The River War - An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan

From the young Winston Churchill, in his first major historical work, the stirring and authoritative account of the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of Sudan. First published in 1899, this history of the River War in Sudan vividly chronicles the military campaign that altered the destinies of England, Egypt and the Arabian peoples in northeast Africa. More by accident that design, in Churchill's view, England was drawn into the affairs of Egypt in the 1880s, for at the same historical moment that the English, under Lord Cromer, were granted virtual sovereign power to establish a sound government in Egypt and to stimulate its national economy, the Mahdi rebelled in the Egyptian suzerainty of Sudan. Violence and bloodshed ensued and the English soon found themselves embroiled alongside their Egyptian ally in a bitter conflict with the fiercely nationalistic Mahdi - a conflict that
culminated in the massacre of General Charles Gordon at Khartoum and the emergence of the fanatical regime known as the Dervish Empire. Here, Churchill not only dramatically relates the catastrophic events in Sudan's 1880s but also places them in the context of Sudanese history. So it is that his subsequent account of the reconquest and pacification of Sudan by a mixed Anglo-Egyptian force under the command of SIr Herbert Kitchener weds history to destiny, as the outcome of the River War for decades would link Great Britain to t he uneasy future of Eypt and Sudan...