His successor, Isma'il Pasha, restarted the venture in May 1863 in the hopes of creating a merchant marine for the modernizing Egyptian nation.[2] After falling into debt, Ismail used the company as leverage to try to gain control of and merge with the Egyptian Commercial and Trading Company, a European trading firm based in Egypt, in order to become a player in European financial markets.[3] The venture was unsuccessful, and the merger never appeared.