The River Nile in the Age of the British: Political Ecology and the Quest for Economic Power

The Nile today plays a crucial role in the economics, politics and cultural life of ten countries and their more than 300 million inhabitants. No other international river basin has a longer, more complex and eventful history than the Nile. In telling the detailed story of the hydropolitics of the Nile valley in a period during which the conceptualization, use and planning of the waters were revolutionized, and many of the most famous politicians of the 20th century – Churchill, Mussolini, Eisenhower, Eden, Nasser and Haile Selassie – played active parts in the Nile game, this work should stand as a case study of a much more general and acute question: the political ecology of trans-national river basins.