A closer look
Cutting thousands of miles off the trip to India was a triumph of engineering, provided you ignored the newly express-shipped pandemics. The 1869 opening of the Suez Canal created a massive boom in shortcut tourism, allowing Europeans to casually pop over to the Orient without sailing around Africa. Unfortunately, this new high-speed maritime highway was also incredibly efficient at transporting waterborne pathogens. It basically invented the modern concept of rapid-transit disease outbreaks, proving that global connectivity is great right until someone coughs.
