moderate
10	Tripoli	3.0	5.5	+82.2%	Very Low
11	Algiers	25.1	41.2	+64.2%	Moderate
12	Constantinople	32.0	50.3	+57.2%	Fragmented
13	Benghazi	3.0	4.4	+48.3%	Very Low
14	Marseille	75.6	110.9	+46.7%	High
15	Tunis	12.7	17.5	+37.6%	Low
16	Smyrna	16.5	20.6	+24.8%	Fragmented
17	Salonica	11.7	12.4	+6.0%	Fragmented
18	Beirut	8.9	9.1	+2.2%	Fragmented
19	Odessa	38.9	30.3	-22.1%	Low

Note: Growth rates measured in thousands of Net Registered Tonnage per year. This is the only measure that is available for all these ports.

Parallels to Today's World

The Suez Canal story offers several lessons for our own age of disruption.

Infrastructure investment determines who captures opportunity. Just as Trieste's railways and modern port facilities positioned it to benefit from the canal, today's winners in the digital economy tend to be those who invested early in fiber optic networks, data centers, cloud computing capacity, and skilled workforces. Countries that built out 5G networks and digital payment infrastructure before the pandemic found themselves better positioned to weather lockdowns and capture remote work opportunities. Those that lagged fell further behind.

Geopolitical instability can override geographic advantage. The Ottoman Empire's ports should have thrived after Suez. They didn't, because war intervened. Today, we see similar dynamics playing out. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has devastated what should be a prosperous region linking European and Asian markets. Ports like Odessa—yes, the same city that appears in Schram's 19th-century analysis—once again find their fortunes shaped more by conflict than by geography.

Technological change creates winners and losers, but political choices determine who ends up where. The Habsburg Empire chose to invest in Trieste. The Ottoman Empire failed to modernize Constantinople's harbor facilities.²² These weren't inevitable outcomes—they reflected different governmental systems, financing mechanisms, and policy priorities. Similarly, how nations respond to artificial intelligence, green energy transitions, and shifting supply chains will be shaped as much by policy choices as by any inherent advantages.

Large, established players may benefit less dramatically than nimble newcomers. Marseille's "modest" 47 percent growth acceleration wasn't a failure—it reflected the difficulty of dramatically accelerating when you're already at scale. Today's tech giants face similar dynamics. When you're already processing a significant share of global cloud computing or e-commerce, the next transformative technology may benefit hungrier competitors more than it benefits you.

Timing matters enormously. The Russo-Turkish War struck just as Suez traffic was reaching substantial volumes. Ottoman ports might have captured that traffic under different circumstances. In our era, consider how the pandemic's timing affected different industries and regions. Some businesses had just completed digital transformations; others were caught mid-transition. Some countries had robust public health systems; others were already stretched thin.

The Long Shadow

Perhaps the most sobering aspect of Schram's research is how long these patterns persisted. The hierarchies established in the 1870s—Trieste and Genoa as dominant hubs, Ottoman ports as secondary players—shaped Mediterranean economics until World War I disrupted the entire system decades later.²³

Once a region or city falls behind in a moment of transformation, catching up becomes extraordinarily difficult. The infrastructure doesn't get built. The shipping companies establish routes elsewhere. The skilled workers and merchants relocate. A temporary disadvantage becomes a permanent one.²⁴

As we navigate our own era of AI revolution, energy transition, and geopolitical realignment, the Suez Canal story reminds us that the stakes are higher than they might appear. The choices being made today—about infrastructure investment, political stability, and adaptive capacity—will cast long shadows. Some ports are preparing. Others are not. And some, tragically, find themselves at war.

The canal transformed the Mediterranean. What's transforming your world—and are you ready?

