Crossing Continents

In 1825, a young giraffe boarded a boat at Sennar, near the junction of the Blue and White Niles in the Sudan, and sailed for Paris. In the next year, also at Sennar, a Kurdish cavalry officer named Mahu Bey Urfali, who represented the Muhammad Ali Pasha regime of Egypt, died of smallpox in a military encampment. What was a Kurd from Urfa, now in southeastern Turkey, doing in the Sudan? Why did a giraffe make the long trip to Paris? And how did a sleepy town 300 km southeast of Khartoum, once the capital of a Sudanese sultanate, figure in both their life journeys? This book answers these questions by exploring the stories of six remarkable individuals whose highly mobile lives allow us to track global microhistory in the Nile Valley and the wider world to reveal a kaleidoscopic and interconnected history of peoples, places, and ideas.


Including a diverse cast of characters from a Christian convert from an Egyptian landowning family to a Sudanese slave drafted into the Egyptian army and sent to fight for France in Mexico and an Armenian businessman, orphaned by massacres in Anatolia, who sold Bibles in Ethiopia and Eritrea, the book connects small places and little things to big events, over 150 years. Inviting us to look at past lives from many angles, it asks: Who or what counts as important in history? Which historical details are worthy of our attention? And what sources can we find and assemble to tell meaningful, interesting stories about the past? The result is a learned but accessible study which will appeal to university-level students and scholars of Middle Eastern, African, and global history, and experts in the history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Nile Valley.