Crossing Continents: Global Microhistory from Egypt and the SudanEnglish | 2026 | ISBN: 0755692136 | 313 pages | True PDF,EPUB | 12.15 MB
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.