Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920. By Neil Faulkner

Abstract

This ambitious book seeks to bind several well-trodden historiographical episodes in British imperial history with a novel “from below” approach. Ranging from the Age of Exploration in central Africa to the First World War in the Middle East, Empire and Jihad emphasizes the violence produced by the mutually reinforcing offensives of British liberal imperialism and Islamic reactionism in the African continent during the High Age of empire. Though interspersed with passages of genuine value detailing the human suffering at the heart of the clash between European-driven “coolie-capitalism” and the Arab slave trade, the result is a somewhat incoherent and dated narrative, and ultimately a more conventional work than Neil Faulkner likely intended. Arranged into four parts, the book opens with an account of how the search for the source of the Nile became entwined with the antislavery sentiments of some of its leading heroes, bringing the British in central Africa into conflict with the slave traders of the coast and regional potentates of the interior. From there, Faulkner takes us down the Nile Valley, recounting how European great power rivalry led Britain to assume responsibility for the fortunes of the deteriorating Turco-Egyptian regime in Cairo at the expense of the burgeoning nationalist movement led by Colonel Ahmad Arabi. The 1882 occupation of Egypt marks the centerpiece of Faulkner’s story; subjected to the cynicism and escalating violence of European imperialism, the forces of resistance and reaction in northeast Africa took an Islamic turn, and the rise of the Mahdist regime of Muhammad Ahmad and its engagement with British forces frames the third part. Faulkner concludes with an account of British imperial engagement with the various currents of what he terms “the First Modern Jihad” as it manifested in the Sudan, Somaliland, and finally across the Ottoman Middle East and beyond after 1914 (p. 386).