수에즈 운하 건설에 대한 영국 정부와 자본가의 태도 = British Policy towards the Construction of the Suez Canal

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the British policy towards the construction of the Suez Canal. The French expedition to Egypt not only directed the attention of British Statesmen to Near East, but it revealed the need of a shorter route to India. The Cape route was no longer regarded as entirely adequate. Great Britain in the nineteenth century evinced an ever-growing interest in the possibility of developing a shorter route to her Asiatic possessions whether by the Red Sea and Egypt or by the Persian Gulf and the Euphrates Valley. Then there was the struggle over the rival canal and railway projects. Many capitalists preferred a canal to a railway. But the British government choose a railway project. The British government put forward some objections to the Suez Canal project. The first was that the canal was physically impossible. The second objection was that the canal would require a long time for its execution. The third objection was that the canal project was founded upon an antagonistic policy on the part of France in regard to Egypt. That is, because of a possibility that the Suez Canal Company might establish a foreign colony in the Isthmus and convert the warehouses into disguised fortresses, and that the French might detached Egypt from Turkey in order to disturb the easiest means of communication between England and India, the British government opposed the construction of the Suez Canal. The fourth objection consisted in the fear of seeing the commercial and maritime relation of Great Britain disturbed by opening of a new route.