Notes

Farnie (1969) provides a comprehensive account of the canal's construction, the engineering challenges involved, and the immediate impact on shipping routes. The distance savings varied by origin and destination, but the London-Bombay route represented one of the most significant improvements.
On the global disruption caused by the American Civil War and the "cotton famine," see Beckert (2014), particularly chapters 9-11, which trace how the conflict reshaped cotton production worldwide and elevated Egypt's role in global markets.
The process of Italian unification and its economic consequences are examined in Riall (2009). For the specific impact on Italian transport infrastructure and port development, see Schram (1997).
Howard (1961) remains the standard English-language account of the Franco-Prussian War and its consequences for European commerce and politics.
The diplomatic background to the Russo-Turkish War is analyzed in Millman (1979) and placed in broader context by Anderson (1966). For the war's economic consequences, see Jelavich (1973).
Port statistics were compiled from multiple archival sources, including official maritime administration records, port authority documentation, and contemporary shipping registers. See Harlaftis (1996) for a discussion of nineteenth-century Mediterranean shipping data and its reliability.
The planning, financing, and construction of the Suez Canal as a deliberate Franco-Egyptian enterprise is detailed in Farnie (1969), chapters 1-4.
For the relationship between industrialization and global trade expansion in the nineteenth century, see Beckert (2014) and Osterhammel (2014).
On the uneven geography of Mediterranean industrialization before 1880, see Davis (2006) for Southern Italy, Carr (1982) for Spain, and Quataert (1994) for the Ottoman territories. Price (1987) discusses the concentration of French industry around specific regions including Marseille.
The statistical analysis of port traffic data across 19 Mediterranean harbors was conducted with the assistance of Claude-Opus-4.5, a large language model developed by Anthropic. The model was used to process, compare, and calculate compound annual growth rates from historical shipping statistics. All results were subsequently verified against published secondary sources and original archival data where available.
Austrian infrastructure investment in the mid-nineteenth century, including the Südbahn railway, is discussed in the context of Habsburg economic policy in Bridge and Bullen (2005) and Wawro (1996).
The Austrian Lloyd shipping company and its role in Mediterranean commerce is examined in Harlaftis (1996).
On Genoa's development as Italy's principal port and the importance of Alpine railway connections, see Schram (1997).
The relative performance of Italian ports is analyzed in Davis (2006) for the southern ports and Schram (1997) for the broader Italian context.
Ottoman port statistics are more fragmentary than those for Western European ports. See Quataert (1994) and Issawi (1980) for discussion of Ottoman trade data and its limitations.
The economic impact of the Russo-Turkish War on Ottoman commerce is examined in Jelavich (1973) and Anderson (1966).
On Odessa's role in Black Sea commerce and the disruption caused by the 1877-1878 war, see Herlihy (1986).
The strategic significance of the Turkish Straits and the impact of their closure during wartime is analyzed in Jelavich (1973).
Marseille's position in Mediterranean trade and the disruption caused by the Franco-Prussian War is discussed in Price (1987).
On Spanish political instability during the Carlist Wars and its economic consequences, see Carr (1982).
Alexandria's development as a commercial center during the cotton boom is examined in Owen (1969) and Reimer (1997).
The contrast between Habsburg and Ottoman approaches to infrastructure modernization is implicit in the comparative analysis of Quataert (1994) and the broader framework provided by Osterhammel (2014).
On the persistence of commercial hierarchies established in the nineteenth century, see the long-term perspective offered in Huber (2013).
The concept of path dependency in economic development and the difficulty of reversing established patterns is explored theoretically in Osterhammel (2014) and applied to Mediterranean maritime history in Harlaftis (1996).

Bibliography

Anderson, M. S. (1966). The Eastern Question, 1774-1923: A study in international relations. Macmillan.

Beckert, S. (2014). Empire of cotton: A global history. Vintage Books.

Bridge, F. R., & Bullen, R. (2005). The great powers and the European states system, 1814-1914 (2nd ed.). Pearson Longman.

Carr, R. (1982). Spain, 1808-1975 (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Davis, J. A. (2006). Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European revolutions, 1780-1860. Oxford University Press.

Farnie, D. A. (1969). East and West of Suez: The Suez Canal in history, 1854-1956. Oxford University Press.

Harlaftis, G. (1996). A history of Greek-owned shipping: The making of an international tramp fleet, 1830 to the present day. Routledge.

Herlihy, P. (1986). Odessa: A history, 1794-1914. Harvard University Press.

Howard, M. (1961). The Franco-Prussian War: The German invasion of France, 1870-1871. Rupert Hart-Davis.

Huber, V. (2013). Channelling mobilities: Migration and globalisation in the Suez Canal region and beyond, 1869-1914. Cambridge University Press.

Issawi, C. (1980). The economic history of Turkey, 1800-1914. University of Chicago Press.

Jelavich, B. (1973). The Ottoman Empire, the great powers, and the Straits question, 1870-1887. Indiana University Press.

Millman, R. (1979). Britain and the Eastern Question, 1875-1878. Oxford University Press.

Osterhammel, J. (2014). The transformation of the world: A global history of the nineteenth century (P. Camiller, Trans.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 2009)

Owen, R. (1969). Cotton and the Egyptian economy, 1820-1914: A study in trade and development. Oxford University Press.

Price, R. (1987). A social history of nineteenth-century France. Hutchinson.

Quataert, D. (1994). The age of reforms, 1812-1914. In H. İnalcık & D. Quataert (Eds.), An economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914 (pp. 759-943). Cambridge University Press.

Reimer, M. J. (1997). Colonial bridgehead: Government and society in Alexandria, 1807-1882. Westview Press.

Riall, L. (2009). Risorgimento: The history of Italy from Napoleon to nation-state. Palgrave Macmillan.

Schram, A. (1997). Railways and the formation of the Italian state in the nineteenth century. Cambridge University Press.

Wawro, G. (1996). The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's war with Prussia and Italy in 1866. Cambridge University Press.

Disclaimer

The quantitative analysis of port traffic statistics presented in this article involved the processing of a large dataset of published and freely available sources encompassing shipping records from 19 Mediterranean ports over a twenty-year period (1859-1878). Calculations of compound annual growth rates, comparative growth differentials, and statistical patterns were performed with the assistance of Claude-Opus-4.5, a large language model developed by Anthropic.

The author employed this tool to expedite the processing and comparison of historical shipping data, while maintaining full responsibility for the interpretation of results and all scholarly conclusions drawn from the analysis. Of the 1000+ data points, a sample was taken to check key figures and the computations generated by the language model were cross-checked against published secondary sources. The use of artificial intelligence in historical research methodology is disclosed here in the interest of scholarly transparency.

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