Beyond the Reach of Empire

In the early 1880s Muhammad Ahmed, the self-styled Mahdi, unleashed a spectacularly successful jihadist uprising against Egyptian colonial rule in the Sudan. The Egyptian military met with a series of disasters, including the rout of major expeditions led by hired-in British colonels, William ‘Hicks Pasha’ and Valentine ‘Baker Pasha’. By the spring of 1884, Cairo had bowed to British pressure to withdraw altogether.

Beyond the Reach of Empire describes how Major General Charles Gordon was dispatched by Gladstone to evacuate the garrison of Khartoum and turn the Sudan over to self-rule. Fearless, profoundly religious and a committed anti-slaver, Gordon would be on familiar ground. In the late 1870s the Khedive of Egypt had employed him as Governor-General of the Sudan. When he reached Cairo, Gordon was offered and accepted the post for a second time. The author goes on to explain how and why the Gordon mission backfired, and then homes in on Sir Garnet Wolseley’s planning and execution of the long-delayed Gordon Relief Expedition. The most advanced part of the British force came within sight of Khartoum only two days after it fell.

Underpinned by an extensive program of fieldwork on remote, rarely visited battlefields, Mike Snook’s narrative is characterized by scrupulous attention to detail, an instinctive grasp of the period and an intimate understanding of its setting. The result is an enthralling tale of Victorian high-adventure, combined with an expose of the myths surrounding the failure to save one of the British Empire’s greatest heroes.

The author argues compellingly that the Khartoum affair was mismanaged from the outset. The outcome is the exoneration of the man cast in the role of scapegoat, and an indictment of Wolseley’s generalship over the course of the last and most deeply flawed campaign of his career.