The fascinating, previously untold story of the building of one of the great Empire railways and the vision that inspired it. For sheer ambition, arrogance and grandiosity, little rivals the 'Cape-to-Cairo'. The 'Grand Project', as Cecil Rhodes called it, was a scheme to build a railway running the length of Africa, a 'ridgepole holding up the whole Anglo-Saxon Empire'. Against the backdrop of the late nineteenth century 'scramble for Africa', a clan of the wildest champions of the British imperial ideal (including Rhodes, Lord Salisbury, Captain Courtenay Selous and Lord Kitchener) hatched a plan to outflank France and Germany in Africa and assure British pre-eminence. Their plan was bold and simple: Britain's most valuable territories in Africa, Egypt in the North and Cape Colony in the south, were separated by a gap of 3000 miles. The Cape-to-Cairo would close this gap, seal British economic paramountcy and open up the dark mysteries of the African interior to the Victorian imagination.
This outrageous imperial adventure became, in the words of a contemporary, 'the greatest romance in all of history'; it was the ultimate manifestation of the Victorian world view, imperial audacity and engineering brilliance, succeeding as it did in traversing desert, jungle and cataracts of the Nile. By drawing together public records and personal testimonies from the PRO, Rhodes House Library, Oxford and the British Library, Eric Lawlor chronicles the achievements and failures of the Cape-to-Cairo. Today largely forgotten, it came tantalisingly close to completion, defeated ultimately by 500 miles of a huge morass, the Sudd, and by the waning enthusiasm for such endeavours in the 1920s. It does, however, represent a spellbinding episode in British history, and one that is strangely missing from the history books.
- ISBN10 0002571773
- ISBN13 9780002571777
- Publish Date 5 February 2007
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 9 August 2008
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
- Imprint HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 400
- Language English