Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 [Hardcover]

Dominic Green (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 9, 2007

A secular regime is toppled by Western intervention, but an Islamic backlash turns the liberators into occupiers. Caught between interventionists at home and fundamentalists abroad, a prime minister flounders as his ministers betray him, alliances fall apart, and a runaway general makes policy in the field. As the media accuse Western soldiers of barbarity and a region slides into chaos, the armies of God clash on an ancient river and an accidental empire arises.This is not the Middle East of the early twenty-first century. It is Africa in the late nineteenth century, when the river Nile became the setting for an extraordinary collision between Europeans, Arabs, and Africans. A human and religious drama, the conflict defined the modern relationship between the West and the Islamic world. The story is not only essential for understanding the modern clash of civilizations but is also a gripping, epic, tragic adventure.Three Empires on the Nile tells of the rise of the first modern Islamic state and its fateful encounter with the British Empire of Queen Victoria. Ever since the self-proclaimed Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi gathered an army in the Sudan and besieged and captured Khartoum under its British overlord Charles Gordon, the dream of a new caliphate has haunted modern Islamists. Today, Shiite insurgents call themselves the Mahdi Army, and Sudan remains one of the great fault lines of battle between Muslims and Christians, blacks and Arabs. The nineteenth-century origins of it all were even more dramatic and strange than today's headlines.In the hands of Dominic Green, the story of the Nile's three empires is an epic in the tradition of Kipling, the bard of empire, and Winston Churchill, who fought in the final destruction of the Mahdi's army. It is a sweeping and very modern tale of God and globalization, slavers and strategists, missionaries and messianists. A pro-Western regime collapses from its own corruption, a jihad threatens the global economy, a liberation movement degenerates into a tyrannical cult, military intervention goes wrong, and a temporary occupation lasts for decades. In the rise and fall of empires, we see a parable for our own times and a reminder that, while American military involvement in the Islamic world is the beginning of a new era for America, it is only the latest chapter in an older story for the people of the region.

--This text refers to the MP3 CD edition.

Editorial Reviews

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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 imperial diplomacy. 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. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (January 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743280717
• ISBN-13: 978-0743280716
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,108,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in London, Dominic Green was educated at Oxford University, Harvard University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Mandel Fellow in the Humanities, and taught history and writing. Currently he is working on his next book, 'The Religious Revolution' (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux). For more information, see www.dominicgreen.net

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Popular history at its very best, and more, January 28, 2007

By 

C. R. Chappell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 (Hardcover)

Truly good popular history should inform, entertain, and provoke further thought. Green's relatively slim (266 pages) volume does all three far more effectively than many a longer tome from better-known, longer established authors. If, like me, your knowledge of European imperialism in the Middle East, Ottoman decay, the stirrings of both Arab nationalism and Islamist reawakening was pretty much framed by movies such as "Khartoum", "Lawrence of Arabia" and the works of H. Rider Haggard, this volume will make sense of a key era of history mainly perceived in the West as a time of quaintly romantic chaos.

Green makes his cast of characters, Gladstone, Gordon, the Madhi, et al come alive in ways I never recall from my collegiate history days, and frames their actions, motivations, and the results of their choices in a coherent way that provides the reader with an excellent intelligence brief, not only on the era described, but on the issues topical to the region today. Green shows with great precision how personality often drives public policy, and illustrates the apparent paradoxes of how liberal, anti-imperialist humanitarian impulses can sometimes create empires of misery, and how elitist conservatism can sometimes create social improvements and upward mobility for the masses. Mr. Gladstone, meet Mr. Carter.

Green's discussion of the origins of modern Islamism in the odd stew of Western and Eastern ideas bubbling in the dying Ottoman hinterlands is alone worth the price of admission to this book. Without demonizing nor idealizing the iconic figures of Muhammed Ahmad, Chinese Gordon, Winston Churchhill, or Herbert Kitchener, we get a better understanding of the Mahdist revolt and a glimpse of how yesterday's news headlines drive those of today. A note to George Clooney and other well-heeled would-be humanitarians who hope to stop genocide in Darfur- READ THIS BOOK!

In summary, this is excellent book on a little-known subject that the reader will find very entertaining and enlightening, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. I look forward to more works by Mr. Green.

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Readable recovery of important history, March 9, 2007

By 

Jane "Bibliophile" (Laguna Beach, CA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 (Hardcover)

This is a well documented, yet very readable, recitation of British involvement in Sudan and Egpt in the years leading up to WWI, and the reverberations down to the present day. While many are aware of the actions of Kitchener and the hysterical reaction back home in England to Gordon's fate (thank you Charlton Heston), few have a clear view of the deeper objectives and consequent military and economic policies that drove England's actions. This history is a useful reminder of the importance of deeply held worldviews of two cultures riven by much, but especially religion.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing (audio book), October 30, 2007

By 

J. Nuzzolillo "amateur philosopher, hacker" (FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899 (Hardcover)

This book was one of the best history books I've ever read (I actually listened to it while commuting to NYC and while finishing chores).

I have no idea what one of the other reviewers was referring to when they said it was generally hard to follow. I was able to follow it nearly in its entirety even when listening to it as a disjointed audio book.

I highly recommend this amazing historical account, that reads as smoothly as even the best historical fiction I've read.