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Lord Cromer, a former Consul-General of Egypt, expressed his frustration at politicians who set too much store by Foreign Office briefings.
In an Introduction to Sir Sidney Low’s study of Egypt in Transition (1914), Lord Cromer (1841-1917), former Consul-General of Egypt, humbly recalled how momentous decisions were taken by men who knew next to nothing about the peoples and societies they were dealing with. But more dangerous by far were the decisions taken by men who had been thoroughly briefed by the Foreign Office.
When it opened in 1901, the Uganda Railway still wasn’t in Uganda, and Westminster’s MPs were still debating whether or not to build it.
Two years after Uganda became a British Protectorate in 1894, work began at Mombasa in British East Africa (Kenya from 1920) on a railway inland to Uganda. Thanks to African terrain and British bureaucracy, when Winston Churchill published the following assessment of it in 1908 the meandering line terminated at Kisumu, 660 route-miles away but still short of the Ugandan border.
The villagers of Mabutso in Southern Africa begged Dr David Livingstone to rid them of a menacing pride of lions.
On February 16th, 1844, Scottish missionary David Livingstone was digging a water channel at his mission near the South African village of Mabotsa when the villagers rushed up, crying that lions had again raided their village and slaughtered their sheep and goats. Livingstone ‘very imprudently’ agreed to go with them and demoralise the pride by shooting one of the dominant males.
American historian David Montgomery credited King Edward VII with bringing peace to Europe, the Empire and the world.
American historian D. H. Montgomery gave this assessment of the reign of King Edward VII in 1912, two years after the king died and two years before war broke out across the world. Whereas some historians like to focus on Edward’s scandals and family quarrels, Montgomery saw quite a different side to the King.
David Livingstone relives the historic moment when he became the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
In 1852-56, David Livingstone mapped the course of the Zambesi, hoping that agricultural trade along the river would crush the horrible trade in slaves (recently outlawed in the British Empire). On November 16, 1855, he was transported by canoe to a magnificent cataract named Mosi-oa-Tunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’, so becoming the first European to see the Victoria Falls.
Four years before the bloody American civil war, Dr David Livingstone proposed a peaceful way to rid the world of slavery.
In 1861-65, America went to bloody civil war over (among other things) the issue of slavery in the South’s cotton and sugar plantations, and upwards of a million people died. A few years earlier, Scotsman David Livingstone proposed a far less destructive answer: establish cotton and sugar farms in Africa, employ local labourers on good wages, and strangle slavery by the cords of the free market.