Britain’s long period of comparative restraint when it came to intervening militarily in Egyptian affairs ended in the 1880s, when the British invaded the country to support the government of the Khedive Tawfiq whose rule was threatened by Ahmed Orabi, an officer in the Egyptian army who was seeking to end a system of indirect foreign control.
It was this intervention in 1882, ostensibly to support Tawfiq’s government but in fact to prevent Orabi threatening British interests, that led to Britain’s occupation of Egypt that did not completely end until the 1950s. Its military intervention in Sudan at the same time meant that by 1900 at the latest both countries were under some variety of British colonial rule.
The history of how this situation came about has been told many times, with American historian David Landes excavating the financial aspects in his well-known book Bankers and Pashas published in the 1950s and many other historians before and since placing these events within the framework of the late 19th-century “scramble for Africa” that saw the continent occupied almost in its entirety by the European powers.
British historian Peter Hart is thus returning to familiar ground in his new book Chain of Power, Campaigning in Egypt and Sudan, which reconstructs the British military campaigns in both countries between 1882, date of the British defeat of Orabi’s forces at the Battle of Tel Al-Kabir, and 1898, date of the defeat of the Sudanese forces under local ruler Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad at the Battle of Omdurman outside Khartoum.
However, what makes Hart’s book unique and almost compulsive reading is his decision to tell this story by using only primary sources, above all the accounts left by the British officers and men who took part in the campaigns, and to ignore the vast secondary literature on Britain’s 19th-century imperialist wars.
While he provides linking passages between the quotations he has selected from these sources, sometimes quite extensive but usually confined to a few paragraphs, his method is to let those involved in the campaigns describe them at first hand. He mostly keeps his own contributions almost to a minimum and simply provides commentary on what they have to say while joining their words together to ensure narrative flow.
Hart was until recently a historian at the Imperial War Museum in London, where he worked on one of Britain’s largest archives of modern military history. Going through the material kept in these he was able to produce some startlingly direct accounts of the First and Second World Wars, with his Voices from the Front using materials by British soldiers who took part in it and Burning Steel and Footsloggers doing the same thing for the Second World War by using accounts contributed by members of a tank regiment and infantry battalion.
For his book on Britain’s late 19th-century Egyptian and Sudanese wars Hart has done something similar, going through contemporary newspaper accounts, letters and journals when these are available, and various published or unpublished memoirs. He has read a lot of unappetising material, including the kind of late-Victorian military memoirs that at one time filled the shelves of secondhand bookstores.
The effect is a bit like oral history, except that the testimonies come from written accounts, in some cases ones that were also designed for publication and therefore tend to be shaped to meet audience expectations or to put the writer in the best possible light. No one interviewed those involved directly about their experiences, as has been done to such valuable effect for subsequent wars, and so there is something haphazard about the testimonies that have survived.
Some soldiers wrote letters home or left accounts, but only a tiny number of these have survived. Meanwhile, there was a fashion for high-ranking figures to publish memoirs or even letters and diaries recording their thoughts during the campaigns, and so Hart’s recovery of these Victorian voices often includes people like the young Winston Churchill, a journalist during the Sudanese campaigns, as well as Herbert (Lord) Kitchener and Douglas Haig, later well-known names in Egypt and during the First World War.
Churchill, Kitchener, and Haig and others like them wrote up their experiences or had them written up for them by sympathetic historians, and their first-hand testimonies have value since for better or worse they capture something of the flavour of the time. However, they are of course not representative of the experience of most of the British soldiers who took part in these campaigns, some of whom would have been illiterate and would not have been in the habit of writing memoirs.
Despite his best efforts to find subaltern voices Hart’s book therefore could not reasonably be described as “history from below.” It goes without saying that his method, however valuable in retelling the British history of the Egyptian and Sudanese campaigns, has nothing to say about how these were experienced by the Egyptian and Sudanese people concerned.
Victorian voices: One of the criticisms often made of oral history is that eye-witness accounts by their very nature can only report what their authors saw but not what it meant.
However, the kind of reportage that Hart quotes in his book has the virtue of immediacy, giving, at its best, a sense of what it felt like to be taking part in the events it describes. The men – there are no women – he quotes were in a sense the ones who were making history happen, even if in many cases they had little or no idea who they were fighting or what they were fighting for.
