Ethiopia's Menelik II defeated the Italians in battle, securing not just independence, but an empire of his own. But embracing European-style modernization could also be problematic, as Hadid Ismail of Egypt found out during his rule in the late 19th century. He celebrated his imperial success by commissioning an opera, Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, for the opening of the Cairo Opera House in 1871. Giuseppe Verdi, by the way, no relation to John Green. And Ismail had ambitions of extending Egypt's control up the Nile west toward Lake Chad, but to do that he needed money, and that's where he got into trouble. His borrowing bankrupted Egypt and led to Britain's taking control over the country's finances and its shares in the Suez Canal that Ismail had built with French engineers and French capital in 1869. The British sent in 1,300 bureaucrats to fix Egypt's finances, an invasion of red tape that led to a nationalist uprising, which brought on a full-scale British intervention after 1881 in order to protect British interests.