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Volker Matthies. 2012. The Siege of Magdala: The British Empire against the Emperor of Ethiopia. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers. 207 pp.
In 1868, some 30,000 British troops (mostly Indian to be precise), marched over 400 miles into the Ethiopian highlands under the command of General Robert Napier. Their twin objective- the liberation of a number of Europeans who had been held hostage since the early 1860s by Emperor Tewodros of Ethiopia and chastising the emperor for daring to defy the mighty British Empire. In the end, they succeeded in the former objective. The latter eluded them as the mercurial emperor denied them the satisfaction of dragging him in chains to London by committing suicide when he saw all was lost, thereby attaining the status of a national hero.
The story, full of drama fit for a Hollywood movie, has been told and retold. The official record of the expedition (T.J. Holland and H.M. Hozier, Record of the Expedition to Abyssinia, 2 vols.), richly illustrated and amply documented, came out only two years after the event. Other participants of the dramatic encounter, including the famous Henry Morton Stanley of David Livingstone fame, gave their own version of events soon after. In more recent times, scholarly interpretations...