A review by jamesvw
Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 by Dominic Green

4.0

At times great and at times frustratingly wandering off on tangents and reading like a turn of the century colonialist adventure story with its focus on old dead racist white men, this book illuminates the European policies of structurally salting the earth in Egypt and Sudan in the middle of the 19th century. The book is especially fascinating while focusing on the Sudan, torn apart as it still is today by ethnic and religious tensions - with the local populace decimated by imperialist stubbornness and Islamist anti-colonial rage. Green doesn't let the reader miss the parallels to today's world (from graphic descriptions of starvation to European invasion of sovereign Muslim lands) but doesn't always look latitudinally in placing the subject in its context of global colonialism.