Three Empires On the Nile
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 imperial diplomacy. In Three Empires on the Nile, Green’s panoramic narrative re-creates these three decades with remarkable dynamism, applying a flair for pithy characterization to the political and religious players involved. Among the dozens of portraits worked into the chronicle, none are sharper than Green’s images of two men who personify the period: General Charles George Gordon and Mohammed Ahmed (better known as the Mahdi), both of whom were mystics. Where Gordon’s mysticism was Christian and personalistic, the Mahdi’s was Islamic and totalistic. As the “Expected Guide” awaited in Islamic tradition, confirmed as such to his adherents by his killing of Gordon at Khartoum in 1885, the Mahdi established a militantly fundamentalist state destroyed in turn by the Anglo-Egyptian forces of General Herbert Kitchener. Occasionally bemused but never supercilious, Green achieves a vividly popular account of Britain’s ascendance in Egypt and Sudan.
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