The Suez Canal—with ships guided through it under the hot sun by mostly foreign, mostly French and British pilots garbed in impeccable knee socks, shorts, crisp white shirts, and captain’s hats—was an all-too-evident and embarrassing symbol of the old nineteenth-century colonialism right in the middle of what was to be Nasser’s new Egypt. Symbols, however, were not the only consideration. As with the oil concession in Iran before Mossadegh, most of the canal company’s earnings, derived from tolls, were going to European shareholders, including the largest shareholder of all, the British
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