Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 by Dominic Green ISBN 9780743280716, 0743280717 instant download

Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 by Dominic Green ISBN 9780743280716, 0743280717 instant download

A dramatic narrative of the late-nineteenth-century conflict between Victorian Britain and Sudanese Moslems documents how Egypt's despotic ruler, Khedive Ismail, set the stage for the uprising by draining his nation's resources and setting in motion a series of events that were mistaken by the Islamic people as an attempt to establish an African-Christian empire. 35,000 first printing.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Green ( The Double Life of Doctor Lopez: Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth I ) has written a formidable work of popular narrative history describing the tumultuous events that took place in northeastern Africa in the final third of the 19th century. Breathing life into, among many others, the starchy British general Charles Gordon and his fanatical antagonist, the Mahdi, who launched a movement that was a forerunner of today's radical Islamist sects, Green examines an era that witnessed the rise of no fewer than three empires (the Egyptian tyranny of Khedive Ishmail, the apocalyptic "fantasy" of the Mahdi, and the British Empire, which "arrived in a flurry of humanitarian concern, but endured through brutal force"). Cautionary modern parallels of this, the first clash of Arab nationalism, Western intervention and Islamic fervor, are of course never far from breaking the surface, but Green carefully prevents them from becoming overtly apparent. He succeeds in not only untangling the complex politics of the Great Powers as they reacted to the crisis along the Nile but also explaining the equally opaque motivations of the shadowy Mahdi and his followers as they pursued their jihad. 16 pages of color photos. (Jan. 9)
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From Booklist
Between the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 and the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, the British Empire expanded up the Nile River, impelled by varied motives: money, vengeance, humanitarianism, and