Three Empires on the Nile: The Victorian Jihad, 1869-1899, (Dominic Green, 2007, Free Press), is about the attempts of the British to civilize northeastern Africa (Egypt and Sudan, with minor spillover to other countries) from the completion of the Suez Canal to the beginning of the Boer War.
Originally it was France, and not England, who dominated Egypt, then on paper a province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was the "sick man of Europe," and France was trying to assert its influence wherever it could.
The Suez Canal was very important to England, serving as a shortcut to British India and points east of there. Its preservation was of paramount importance to England, but Egypt was a rotten apple, infested with frauds, counterfeits, shams, and corruption.....and Egypt too had an empire, Sudan, a gangrenous apple.
When the British took Egypt into their civilizing embrace in 1882, they also inherited the problem of Sudan, then rife with the slave-trade and internecine warfare.
Obviously the slavers of 17th and 18th century North America were nothing, when compared with the brutalities, the blood, the torture, the sheer atrocities, the murder, of the slavers of Sudan.
The British did not want Egypt (much less Sudan), but as with so much of the British empire, Egypt and Sudan fell into their hands because some sort of stabilizing, civilizing, force was needed in the area to ameliorate the lot of the wretched.
The book covers the various military and political campaigns in the area, and the strategic details might confuse the reader (I could never figure out why the author used "up the Nile" when to the ordinary layman, it should be "down the Nile;" this confuses the geography considerably).
But my biggest problem was with the "al"-this and "al"-that which peppers the pages.
All in all, though, a good read, but it helps if one beforehand has at least a general knowledge of the overall history of the British empire.
