Although Ismail was the greatest modernizer of Egypt since Muhammad Ali Pasha, his wars of expansion into Africa and the many infrastructure projects he carried, including the costly Suez Canal, put the country heavily in debt. In 1879 he was forced out of power by Great Britain and France who replaced him with his much less capable son Tawfiq. The Ibrahimiya Canal The Ibrahimiya Canal was the most important public work executed under the newly established Ministry of Public Works. It was built during the reign of Ismail Pasha when he was Khedive of Egypt. It was built in 1873 by Bahgat Pasha, minister of public works, who designed it primarily to provide perennial irrigation to the Khedivial sugar estates in Middle Egypt. It supplied perennial irrigation to and flood irrigation to another . The discharge of the canal varied between 30 and 80 cubic meters per second in summer and between 500 and 900 cubic metres per second in flood. Having its head on the left bank of the Nile, opposite Assiut, it runs northwards for 60 kilometers and then divides in Dirout into two main branches; one branch is the Bahr Yousef Canal, while the other is the Ibrahimiya Canal proper. Troubled years Between 1849 and 1879, was the time of the great expansion and development of a centralized Egyptian bureaucracy, and important structural changes occurred in the Egyptian system of government. A trend of discontinuity of entities within the Egyptian government became apparent during these years. Departments of the government (Public Works included) were continuously being combined and recombined, abolished and reformed, or otherwise modified. From 1864 to 1866 that time, the Department of Public Works assumed jurisdiction over railways and was also given supervision of the Delta Barrages. In 1866, railways administration was separated from the Department of Public works which was reduced into an office (qalam) within the Department of Interior. Public Works was subsequently reconstituted as a department and with combined with Education into a single administration under Ali Mubarak, yet by 1869 it seems to have resumed an independent existence under its own director Linant Bey. After his resignation in 1870, public works was joined to Education and Charitable Endowments and was headed by Ali Mubarak for a second time. In November 1871 it was converted into an office of engineering and was placed under Interior again. By 1872, it had been reestablished