Ch.10 A Canal to the East and a Very Dry Desert
The War of the Pacific
- Miners from Chile went into the Atacama Desert to dig for copper and for sodium nitrate. But Bolivia claimed that, since part of the desert belonged to Bolivia, the miners should pay taxes to Bolivia when they sold the copper and sodium nitrate that they found.
- Bolivia (with its alley, Peru) declared war on Chile.
- Chile won the war.
- Peru had to agree to sign a peace treaty that gave the southern part of its coastline to Chile. Bolivia also had to give up land- its entire coastline! From that day on, Bolivia was ˝landlocked.˝ It had no way to get to the sea. And Chile had won the rights to the Atacama Desert and all of its mines.
The Suez Canal
- Egypt became a far-away part of the Ottoman Empire a part that no one really paid very much attention to.
- In 1805, an officer, Muhammad Ali in the Ottoman army seized the throne of Egypt. He made Egypt growing stronger and more modern.
- His son, Said Pasha gave a French company permission to start digging a canal from the southern banks of the Mediterranean Sea, down to the left-hand tip of the Red Sea. A Suez Canal.
- Ismail Pasha (Said’s nephew) spent too much money on his projects. He had to start borrowing money from France and Great Britain. Finally, Ismail had to sell control of the Suez Canal to the British and eventually the control of Egypt’s government.