Hart quotes one junior officer from the Sudanese campaigns who as well as complaining bitterly about the food, the heat, and the ever-present threat of disease, frankly says that “we knew that, being soldiers, we went where we were told, and did what we were told when we got there… beyond that I do not believe there was any man who could have given you any intelligible reason for which we were fighting.”
Such reasons were available, either produced by imperial propagandists – this was a period when the European powers considered themselves to be “lords of humankind” – or buried in the British foreign office records of the time. There was also a clear distinction between the reasons put about for public consumption, stressing the need to re-establish order, and the real reasons, having to do with securing British financial interests, the route to India, and the control of the Suez Canal.
In the Egyptian case, Britain’s decision to invade came as a result of a guarantee given to Tawfiq that it would defend his government from popular pressure. A British fleet was sent to patrol off Alexandria, and the city came under British bombardment in July 1882 and was later occupied. The decision was then made that this would not be enough to defeat Orabi and rescue Tawfiq, and so an expeditionary force under British general Garnet Wolseley was put together and sent to Egypt with the instruction to restore the khedive.
“The politicians in London were pondering their exact course of action,” Hart writes, “but the threat to the Suez Canal proved impossible for them to ignore. There was also the question of the safety of British commercial investments in the region. It was almost impossible to secure the safety of the Canal without taking Cairo.”
Wolseley decided to sail down the Canal to Ismailia and then to move his troops, numbering some 18,000, along the railway to Qassasin before eventually engaging Orabi’s forces at Tel Al-Kabir some 60 km west of Ismailia northeast of Cairo. Hart quotes from a dispatch by Wolseley to the effect that “my desire was to fight him [Orabi] decisively where he was, in the open desert, before he could take up fresh positions more difficult of access in the cultivated country in his rear… These circumstances determined me to resort to an extremely difficult operation of a night march, to be followed by an attack before daybreak on the enemy’s position.”
The result was a rout, and Wolseley advanced on Cairo, where a military parade was organised to mark the arrival of Tawfiq from Alexandria. British lieutenant James Grierson, quoted by Hart, remembered that “as the procession came along the bands played the Khedive’s March and the troops presented arms, but not a sound came from the crowd. The Khedive looked a pale, sallow creature. Alongside him sat the Duke of Connaught and opposite Sir Garnet and Sir Beauchamp Seymour. In the evening there were illuminations [fireworks].”
With Egypt now under British military rule, there was the question of Sudan, then administered as part of the Egyptian state under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. Charismatic Sudanese leader Mohammed Ahmed (styled as “mahdi” or “guided one”) had been leading a Sudanese national movement since 1881, and in 1884 he attacked Khartoum. This was used as an administrative capital by the Anglo-Egyptian forces in Sudan and was home to the British governor-general Charles Gordon.
Two thirds of Hart’s book is devoted to the British campaigns in Sudan, since these turned into a complex story not resolved until the defeat of Mohammed Ahmed’s successor Khalifa Abdallahi ibn Muhammad in 1898 at Omdurman. He describes British attempts to rescue Gordon, focusing on the logistical problems of moving troops down the Nile from Cairo. This involved hauling boats overland to get round the Second Cataract of the Nile and then putting together a special Camel Regiment at Wadi Halfa. There could never be any element of surprise, given the laborious logistical issues involved, and there was an “endemic shortage of camels” along with the “time-consuming [and daily] business of unloading and feeding” the animals.
Eventually, the British engaged the Sudanese forces, but too late to save Gordon. “Twenty million, a vast sum for those days, was spent in emulating the Duke of York who marched up a hill and then marched down [again], except that in the more modern version we rowed up the river and then ran down it,” wrote British Captain Ian Hamilton. Another observer, English writer Wilfrid Blunt, author of the Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, continued the denunciation of British actions contained in this book by writing that the “English soldiers are all murderers… a mongrel scum of thieves from Whitechapel and Seven Dials [areas of London] commanded by young fellows… without other principle of action than just to get their promotion.”
A dozen years later at the Battle of Omdurman the British used machine guns to cut down the Khalifa’s forces. It was a case of “modern weapons versus numbers,” wrote British staff officer James Watson. “Gordon had been avenged at an enormous cost to human life,” Hart writes. “Although the Anglo-Egyptian army had lost only 48 killed and 434 wounded, the Khalifa’s forces had suffered anything up to 10,000 dead and thousands more wounded.”
* Peter Hart, Chain of Fire, Campaigning in Egypt and the Sudan 1882-1898, London: Profile, 2025, pp.443.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 22 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: