Standing on the side-lines of Britain’s ongoing EU referendum debate makes for a peculiar and a rather worrying spectacle. It is probably the single most important political decision this count...
In the autumn of 1884 the British Consul at Zanzibar reported to the Liberal Foreign Secretary Earl Granville that the Sultan Barghash had imported ten slave-women and nine boy eunuchs to his har...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2014/08/31/eunuchs-for-the-sultan-of-zanzibar/
Rewind the clock more or less than a century and you will find a world teeming with settler colonies engaged in battle with ‘unruly natives.’ Today only one remains; Israel is the last of a d...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/israel-the-last-of-the-settler-colonies/
Sir John Kirk, the British Consul to the Sultan of Zanzibar, received in 1884 a report from his Vice-Consul John G. (Jack) Haggard. The brother of Victorian writer H. Rider Haggard had summaris...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/vice-consul-haggards-report/
A year after the great African explorer Dr David Livingstone’s death in 1873, his friend Horace Waller published an edited version of his diaries. In his introduction to ‘The Last Journals of...
In 1903, during the premiership of Arthur Balfour (later the author of the Balfour Declaration of 1917), the British government offered a territory of 5,000 square miles on the Uasin Gishu (Gwa...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/an-east-african-israel/
A favourite currency among European and African alike during the 19th century was glass beads. Inexpensive and portable for the European explorer or trader and having a high intrinsic value for t...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/glass-beads-for-the-african-trade/
Report on the Mombasa Victoria Lake Railway Survey Chapter VIII – Slave Trade in Connection to the Projected Railway by Captain J.W. Pringle R.E. 12th May 1893 A caravan of Swahili porters and ...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/the-arab-slave-trade-in-east-africa/
An old soldier neglected by an ungenerous country. (The Morning Leader, October 1892) English governments have a rather unpleasant reputation for neglecting the humbler heroes of the nation; and...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/mcleod-of-the-niger/
Foreign Office Translation. Berlin. May 31, 1892. Sir, With reference to your note of the 21st instant relative to the employment of Camels in the S.W. African Protectorate, I have the honour to ...
https://thecivilisingmission.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/kamele-fur-deutsch-sudwestafrika/