Sir Samuel White Baker (1821–1893) was a traveller and explorer. A lifelong campaigner against slavery, he lived with and later married a woman he rescued from a slave auction in eastern Europe. This two-volume work of 1874 is his account of a military expedition under Ismail Pasha (Ismail the Magnificent, 1830–1895), Khedive of Egypt, to suppress the slave-trade in central Africa between 1869 and 1873. Having found Egyptian citizens exploiting the population of the lawless central lands, Ismail determined to colonize and modernize the Nile basin (now southern Egypt and Sudan). He appointed Baker governor-general and major-general in the Ottoman army. Illustrated with over 50 plates and maps of the area, and with Baker's lively observations of the country and of the society he was trying to reform, this book is a wonderful record of a lost world, and of an important stage in late Ottoman military expansion.
