Crossing Continents

Global Microhistory from Egypt and the Sudan
The stories of mobile lives from the 19th-century Middle East and Northeast Africa across local, regional, and global scales

In 1825, a 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 al-Urfali, representing 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 sultanate, figure in their life journeys? This book answers such questions by viewing the lives of seven remarkable individuals through the lens of global microhistory, to reveal a kaleidoscopic story of peoples, objects, and ideas as they moved through the Nile