To the cost of millions who've suffered under its yoke, the world, particularly the West, has learned that colonialism is a euphemism for the systematic exploitation of the weak by the strong. Empowered by a belief in their own superiority, strong groups justified these subjections on the claim of necessity: that they required the resources held by weak groups, that weak groups were too ignorant to understand how best to utilize what they had, that weak groups needed to be properly civilized by the strong in order for them to think and behave properly. But while most forms of colonialism have been rightfully abolished, one of its most insidious tenets persists into the present. This practice concerns the grotesque manner in which the governments of strong groups help to prop up the tyrants of weak groups because it is politically and economically advantageous for them to do so. And it is precisely this manipulative power which pervades Mr. Green's account of the thirty years of political and social upheaval which beset Egypt from the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal to the end of the 19th century.
From the overthrow of the fiscally ruinous Khedive Ismail who ruled, as a playboy, over Egypt until 1879, to the zealous and nihilistic jihad prosecuted by the Mahdi and his followers in the 1880s, and to the final subjugation of rebellious elements by the British in the 1890s, Mr. Green escorts the reader on a sweeping exploration of Egypt and Sudan of the late 19th century. Exhibiting little of its former, pre-Christian glory, the region is rife with poverty and oppression, dominated by poorly educated peasants who have the misfortune of being ruled by the Turkish throne of the Ottoman empire. Perhaps, if the Khedive's rule had been moderately progressive, events would not have slipped his control to evolve into 30 years of bloody chaos. But after hailing Western Europe as the future, Khedive Ismail spent his country into oblivion, a calamity which not only necessitated his removal from power but provided the spiritual fuel by which Sudan went up in religious flames. It not only radicalized Muhammad Ahmad until he believed himself the Mahdi, Islam's prophesized redeemer of the Earth, it gave him an opportunity to recruit an army tens of thousands strong, an army which, in the name of ridding Egypt and Sudan of corruption and foreign influences, devoted the next ten years to turning the region into a war-torn wasteland.
But while the Khedive's failures gave rise to the annihilation of the Mahdi and his crusade, it also empowered men like Ahmed Urabi, the first Egyptian of the modern era to rise from the peasantry to force some kind of reform upon his incredibly corrupted country.
Three Empires On The Nile is full of war and chaos, politics and corruption, religion and devastation. Through men like Charles Gordon, the engineer and reformer, it explores the spirit of adventure and power that infused British life at the peak of its imperial powers. Through the Mahdi and his war, it elucidates the extent to which religious extremism is an outgrowth of poverty and oppression, and that such fundamentalism often ends up destroying the very thing it is suffering to save. Finally, through William Gladstone, the British Prime Minister of the period, it explains how the three Cs of the British empire, Christianity, Commerce and civilization, energized the empire's expansion and lead to its colonial entanglements in parts of the world it could not understand.
Mr. Green's excellent history is full of fascinating and profoundly flawed characters, explorers and drunkards, warriors and self-flagellators, zealots and martyrs, all of whom are set against the ancient world of Egypt and the burning sands of the Sudan. While its conclusion overreaches by attempting to connect these three tempestuous decades to more recent history, it is, in every other way, a wonderful examination of three of history's Cs, colonialism, corruption and change, the omnipresence of which have shaped our nations and our lives. Terrific work. (5/5 Stars)
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