Suez Canal

"David Sassoon and the equally canny Parsee magnates up on Malabar Hill waited until the vanguard had painfully cut their wisdom teeth. The new mills were badly ventilated, with fire a chronic hazard. Native labour was casual and mostly too unskilled to handle even the old-fashioned machinery. Cleaning and ginning remained primitive, largely by hand and foot-rollers, while the yarn itself was unsuitable for the newly developed British looms. America found it easy to deliver better quality cotton more cheaply and faster. Before the opening of the Suez Canal, cargoes from Alabama would be unloading in England while Indian yarn was still puffing up the coast of Africa."

"As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw clearly, the 19th-century business class created more massive and more colossal productive forces than all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor? Each generation’s inventors and visionaries surpassed their predecessors. In 1843, the London public was invited to make its first crossing underneath the River Thames by a newly dug tunnel. In 1869, the Suez Canal saved Eurasian shipping traffic from rounding the Cape of Good Hope. In 1914 the Panama Canal cut short the route from Atlantic to Pacific. Even the Great Depression failed to impede relentless progress in the United States, which has always been home to the world’s most far-seeing definite optimists."